00:00Ali Godzi is with us, the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, one of the most valuable private
00:03companies that has yet to file confidentially with the SEC. As far as we know. We're going to
00:08hold back on IPO chat for a minute and ask you about whether this moment of all of these companies
00:15looking to access capital in the public markets, is that an anxiety for you? Could there be oxygen
00:20sucked out the rim in some ways to back some companies such as yourselves? Well, we're a
00:25private company. So private investors, they're soon not going to have all these companies to
00:29deploy their capital in. So there's going to be a lot of capital available in private markets. So
00:33no, that's not going to be a problem at all for us. Ali, I'm really interested in what life's like
00:37for you right now as the CEO of a company of Databricks' valuation. But also, I don't mean
00:44this sort of flippantly, like, OK, great, big private valuation. The company is growing incredibly
00:49fast, revenue run rate. Caro set up at the top everything that's happening in software right now.
00:56What is it that you are dealing with most often? What is it that you are sort of, I don't
01:01know,
01:01waking up and going, OK, wow, this is today? Yeah, my view is that we're in a very special
01:06moment because I'm a contrarian. I believe we actually already have AGI. Artificial general
01:10intelligence already arrived. What's your evidence? I ask groups all the time. I ask this question. I
01:16ask, how many of you believe we have AGI? And roughly 10% of the audience usually raises their hand.
01:20Then I ask, how many of you think that the AIs that you use, the frontier models, are smarter
01:25than most other people you work with most of the time? And 90% of any crowd, I've done this
01:29like
01:3020, 30 times, raise their hand, OK? So it's already really plenty smart. We don't need AI to get
01:36smarter. It just is lacking context. If we could capture all the context of all the conversations
01:41we're having and everything that's happening in the processes. Data breaks. That's what you do.
01:45Exactly. If you could feed that to the AI, they already could be extremely productive. But no
01:51one's really focused on that problem. Everybody's focused on superintelligence and can we continue
01:55the scaling laws? And the problem is, if we just could have that context, we would have
02:00a huge breakthrough. So that's what DataBits is focused on. Our only focus is, how do we
02:05infuse that data context into this product we have called Genie, which then can help answer
02:11and automate questions? I think this is the most important question that people should focus
02:14on right now.
02:15And we've got plenty of new products. As you're getting ever higher valuations, you're backing
02:20it up with new offerings. I think about Lakebase, I think about some of the M&A that you've been
02:23doing in the market to beef up the product offerings. What's hitting home at the moment?
02:26What are the customers demanding of you?
02:29Yeah. As you said, Lakebase is, you know, it's everyone wants these databases. People are not
02:34paying attention to databases. Everybody's paying attention to software is being commoditized
02:39because AI can produce software. But what they don't think about is that all software needs
02:43a database. It's a fact. You cannot have a piece of software and it's not using a database.
02:47And Lakebase is really, really, really tailoring to those agents. So, you know, for instance,
02:53product group uses Lakebase. And they're using, they put all their KPIs in it. And that way,
02:59the agents can actually start answering questions on all the KPIs that they have because, you know,
03:04everybody's using agents now. Or...
03:06Are they? Is everyone using an agent now? Is adoption, is productivity already there?
03:09Yeah. Okay. So that depends. So back to that context question, if we could just get the data
03:12to the agents. People are using agents, but they're not using it in its full potential.
03:17Maybe we've like tapped into 1% of it because it's not like autonomous agents are running around,
03:22you know, working together, collaborating with humans and, you know, so that's not happening yet.
03:27Why is that? Because they don't have the context. So you have to infuse that context into them.
03:31So I'll give you another example. Novo Nordisk, you know, they make a Zempic, you know,
03:36big customer that actually leverages Genie. And they're able to infuse a lot of the,
03:41all the trials that they run, they infuse it to the AIs. And now you can ask questions from the
03:45AIs about,
03:46you know, how's that obesity study going? And they were able to shorten the time it takes
03:50to understand these studies using Genie and agents from, you know, weeks down to a few minutes.
03:56So it is happening, but we're just at the beginning of it.
04:00If that case study is real, right? And I'm not questioning whether it is,
04:03but then Jensen Huang's equation of more compute, more tokens, more revenues,
04:10it means that that puts them on a trajectory to more profitability, right?
04:14To many people, it's really simple. The other thing that Jensen Huang outlined at the beginning of this week,
04:19Computex, yes, was that it's complete nonsense that software is in trouble
04:25because his thesis is that the agents themselves become the ultimate users of that software.
04:31I've been finding that concept very hard to understand.
04:34You probably are in a place where you can evaluate it early, aren't you?
04:37Yeah. So I think Jensen is spot on with both of those.
04:41You know, we actually did the calculation.
04:43We think in the next nine months, but let's say year round, one year or two years,
04:47we're going to have more software being written than in all history of mankind.
04:52You know, no matter how you back into it, this kind of checks out.
04:55Okay. With so much software being written, there's going to be so much demand for all the other things.
05:00There's a big ecosystem around software. We happen to do Lakebase, which is a database.
05:04And, you know, we're seeing huge demand in these databases, but there are other ones around software.
05:08So, yes, this is just continuing.
05:11And therefore, I go back to how we started this conversation.
05:14As you keep on scaling, as you keep driving innovation, do you need more private capital?
05:19Would you look to go for public capital at this moment?
05:21Yeah. I mean, we are always interested and we're always talking to investors.
05:24And, you know, I'm sure we're going to do more of that.
05:26We will also be a public company.
05:28When, Ali?
05:29But why? Also, why? Like, if the private markets will keep going with you, what's your impetus for going public?
05:35Yeah. Because, you know, at our scale, you know, I think we raised $20 billion.
05:38At these scales, we're almost trying to create a market transaction mechanism for our employees,
05:44which, you know, it's 10,000 right now.
05:46But if you take all of them, the prior employees, it's probably 14,000 or so, you know.
05:50So, there is a thing that can do that. It's called the public markets.
05:53So, I just think this is a terrible year for, you know, to go public because there's so much happening.
05:58Just super quickly, how closely did you read the SpaceX S1?
06:02And how closely will you track an Anthropic IPO to evaluate the future market that you want to go into?
06:09Yeah, look, we're not really trying to time the market.
06:11We're trying to really win the market in the long run.
06:14That's really our focus.
06:15So, no, I did not go through the S1 filing word by word.
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