Databricks Is Focused on Keeping Up With 'Massive' Demand, CEO Says

so walk me through your business model yeah it's pretty simple so we help companies solve some of the world's toughest problems using data so in other words we take massive amounts of data and we do machine learning on it and we do that in the cloud through SAS business so customers rent our service in the cloud from us and they pay us by the hour congratulations on the funding what are you using it for we're gonna invest over 100 million dollars in our European Development Center so a lot of its gonna be R&D we've had massive massive demand for our service over the last year or two so we're gonna invest that back in R&D and we're looking at actually over the next three years investing in all these open-source projects that we lead there's gonna be dedicated teams for each of these in Europe why is there more demand in Europe right now what the demand is actually worldwide everywhere but we have a big headquarter here in San Francisco with engineers there's also difficulty is moving engineers to San Francisco there's visa issues so balancing the two with Europe and San Francisco is a good plan with those visa issues how much of it is restriction from the Trump administration and then how do you get around that yeah it's just we've just seen in the last few years more and more people to get their visas rejected some of our current employees that are on visa as they expire they can't come back so we're just working around it and trying to expand to beyond more places around around the world with this increased funding comes increased valuation more than six billion dollars how much of been a unicorn status in this environment helps you or hurts you we're not really focused on that we're seeing massive massive demand for a service we're just trying to keep up with that demand that we're seeing so we're not obsessed by you know what the exact valuation is or the unicorn status or what the markets are doing we're not seeing any sort of any of that we're just seeing the man that we need to satisfy so investors or customers haven't had increased focus on free cash flow or profitability at this point no the focus is mostly sort of how do we actually grow our business you know it's as everybody wants AI every Enterprise on the planet every software company now have you realized in the next couple of years they need to build an AI into their software okay and they want to get there fast and they have deadlines so they ask us how can you help us we need to get there quickly please help me so that's what we're focused on mostly what the most frequent question you get these days from investors masters I think the most important question that you get is you know is a I you know is is that going to be a threat how's it gonna change society and so on those are the kind of questions we often get and you mentioned the importance of AI and sort of the race who is winning this AI race between the China and the US well the way I actually see it is that the enterprises that have software today they're the ones that are gonna build an AI in it they need platforms that can help them we provide that platform so whichever the enterprises are on the planet that are right now I think actually ones all over you know amia asia-pac and United States all of them are sort of trying to build in this AI technology so the important thing is we can actually build the platform that can support them so AI and Big Data is all the rage and up until now it's been a huge growth opportunity recently though when you have data and in the name of the company it also is now directly correlated with privacy what are you doing to help protect customer privacy yes so we've actually built technologies that actually help you become compliant so we have technology called Delta Lake actually helps companies become GDP are ready or compliant so a lot of technologies we build actually help you track the data so that if someone wants to for instance find out the data you have about them or delete it we actually enable companies to buy that kind of technology from us so we focus on that quite a bit actually one more question here yesterday we had a start-up on and he said that it wasn't directly in response to we work but they realized that given the heightened attention on corporate governance they started having more board meetings have you had a sense of doing anything to increase your corporate governance to help appease investors no our investors are super supportive have you can see I mean they just again we fundraised eight months afterwards and they actually was unsolicited they came to us and wanted to invest so we've just seen support you know be that lucky

Channel: Bloomberg Technology

Views: 5,481

Rating: 4.9487181 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: sObSTLB-uCg

Length: 4min 6sec (246 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019