Hypergrowth Leadership: Arsalan Tavakoli on Scaling Databricks

0:00as a leader you want to be involved in figuring out how do we shape that how do we think about that how do we structure that how do we set the right set of principles and then let the team go amount of things that are kind of coming towards you is fairly significant so you know you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do you ruthlessly prioritize where do you focus your time on it's hard to do something when you feel it's just a job and I know I know

0:22this will sound corny but we do it because we're passionate about the company what it what it is and what it could become so you want to invest a lot so look after M and rold who both are the scof founder we are super happy to host today asan with us who is also one of the Arabic cofounders so thank you so much asan for being with us we

0:45know you're super busy so thanks a lot of course happy to be here so I feel like you have maybe a little bit less public known phase compared to like mat and rold you know who are working on spark uh so I feel like we or you proper introduction so you have a PhD in computer science from berley uh you spend four years at mckin and then you

1:07join Dar bricks right at the beginning um and I think I heard you were actually um managing the sales team at Dar bricks when you join is that is that is that a true thing yeah so um it was kind of funny right uh when we were when we starting the company I I think I guess I was the quote unquote token you know business

1:30guy as well which meant that um you know look all of us were technical when we started and you know as a as a result of that though uh we Mo all of us spent a ton of our time coding um but I remember back then you know Yan who was our CEO there was like okay arson I need you to

1:52come join and we have all of these kind of things we need to do his what he really wanted me you know to start on at the very beginning was adding you know commenting features um you know to the notebooks but then he's like in your spare time do the things like you know marketing and pricing and go to market and business development and all of those I mean you were at McKenzie you should you know know some of those

2:14things um and then you know so sure why not um and then so then as we started in the very early days like it wasn't called sales it was called customer engagement actually which was anybody who spent time dealing with customers and um way before we even hired

2:36salespeople um you know we had solution Architects uh because most of your time back then was engaging with customers and trying to hold together with duct tape and glue what you were giving them and making it work um and then as we were getting ready to you know fully not just come out of stealth but you know GA the product we started um you know

2:58basically hiring sales people and that would have been summer of 2015 I think we hired our first set of uh sales people and then yes I was responsible for doing it until we fortunately found somebody who is far far better at it than I am you know which was you know Ron who's still our cro today so and and

3:20now you're are leading the dats field engineering so maybe F would don't know what's field engineering at Databricks uh I think the best way to explain that would be like everybody was Technical and customer facing at the same time so like not the engineering team not the sales team kind of everybody else to simplify that um so yeah like a big team of two 2,000

3:43people so talking about that what what well what do you think is the what do you find the most challenging like is it leading a team of 2,000 people in the era of gen with all the challenges run that or is it you know having to deal back at home with a family of five kids and and making sure everything go movie that's a tough question um you know what how about try the challenge is

4:06trying to do both of those at the same time um right look I think um you know I think you always get energy from you know you get energy from one to feed into the other um candidly uh yes from a from a you know family life perspective most people think I'm nuts um you know we have uh

4:28five kids the oldest one just turned nine um and they're all exactly 23 to 26 months apart um you know so you could just imagine you know dinner time at our house is you know quite hectic um but then against that backdrop what that means is um we didn't have any kids actually um I started at Databricks

4:52like you know we're starting uh I think a couple of days after my wedding so it's like my wedding you know has coincided with kind of the time of data breaks and definitely didn't have any kids um you know when we started uh which has been an interesting Journey but from a from a challenge perspective I think you take that the personal life as a backdrop the thing that's always interesting is um the speed that things

5:17change right like I always have a simple formula um for me it's like where you know um what keeps me at some place is like am I having fun am I learning am I making an impact it sounds simp simple but it's rules to live by and for me I have the attention span of a six-year-old so I've literally the last time I was somewhere for more than four years was elementary school and even

