AI Tech / news
Databricks co-founder: enterprise deals hinge on people and processes, not just product
Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, co-founder and senior vice president of field engineering at Databricks, told a conference audience that strong technology alone rarely closes large enterprise contracts. He pointed to relationships, internal champions and readiness for legal and security scrutiny as the deciding factors.
Tavakoli-Shiraji, who helped land Databricks' earliest large accounts, said young companies typically assume the best product wins the deal. In practice, he said, the people involved and the processes around a sale carry more weight than technical superiority.
He recalled arranging a meeting with an early prospect only to learn the executive had already signed a major contract with a leading competitor. Because that buyer had staked his career on the rival's platform, he had little appetite for hearing an alternative pitch, Tavakoli-Shiraji said.
Other early opportunities stalled for less glamorous reasons, according to the executive, with the startup unprepared for the legal, contractual and security questions that large buyers raise during procurement.
Databricks is now valued at $190 billion and counts more than 70% of the Fortune 500 among its customers, a scale far removed from its early days. Tavakoli-Shiraji's advice lands as startups face mounting pressure to grow quickly, with large enterprises seen as the IT world's deepest-pocketed buyers.
One route he highlighted is aligning with a much larger company's sales organisation rather than relying on a small team to break into accounts alone.