Startups eager to grow often assume a strong product will sell itself, but Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, co-founder and senior vice president of field engineering at Databricks, says that belief is a mistake. The data and AI company is now valued at $190 billion with more than 70% of the Fortune 500 as customers, but it started small, and Tavakoli-Shiraji helped land its first big deals. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, he said founders tend to think enterprise sales are all about having the best technology, while he learned the hard way that "people and processes matter the most."
He recalled one early meeting with a prospect who had signed a major deal with a key competitor and had no interest in listening. Other early deals fell apart because the startup wasn't ready for legal, contractual or security questions.
His advice includes selling under a larger tech company's umbrella. Databricks failed to get a meeting with UBS until it became a Microsoft Azure cloud partner, which put sales agreements under Microsoft's terms and had Microsoft's sales staff booking meetings and advocating for the startup. "All of a sudden, that meeting wasn't hard to get," he said. Databricks now plays that role for startups including Hightouch, Addepar and Tecton, which it later acquired.
When selling AI, he says startups should address what he calls the four Cs: context, choice, cost and control. Context means an AI trained like a new employee on a company's terminology and processes; choice means freedom to switch models; cost means controlling running expenses; and control covers safeguards and protection of sensitive information.
He also sees opportunity in modernizing costly legacy systems. Asked to rate their AI progress from one to five, most CIOs he talks to land in buckets one and two, he said, and meaningful enterprise AI deployment will take many years. Banks still run IBM AS/400s and mainframes that nobody wanted to touch, but AI agents can now understand and break down what that code does, opening the door to modern interfaces or full replacement.
Source: TechCrunch