Databricks CRO, Ron Gabrisko: $0–$4BN: The Databricks CRO’s Playbook to Build the Fastest GTM Engine in SaaS History

Ron Gabrisko is the Chief Revenue Officer at Databricks, where he joined in 2016. Under his leadership, Databricks has scaled from $0 to over $4BN in annual revenue. He has grown the sales team from 0 to over 1,000 globally, leading expansion into enterprise, government, and international markets. Ron previously held senior sales roles at Cloudera and IBM, bringing deep experience in data and AI infrastructure. His tenure at Databricks has been defined by hypergrowth, multi-product adoption, and world-class GTM execution.

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What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The Databricks origin story and the founding team behind it

• Why CEO Ali Ghodsi turned down $10M from JPMorgan to stay cloud-first

• How Ron scaled a prospecting-first GTM culture

• Why Databricks’ pricing model became its secret weapon

• The high-stakes Enterprise vs SMB bet—and how it paid off

• How Ron built the first sales engine from $2M to $13M ARR

• Whether AI can truly replace salespeople, and Ron’s honest view

• How to hire and retain your first million-dollar sales rep

• The culture secret behind scaling to 5,000 sales reps

• Why Databricks delayed international expansion until $500M ARR

• What a world-class sales meeting looks like, according to Ron

• Why Ron believes Databricks is 5 years ahead of Snowflake