5:39that's not true because I switched elementary schools in the middle um so the fact that you know now we've been at data breaks for you know over 11 years at this point the reality is you talked about it yourself 11 something years ago we were seven people you know in a room uh somewhere trying to you know figure out how do we scale a company and then you think about all of the iterations there

6:01of watching what's happened as Cloud accelerated what happened as the space accelerated what happens as Databricks you know continues to kind of grow from a product breath perspective and figure out okay how do you stay on top of that what are the markets how do you go about it um how do you keep figuring out what are go to go to market dynamics right the way that you think about an organization when we were you know zero

6:26people to 50 people to 100 to 500 to now as you mentioned I think we're almost you know 2 200 people you know in field engineering um spread out all across the globe how do you think about the role and expectations as a company from when in the early days we were so excited um you know about like bringing in a 20K deal to now you're talking about you

6:49know deals that are kind of eight figures or nine figures so there's a just a unique challenge um in being in all those phases and the fact that they are so compressed right the speed that you're moving from one phase to the next doesn't give you time to kind of see it plan it digest it you're always just trying to figure out what's around the corner um and that's both challenging

7:11but exhilarating at the same time and and I have a question like you mentioned lot you are doing a lot of things and so how do you balance work and personal time because I I imagine you have tons of critical like requests coming from across the world like like literally nonstop so how do you do this

7:36compromise yeah look I think there's twofold I mean the real there's a couple realities right which you know I I think people always treat it as taboo but it's not like a Databricks or any hypergrowth startup is never going to be like a you know nine to four uh you know type place right it's G to be there is

8:00always 10x the amount of work um you know that there are people and the company will always take as much as you're willing to give and offer right and for many of us who are here um right uh we are it's hard to do something when you feel it's just a job and I know I know this will sound corny but we do it because we're passionate about the

8:22company what it what it is and what it could become so you want to invest a lot in it at the same time it was very clear you know to me from the beginning that it's not a Sprint it's a marathon you're in there for a long period of time and so um you know for me family life is incredibly important and you make sure

8:45that you set those boundaries like for example for me um to the extent possible it's not always the case there's certain things like I like to see the kids um off to school before um they go to school um I try to make it a practice if I can because you know um you know when I'm home when my wife works from home to kind of carve out times to sit down and

9:08have lunch together um you know it's kind of important to me to you know be able to be at home in time to have dinner with the kids and the family spend some time and put the kids to bed um you know as well but look as a result I said that there's a lot uh from a company perspective that means that you make tradeoffs so for example example those who know me know one of the most

9:30common trade-offs I make is whenever I'm flying somewhere I'll almost always take the red eyee and not because I love red eyes red eyes suck they're miserable who likes a red eye right but the answer is because the red eye gives me time to have dinner with the kids and tuck them into bed say you know basically good night to my wife before heading you know to the airport um you know as an example

9:52or looking at it and being careful about there's always every night a hey have a dinner or this or that how do I get home or after everybody's asleep getting back on to kind of work things so um you know as I said you you're putting in a bunch of time to work but you've set those boundaries of what are some of the most critical things and I think for everybody those boundaries are different

10:14for some of them it's family for some of them it's you know I want to make sure that I work out and stay healthy for some of them it's these are the hobbies that I need to you know invest in and I think the you know the nice part about a place like a Databricks is we I think we hire amazing people we trust them to kind of know what they need to deliver and deliver it but then within that give

10:36them flexibility to balance their personal obligations or other things that are important to make those work while still delivering what's necessary so talking about like family and kids and and and you are a lot on AI uh we like I'm hearing a lot of things about Ai and education around the kids like do you think it's going to change the way you where Maybe Vision raising

11:00kids like maybe do you do you have something that you see is changing before chat GPT and after chat GPT we hear a lot of things about you know private kind of AI to train your kids educate your kids knowing them like super well and things like that do you think it's gonna be Game Changer yeah I think it's going to be act a game changer there's a lot of things I'm excited about one is I am hopeful with AI that I never have to get any of my

