Databricks co-founder shares his secrets for winning big enterprise customers
I think the most interesting part is that the co-founder is basically telling founders to stop obsessing over product demos and start asking who already owns the room. For Databricks that meant latching onto the cloud giants and borrowing their sales motion instead of grinding out your own from zero. That is a humbling message for anyone who wants to believe the best tech always wins.
Where I land is that this only works if the giant has a real reason to keep pulling you along. Their reps won't carry you out of charity. You need to make their quotas easier to hit, which usually means you solve a problem their own stack leaves open. Otherwise you are just a line item in their catalog nobody ever mentions.
I'd want to know how they measured that bet early. When did they know the co-sell was real versus a polite handshake? That is the piece founders should copy, not just the strategy in the abstract.