Databricks co-founder says enterprise sales depend on people and partnerships

Winning large enterprise customers takes more than strong technology, according to Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, Databricks co-founder and senior vice president of field engineering. People, processes and access to buyers matter, he said at TechCrunch Disrupt.

In Databricks’ early days, the company struggled to get a meeting with Swiss bank UBS. A partnership with Microsoft made Databricks an Azure cloud partner, allowing sales agreements to use Microsoft’s terms. Microsoft’s sales team also arranged meetings and advocated for the startup. Tavakoli-Shiraji said the partnership gave Databricks access and distribution, though it also brought requests for features in countries where the company had not yet expanded.

He said startups should prepare for legal, contractual and security questions, which had caused some early deals to fall through. For AI sales, he groups enterprise concerns into four Cs: context, choice, cost and control. These refer to adapting AI to a company’s terminology and processes, switching models, managing operating costs, and setting safeguards to protect sensitive information.

Tavakoli-Shiraji said 99% of the CIOs he speaks with place their companies in the first two stages of a five-point AI adoption scale. He said many enterprises have yet to deploy AI agents in ways that create value beyond helping engineering teams write code. He sees an opportunity for startups to modernize legacy systems, including IBM AS/400 systems and mainframes, with AI agents that can analyze what their code does.