.@bhorowitz on why he refused the Databricks founders' $200K ask and wrote them a $10M check instead: "So there were six PhD students, and Ion Stoica, who was their professor." "What they had was this thing called Spark, and the competitor was something called Hadoop. Hadoop had very well-funded companies already running towards it, and Spark was open-source. So the clock was ticking. I think they didn't quite know what they had." "Professors in general, it's a pretty big win if you start a company and you make $50 million. You're a hero on campus... So I'm always a little nervous about a company that comes out of academia thinking too small." "So I said 'I'm not gonna write you a check for $200,000. I'll write you a check for $10 million.'" "You need to build a company. You need to really go for it if you're gonna do this, otherwise you guys should stay in school." Ben Horowitz w/ @lennysan on Lenny's Podcast (2025)