A short YouTube talk describing Databricks' growth strategy: the founders prioritized open-source adoption over early revenue/pricing, achieving widespread use with Apache Spark and later projects (Delta, MLflow). The speaker frames Databricks as an open-source-focused company that monetizes by offering valuable services to users of those projects.
Think building an open source product and then getting the community to use it and be behind it was one of the secrets I think of databricks like the founder, the founding team, that's literally what they focused on for the most part, right? They weren't as focused on how do I develop my revenue model and my pricing model. They wanted to make sure they got the adoption model and they nailed that with Spark. And then as we have evolved we've done lots of other open source projects, right, Like Delta and ML Flow and there it's we're an open source company, right? That method of how you develop open source, get people to both contribute to it and adopt it and use it and then how do you then offer a service that's of value to customers that use that? That's honestly I think that's the open source model of the future and I think databricks pioneered that. So.