11:22kids at driver's license cuz the thought of teaching any of them to drive is terrifying to me so if we just have self-driving cars that can be you know happy with that um the second thing is look uh kids people in general but kids are sponges for basically like absorbing you know information um and you do your best

11:45as a parent to both help with them but one even if you put aside the time there's just stuff that they want to know that I have no idea um you know I don't know the you know answer to it and it is kind of uh funny you know like way before chat GPT in our house we always had like Google homes that's what we use sorry to the Alexa folks I wasn't a big

12:07Alexa fan we are Google home family um and I kid you not the majority of my kids one of their first 10 words was Google um because they learned you know for things that you just say you know you'd ask a question of Google still to this day my son will ask one question he be like oh don't worry I'm going to go ask Google um you know those kind of things where and the level of detail and explanation and look as you look at the

12:31tools out there we all use it as well um but for the kids of how do they gain information about the world how do you feed their imagination when they want to understand anything and everything about it um you know being able to go ask whether it's chat GPT whether it's something like you know perplexity whether it's kind of many of these are going to get embedded in um you know

12:55phones and the like uh the fact that they have have easy ways to get access to that information it's critical now as you might imagine there's a whole bunch of concerns that you then have is like exactly you know if you know my kids ask this question no no no that's a question I want a chance for me and my wife to answer because we want to you know kind of color like how we answer it because

13:18there's not absolute answer there's a lot in that digital world that you're you know trying to figure out but you look at the pace where they can tailor learning from themselves and bring all of that information at their fingertips I think that's undoubtedly going to change how they're able um to go through things and go through life and now you will have to trust like the company behind this model to kind of

13:41give the education that matches your you know your way of lives and everything that's that's interesting exactly and since you're talking about education as as Quinton mentioned the you have a PhD so do you still believe that PhD is something valuable in this world as all the information are now being available like to everyone you can

14:03literally do anything you want yeah um I think it is um you know valuable look I know that everybody has their different thoughts of whether you should go to college whether you should get a grad degree like I don't view um you know a PhD candidly being about oh you know it gave me an opportunity to

14:25read these research papers all the papers that you read you know and PhD or the textbooks are available you can read it um otherwise I think the PHD was really really valuable on a couple of Dimensions right one you just look at the connections that you build with likeminded people as well which is incredibly valuable but I

14:47thought uh that whole process of a PhD which is dedicated focused time where you have autonomy but to teach you how do you go through analytical and critical things thinking right how do you go into a world where it's not some very very nice well structured problem right that's what you know in a large parts of you know schooling is there is

15:10a problem everybody knows the answer to it and now it's just about you know you kind of memorizing it or understanding that mechanism and repeating it out it's not how the real world works though right the real world is driven by can you enter into an area where it's unclear what even the design spaces it's unclear what the answer is but you need to find a path forward and I think the

15:33incredible thing about a PhD is it lets you struggle it lets you discover what are the different problems it lets you figure out what is the one that's interesting for you to tackle and figure out how do you you know structure okay how do I Define the problem how do I constrain the problem how do I approach it how do I understand what good enough

15:55is how do I deal with failure how do I deal with things that I got there but you know the results weren't what I thought about but it's and use that to move things forward in a way that you Pioneer um you know canine your new approaches that then other people build upon just like you built upon their work it's an incredibly valuable toolkit right even even if you think about the

16:18um hey I have ai ai is really good about giving you access to a bunch of information and maybe synthesizing it and but and maybe for the simplest problems it'll help structure it but that way of still knowing what to ask for how to structure it and how to basically pull that together to create novel new things and Pull It Forward in a world of ambiguity I don't think it replaces that and I think like that that

16:42SK like I remember that much more than I remember what esoteric networking or just you know database paper that I read on some novel new sharding technique um you know in grad school so I think in that realm it was incredibly helpful um you know for me uh at least I loved it had to do it over again would you know absolutely go down the same

