Databricks — Series A Pitch Deck (May 30, 2013)
| Author | Databricks |
|---|---|
| Published | May 30, 2013 |
| Format | Report |
| Original | Read the original |
TL;DR — Databricks’ 36-slide May 2013 Series A deck: Spark beats Hadoop, a hosted analytics service, an open-source strategy, and a budget assuming a $10M raise.
The deck is titled “DataBricks” and dated May 30, 2013. Its “big picture” is three claims: big data is a huge, growing market led by Hadoop; the founders’ technology, Spark, outpaces Hadoop and is gaining traction; and they are the best team for Spark. The team slide lists Ion Stoica (CEO), Matei Zaharia (CTO), Scott Shenker, Ali Ghodsi, Reynold Xin, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell and Arsalan Tavakoli, most from UC Berkeley’s AMPLab.
The product argument is “make simple things easy, make complex things possible, and everything fast.” That means a hosted service with an interactive shell and dashboards, a single engine covering SQL, machine learning, graph and streaming, and in-memory processing claimed at 100x faster than Hadoop with 5–10x less code. Traction is given as sold-out AMPCamp and Strata tutorials, 700+ meetup users and 17 companies contributing code. The go-to-market plan is a cloud service first, priced at twice Amazon EMR while running about 10x faster. On-premise “virtual cluster appliances” and customisation would come only if customers asked (“if they write a big enough check”).
Later slides cover a roadmap from June 2013 to April 2015, then a quarterly budget from Q3 2013 to Q2 2015. It assumes a $10M Series A and grows headcount from 8 to 40. The goal is “over 500 customers, and well over $10M/year revenue by series B”. Backup slides cover market size (Amazon EMR cluster counts), the open-source strategy (support two or three big companies, get Hadoop distributors to package Spark, train and certify developers) and a smartphone analogy for a unified engine. Most slides carry the startup’s original distribution stamp, though Fortune has published the full deck since 2023.
What it is: A founders’ fundraising deck, so the claims are the company’s own. It is a primary source on how Databricks pitched itself before its 2013 Andreessen Horowitz-led round. Fortune published it in March 2023, with Ben Horowitz recalling it as one of the worst decks he had seen.
Where this came from
- A copy shared on Google Drive, with downloading disabled.
- Published by Fortune in its March 2023 story on Databricks’ pitch decks, which hosts the Series A PDF. The local copy is Fortune’s file, and its first page matches the Drive copy.
36 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.