Databricks: From Data to Decisions - [Business Breakdowns, EP.238]

This episode is brought to you by Portrait. It's the AI research system that I used to prepare for today's episode and for all business breakdowns episodes. Portrait was built by former buy side investors, and they understand great investing isn't just about having more information from low quality sources. It's about having the right information organized the right way. And if you listen to the show, you appreciate diligence consists of many things, diving into the history of a business, framing the nuanced competitive dynamics, tracking key signposts around your thesis. And historically, that would take up material time that you do not have. But Portrait is basically like adding an army of analysts to your team. It's powered by an AI system specifically designed for investment research workflows. So you get nuanced idea generation. Portrait assesses the same types of qualitative attributes that we discuss on this show, and that can help identify businesses which fit your frameworks. Portrait also customizes research report generation, and I use Portrait to generate a primer and layout bold bear cases ahead of today's episode to help frame the conversation. And third, there's intelligent thesis monitoring, and that's where Portrait assesses thousands of data points across value chains each day, extracting the insights, driving the business. Again, all this work would typically take hours and hours and hours. It's at your fingertips now. Visit portraitresearch.com to start your free trial today. This is Business Breakdowns. Business Breakdowns is a series of conversations with investors and operators diving deep into a single business. For each business, we explore its history, its business model, its competitive advantages, and what makes it tick. We believe every business has lessons and secrets that investors and operators can learn from, and we are here to bring them to you. To find more episodes of breakdowns, check out joincolossus.com. All opinions expressed podcast guests, their employers, or affiliates may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. This is Matt Russell, and today we are breaking down Databricks. My guest is Alan Tu, portfolio manager and analyst at WCM Investment Management. And you may actually remember, we broke down Databricks with a different guest about three years ago. But given how much has changed in this business and the subsequent capital raises, I was personally interested in revisiting this story. And I had a conversation with Alan about nine months ago. WCM had invested in Databricks in December 2024, and I was curious just to get a better understanding of what they saw in the business. And we got into that in that private conversation and then really focused on it in this conversation. So we start with what exactly Databricks does for its customers, and I think this is the large private company that might be least understood by the general public. And perhaps that dates back …