17:05path so what how did you like what made you switch M and go to Da bricks did you knew the da bricks team before like from bleay from your PhD how did it work how did you know okay I'm GNA give up on mck say um which seems like you know like a nice world to be in and and start something new within bricks yeah um you know the short answer

17:28is you know if you've ever met our CEO Ali he's a he's a really persistent guy um look I think um I knew uh you know obviously many of the of the founders from Berkeley so you know uh Yan was a professor there who I worked with a ton while I was there um

17:52you know my PhD advisor Scott Shanker was you know kind of um one of the core early you know both um investors and you know um board members as well you know Ali and I were um good friends and it's remained good friends um you know uh after leaving Berkeley um you know kind of and then you know two of the other

18:14Founders they came in a year after me so I knew them there we were all part of the rad lab amp lab you know the like and then you know two of them so actually like Patrick and Reynold would enter after I so I did not know them um at the time and look I think there was two things I was not explicitly um you know looking to uh for

18:39example to leave McKenzie McKenzie you know was also you know a great experience turned a lot and at the time period that I was leaving McKenzie everybody would tell me I'm nuts right because you know in McKenzie or many of the Consulting places you are there's this place where you go from being a junior partner which is what I was to like a full partner and you never know for sure but they were like hey you're

19:02you know a couple of months away from that and that period when you become a full partner that that beginning there's a lot like it's almost like a reset to figure out what you want to do you're well compensated so you be it's like the worst time in the world considered to leave it's like the equivalent of a you know a professor like leaving school like three months before they get tenure just makes no sense um but I also knew

19:26that that wasn't what I wanted to do long term right you look at the people who are way ahead of you and you have respect for them but you look at and say that's not the path um and I knew I didn't want to go join a big company right because at McKenzie you advise many of those large companies and they're doing some incredible things but you tend to get job offers from them often and just the pace with which they

19:49moved it was just not really um for me and so you know I mentioned I joined you know Databricks uh right when I got married so at my bachelor party South Beach Miami you know uh Ali shows up and he's like hey we're starting a company I was like you got to be fing kidding me like I don't want to talk about it right now I'm at my bachelor part leave me

20:11alone you know come find me when we're done um and sure enough you know as soon as uh I land I have a voicemail from him say hey okay your bachelor party is over can we talk about this we're stting the company and you know uh I met with the guys I talked with them a bunch and I remember it was you know the week before the wedding I went um you know met with all

20:34of them obviously many of them I knew well you know some of the new ones in there heard about the vision heard about you know what they wanted to do and for me it was kind of simple right look most startups are destined to fail that's just the reality of it that's how it always works but when I looked at it I was like okay um first the people are

20:56incredible right um when when you look at that normally and I know this is going to sound bad you normally have you know maybe an NBA and a token engineer you know some form but you had like six other people were very well accomplished like incredibly smart you know but High e EQ you know looked at it as um they had an idea of what they wanted to drive

21:18second uh you already had you know a solid technology again many of them will be and I'm going to sound dismissive that's not fair but it'll be like oh we have we have the like brand new iPhone app we working on they had kind of in the like a bunch of Technology like spark widely adopted kind of um at that pace third from a investor perspective

21:40you already had interest from you know somebody like a Ben Horwitz himself that wanted to go in there and then lastly you looked at that space that you were in right which was called Big Data back then that if nothing else even if it failed getting a chance to be on the front lines of watching that Journey um you know is pretty uh is pretty

22:03incredible so I told my wife I was like well actually she told me as she'll remind me um if you don't do this you might as well admit to yourself you're never going to join a startup because you're not going to get a better even if the likelihood of uh success is not high you're not going to get a better opportunity than this um and so I remember as I said I talked to them the week before the wedding and you know

