It's not often that a founder with no intention of selling, and an acquirer that's not looking to acquire, find themselves in a whirlwind frenzy of dealmaking, that a mere two months later results in one of the biggest A.I. deals of the year. But that's exactly what happened with Databricks’ $1.3 billion buy of MosaicML, announced in late June. This is the story of how the two founders—Ali Ghodsi, the chief executive of Databricks, and Naveen Rao, MosaicML’s CEO—met, realized they have lots in common, and in warp speed came to combine their companies.
Ghodsi, 44, and Rao, 48, had long known of each other, but they didn’t actually meet until March 30. That’s when they both attended the Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, an AI summit that attracted about 200 people, including some of the biggest names in industry like Cristobal Valenzuela, CEO of Runway; Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face; and Ghodsi, who spoke about the movement towards open source in AI.
