How did you find your head of sales Ron Grisco and what made him so rare?

Ali Ghodsi
Replied byAli Ghodsi

Co-Founder & CEO at Databricks

Niche: AI
Revenue: Approx. USD 583 Million/month
Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Started: 2013

Ron was what they call in the industry a PTC or BMC-style seller. Classic meat-eating enterprise sales DNA. But he also had an engineering undergraduate degree and an engineering master's from Stanford GSB. That combination meant he could talk to our engineering founders as equals. We were not oil and water. He had also built a sales organization from zero to 50 million ARR at a startup called Cyclone, then seen the journey up to hundreds of millions at Axway. He knew how to build the car, not just drive someone else's car. And he had been at the same company for 11 years. That told me he had loyalty and staying power. If it got rough, he was not going to quit. That turned out to be crucial because great enterprise salespeople are very hard to manage.

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