22:25couple of days after on a honeymoon I remember I was in a ROK and Kyoto and I facetimed them I'm like all right I'm in um let's do this and so uh I once said that was the best decision I ever made and then my wife gave me a dirty look and I said it's the second best decision I ever made um you know but uh 11 years ago and changing Still Loving It wow that's amazing story yeah and and

22:49I have a sorry um I think this is one of the questions that a lot of people has been asking me to ask you and was like how does someone became a leader and like what's the process I mean like is it something you got learn we GNA you GNA learn by by Leading since for example for your case you joined the

23:11company it was a very small team and now you're leading almost 2,000 people yeah look I think um I think there's absolutely a lot of training to become an amazing leader but what I find is um you've got to look for uh a couple of things if I'm honest a you have to

23:33have people who are passionate about being a leader right so what I find is that there are still a lot of people who think that they need to go into leadership because that's the way that you you know make money or you get influence um you know I lik in this is you know I come from a you know um you know born in Iran come from an immigrant

23:55family and the joke is an Iranian family amilies you can be anything you want to be as long as it's an engineer or doctor and maybe a lawyer on some days right um so there's many people who go into that and I'm like I don't want my doctor to be somebody that their parents force them to be a doctor I want it to be somebody who cares about basically helping people right so you know as an example at data breaks from the early

24:17days we set it up that compensation is similar between the bands and influence is similar between you know individual contributors and managers so you get people who really want to do it I think that the second thing is um there are people who you have even though that there's a bunch of training on the job you intrinsically see those people who

24:39have it one of the big mistakes we oftentimes make is assume just because somebody's an amazing individual contributor and they understand the individual contributor role they'll be phenomenal leaders and it's absolutely not the case right I've seen plenty of places where you know incredible individual contributors are terrible leaders and then we have people who were good average individual can TR be

25:01amazing leaders right so there's an intrinsic set of quality that you look at right um you know that leaders you expect to have happen um do they have empathy do they have kind of that ability to understand what makes people tick and you know read them and how to interact with them you know do they naturally have a way of putting forward

25:23a vision and a strategy that galvanizes people and gets them around so there there's a set of intrinsics on there right um you know and then ultimately if you have the intrinsics after that it's just people who are also one of the biggest traits I find of good leaders is not having a problem admitting when they don't know something when they're not

25:46good at something and looking for ways whether that's learning from people or surrounding themselves by people who know it of learning like look I came to Databricks I had never been you know I'd never been a manager before for in my life um right like in Consulting you kind of lead teams but it's weird Matrix functions like direct management role um and so not only I never I didn't even

26:08know what solution architecture was or field engineering was much less I built the team right and you know as I will say as both of you will attest to um I've made a million mistakes along the way and I'll probably make a million more until they finally get smart and fire me um you know in the role but the key piece was um that Curiosity of

26:30always you know staying and trying to find amazing people that you respect and learn from them and pick their brain and knowing that being okay to admit that you don't know things and asking people for help and questions those were those were great Hallmarks right I think as we grow larger one of the things we try to do is um make it easier because the hard part of the startup is you basically are

26:53left on your own to figure all of those things out and you probably progress slower um to get there so it's why as you get um bigger one of the most important things you can do is invest for your leaders in things like training and mentorship and feedback programs to help getting there but the best leaders I know have those intrinsics and they're always looking to figure out how do they

27:16get better and you know gain that Insight from anywhere that they can yeah and like mentorship and coaching for sure so so as a leader what's your like what are you actually doing uh what's you know your daily job do you are you taking key decisions uh maybe just a few decisions per day do you like do you oversee everything do you just focus on

27:38stategic ches like what's what is it like um start with easier questions that's a hard question um look I think at a at a given day if your job as a leader is to figure out how to move things over uh forward and be a uh Force multiplier of some

28:03form right so um you know I think your job is to figure out not like hey how can I do X Y and Z individually you know as ARS Salon but how do I help mobilize kind of 2500 people to do things um going forward what that means in practice right is a um you know

