Databricks co-founder: Winning enterprise customers takes more than AI tech

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, co-founder and senior vice president of field engineering at Databricks, shared advice for startups seeking to win large enterprise customers. He argued that having the best technology is not enough — people and processes often decide the outcome.

Tavakoli-Shiraji drew on Databricks' early days, when he helped close the company's first major deals. Now valued at $190 billion, Databricks counts more than 70% of the Fortune 500 as customers. He recalled losing a prospect who had staked his career on a competitor, and seeing early deals fall apart over legal, contractual, or security issues.

He recommended that young startups sell under the umbrella of a larger tech company. Databricks itself failed to get a meeting with Swiss bank UBS until it became a Microsoft Azure cloud partner. Microsoft's sales team then booked meetings and advocated for the startup, which he called a huge boon.

Tavakoli-Shiraji also grouped enterprise concerns about AI into "four Cs": context, choice, cost, and control. He noted that most enterprises are still early in AI adoption, and suggested that startups can find opportunity by modernizing expensive legacy systems, using AI agents to understand and decompose old code.