How did you end up becoming CEO of Databricks when you never wanted the job?
Co-Founder & CEO at Databricks
The board was interviewing other people and I was hearing about it through the grapevine. I assumed I was not going to be picked. The company had great open source success with Apache Spark but only about 1.5 million in revenue. I was actually applying for a faculty job at Berkeley at the same time. I was facing the choice between becoming CEO, which I never wanted to do, or going back to my dream of being a professor. What made me choose CEO was a pattern I noticed in my own life. Every time I faced a choice between the comfortable known path and the genuinely challenging unknown, I had picked the challenge and it had opened my horizons each time. So I took the CEO role as the hardest thing I could possibly do.
This answer is part of a full interview with Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO at Databricks.
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