28:26everybody has this you know this Vision that it's going to be great if you have a large organization you just have a bunch of people doing the work and you can coast and do nothing unfortunately it doesn't work that way right um if anything the sheer amount of things that are kind of coming towards you is fairly significant so you know you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do you ruthlessly prioritize where do you focus your time on um that you have a finite

28:50amount of time that gives the highest amount of Roi right is one I think second you tend to spend a lot of time handly in meetings and emails um that are either you know in my world like a lot of time with customers I probably spend somewhere between you know like 30 to 40% of time with you know customers

29:13or kind of customer oriented activities I think then the other thing you're trying to do is figure out how do you make the team productive which is how do you find places where you need to provide Clarity whether it's a decision or whether it's a debate or whether it's problem solving or framing the problem to then unblock people from being able to go out and execute right so there's a

29:35significant amount of time spending there whether that's through an escalation or a strategy meeting or anything of that like right and then you're also spending a significant amount of time with your your team like I am a big believer in one-on ones with the direct team and skip levels because one it gives me a bunch of information about how the organization's going but a large part of my responsibility is to

29:57also invest in those people to kind of develop them to grow them um to learn from them you know as well so that that mix which is you know a combination of customer time which is kind of you know internal with the team time and then which is like unblocking strategy getting decisions driving it forward you know I think that I would say that that's the that's the bulk of it um

30:21there are days that you get to the end which one of the things that I missed from you know uh being in ic was this especially in the early days um I spent um you know basically I was focused on front end pieces of the development uh right which was all sorts of fun you know basically late at night trying to understand JavaScript and jQuery and

30:43backbonejs but so as a result it meant I knew at the end of the day and we had demos every Friday and it was cool because I could get to show up and I be like look at all of these things I built you very clearly in a tangible way knew what you drove forward there are admitt times as a leader that you kind of ask at the end of the day you're like I know I was in a lot of meetings and I know I sent a lot of emails I hope I move

31:05things forward maybe yes maybe no so I think figuring out how do you view you know measure the impact and making sure you're working on the right things um is another big thing that you're you're constantly trying to make sure that you understand and refined yeah and I I I mean I can see how it can be a big challenge because I think if it's a very small team uh then you can easily see you know who is doing what what's the friction how you can

31:28improve and help everybody if the team starts being you know really big and especially I've seen like in previous companies you have so many layers and yeah like it's really hard for the top management to know what's actually going on uh at the IC level because you have like a big bias in the reporting process like everybody would you know kind of sell you what they want to they what they want to sell to the level below and then at the end like you think it's

31:50going well maybe it's not going well or the other way around um so I think it's really like I would be really yeah I wouldn't know how to solve that to be honest well look the key part is um it is a hard problem right because at some point you realize that no matter what you do you get people who've come you know later on time if you haven't done a good

32:12job of explaining to them the culture of the company they start trying to manage upwards right and so if you really want well well there's two things you can all say to me um you know to piss me off one is if I'm going to the meeting if you ask me arson do you need somebody technical to help you in the meeting that's number one you can really piss me off by asking me that and insinuating that I don't know the product uh the

32:34second uh the second piece is when you hear oh we didn't want to escalate this to you we didn't think this was worthy of your time I was like I don't know like people start worrying about bad news filtering up or you know they want to basically get it to you really late and the only way you do that is you basically make it clear that that's what you're seeking out but I will literally arbitrarily start you know

32:58um pinging random people in the organization to ask them what's going on what about x what about Y and I'll often times do those meetings on purpose without any of the people in the chain in between not to circumvent those people but because I know that it'll be easier for me to get kind of very very transparent clear information um you know that way so you know that notion of

33:21continuing to be paranoid and Truth seeking to figure out what's going on good or bad and validated is a never ending um you know piece but I think it's really important even more so as the organization grows yeah and as as you did mention like the team is growing and you have you have to you have to accept let's say as a leader to lose Sometimes

33:43some control or you're in like a way where we still want to go deep into some topics and be like in a Founder mode you know I don't know why founder mode you know has become the most popular thing after what was it I think Paul Graham posted the you know the blog on it um look I think that there are different

34:06ways of doing it I think on the one hand you want uh and different people have different styles and I'm not saying one is more effective than the other everybody seems to think everything is like in absolute terms um in general one you hire incredible people because you expect them you know to be be able to be

34:29autonomous right and to be able to drive things forward if you're literally in every single decision that's made there's no way that you will you know you'll scale that said I sit on the side of um often times driven more by curiosity um for good or for bad if you ask people kind of report like I love to be in the details I love to be in the

34:51details I like to debate the details I like to figure it out because I also think again it's not out of some lack of trust or perspective but I think that there's two things I think that the core element of you know founder mode if you want to call it is uh you know those leaders

35:14have very very strong visions and perspective of what's going on and it's they are eager to make sure that that Vision can be executed upon right and you can't do that if you just fly at a 10,000 foot level the second thing is many of the decisions we make are not easy they're not trivial they're not like to that point that you asked me earli on about the PHD they're not like

35:37hey does 2 plus two equal four or five it's not at that level right I think that the big abstract pieces and a large part is as a leader you want to be involved in figuring out how do we shape that how do we think about that how do we structure that how do we set the right set of principles and then let the team go you know basically Implement uh

36:00implement it but that comes back to that point I talked about um you know where it comes to uh ruthless prioritization because you can't be involved in everything um I once had a leader told me there may be a hundred things uh all hundred of them if you do them you will do them differently than other people but if you try to do all hundred of them

36:22differently you won't have enough time you'll make everybody go crazy and you yourself will go crazy so pick the five or 10 that are really really important and drive those ruthlessly because those are what determine the outcome so that figuring out what are the big ones you want to lean in on is where you spend a lot of time as a leader and I just want to add something

36:45it's like a tribute I've been with you in some meetings and I can truly say that you can move rocks much easier and faster than a lot of people I've met so it's okay you don't have to say the nice things I already came on you know this interview it yeah go ahead that that's that's

37:09that's so true like I've seen like how you move rocks and how like you can talk with any customer in any topic and this is something I heard from Isis many many IIs I'm not throwing flowers that's this is the reality so this just wanted to say it to you and what one more thing do you have a word before we close the uh the

37:32meeting yeah look um know for my side one I appreciate you guys having me on here uh I think it's awesome the things that you guys are doing here and look many of the questions you asked was about what is the trajectory what is the road to get there you know what's the right answer I think the big thing I often times uh Define to people like at

37:56least I share is because we heard this a lot at the early days of Databricks which is like oh you guys are just some young academics it's cute you're building something great but you can look at X Y or z um you know because that's how they did and you have to emulate it and you spend a lot of time with impostor syndrome trying to figure out how do I do what other people did and I think one of the most

38:19important things to realize um you know at least for me um and I still realize it on a daily basis is as a be confident in what you're doing and the DNA and Paving your own path right don't be so arrogant that you think you know everything that it's perfect Don't Close Your Eyes to what everybody else

38:42um you know is doing learn as much as you can from others the good things to do things not to do things that are kind of don't make sense in your world um but if you do that and kind of keep a little bit of that humility knowing that you're not perfect you can always do better but be confident in making your own way around things I think those are the those are the big things and you know what I found is you know because I think

39:05about some of the mentors that I gravitate towards people who kind of have that authenticity that transparency that kind of like genuine humility were the ones that I was the most eager to follow right and figure out how to gets there and so you know as you think about that whether you are a people manager or whether you're as an IC leader in set in the pace just kind of remembering those

39:28principles I've always found have at least for me served me well amazing thank you thank you so much for this uh this session and sharing those all those crunchy details uh thank you so much of course thanks for having me guys thank you