Transcript:

Rick Currier (00:01.24)

Hey, Carlos.

Carlos Roman (00:03.094)

Hey, Rick, how's it going? Good to see you.

Rick Currier (00:04.678)

It's good. is my favorite kind of episode because we didn't have like a really in-depth prep call. You know, we were kind of winging it. You jumped on five minutes ago and we're like, all right, what do we want to talk about today? And we're going to talk about AI. So it's going to be fun.

Carlos Roman (00:19.15)

We're going to talk, I thought we were going to start with politics, then we're going to go into religion, and then, or not today, not today.

Rick Currier (00:27.142)

Half the people will love it, the other half will hate it, but we should have good ratings, right? All right, well why don't you introduce yourself for the guests? I've known you for quite a while, but there might be people listening that don't know who you are.

Carlos Roman (00:30.606)

Yeah.

Carlos Roman (00:39.298)

Yeah, so I'm Carlos Raman and I lead our global partner marketing at Databricks. I'm about 90 days in, so I'm still figuring out the, you know, what's what over here. But yeah, it's, it's, it just, it follows the same path that I've had with my prior companies as well, where I was leading global partner marketing. I think you and I have talked about for quite some time, was I was actually in partner marketing before it was an actual thing.

So now it's an actual thing and they feel like people can have a career path around it as well. lots of scar tissues, lots of scar tissue as you too. mean, you're off doing your own thing with partner marketing and you so you've sort of had a same path as well.

Rick Currier (01:25.19)

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I kind of lucked like my whole life. I've just kind of lucked into things. think, you know, someone always said just be say yes, you know, and I remember 2019, my boss at IDG approached me and said, do you want to head up the partner marketing group? And I was like, well, what what is it? You know, sure. Yes. But I had no idea. And I think, yeah. And since I launched partner Vista, you know, kind of just saying yes and going with it, I couldn't have asked for a better community.

to jump into and take a huge risk because I think partner marketers by nature, they're willing to help. The nature of the job is you got to work with somebody else to succeed, right? And so what better business to get into with other people wanting to help you succeed? And they take risks, they want to help and just very compassionate group of people. So I'm very fortunate.

Carlos Roman (02:15.586)

Yeah, I do agree. think partner marketers in general, my experience is that everyone's really nice. And you you're really nice because you have to work with partners. It's part of the job too. know, I think some, sometimes it's almost to a detriment, but I do think that, you know, that's sort of a natural DNA that you see within the community.

Rick Currier (02:21.348)

Yeah.

Rick Currier (02:36.198)

It's funny. I was going to say I watch these shows like Succession and other shows where you get the business people and they're just jerks. And my wife's like, people really like that? And I'm like, I'm sure they are in some sorts of the industry. But I think we're very fortunate where I think you're right. A lot of us lead with kindness. I want to get into the AI stuff really quickly. really quick, you're heading up partner marketing at Databricks. That's a pretty big deal.

You know, what do you think has been the key to your success in terms of starting a partner marketing before it even was partner marketing to now leading an organization at one of the top technology companies in the world?

Carlos Roman (03:14.348)

Yeah, well, first all, super excited to be here at Databricks too. just, you know, just a really amazing opportunity with a great company and a great space. And so I do, you know, count my blessings, just the fact that to be able to be here and just drive the growth and the impact. You know, I think that for me, partner marketing has always been about just getting scale and leverage.

And I think that when you look at the growth path for any organization, there's only so many internal resources that you can leverage. And so there's so many salespeople, the marketing team is so big, and you're constrained by time and hours of the day. And so you can multiply the number of people by the hours of the day, and you've got your capacity of how much stuff you can do. And so to be able to...

You can always work within that, you're always going to be doing trade-offs in terms of, how many webinars can we do? How many activities, et cetera? And I think the value of the partner ecosystem and where I get excited is to be able to just unlock the potential where now all of a sudden you can actually double your resources without doubling the cost and the investment. Or you could triple or quadruple or you could 10X it by activating a broader

set of sellers and go to market resources. And that includes budget times. You know, I think that's the, that's the power and the promise of partner marketing. And so, you know, I think that there's, there's, to do it right. It's almost like that, you know, you you want to try and approach that perfect way to be able to do it, but it's always more of a continuous journey, less about destination because there's always things are changing and you're always improving.

but you just have to kind of incrementally over every week, every month, every quarter, every year, just improve on what you're doing and how you're activating more and fix a problem and then don't look back and then go on to the next problem. And then just how do you keep expanding? So I think that's kind of the, you know, the what's been always attracted me to partner marketing is just the way that you can make an impact on the business and unlock additional routes to market.

Carlos Roman (05:38.764)

and go to market areas is, has been key for me.

Rick Currier (05:42.886)

Yeah, it's been great to see over the last 10, 20 years, these organizations take a shift in terms of realizing the power. And a lot of them have had it the whole time, but they just haven't realized the power of this partner ecosystem. I think, you know, coming out of COVID, especially where, you know, everyone was doing digital transformation, you know, unlimited debt, we could just buy, buy, buy. And then all of sudden there was a softening. And now I think organizations are really leaning into their partner ecosystem to help get that next evolution of growth.

Finally, think partner marketers are almost getting the recognition they deserve. think we still have some work to do, but we're getting close.

Carlos Roman (06:18.594)

Yeah, find, you know, a couple of things. One is that, you know, for good or for bad, I feel like partner marketing, because it, you may not be as part of the core to the business that sometimes you're either as a team and as an individual, you're over indexing on supporting either the partner sales team, versus, know, when they're handing out promotions, they're handing out promotions on the marketing side. And so.

just making sure that you're balancing out, managing all your key stakeholders is really key because I think that all of us tend to be nice. And so if you tend to be nice, you try and just make everyone happy, you're not gonna be able to do that. So you just have to make sure that you're managing your career, you're focusing on what's important, and then just making sure that you're taking a look at the big picture too.

Rick Currier (07:10.182)

So I'm sure the evolution of AI has been part of your career journey. know we're very early in this AI journey, but before we get into AI and Databricks, just for you personally, what's it been like just adopting this new technology? What's your philosophy been around it? How have you learned to utilize this and what's that journey looked like?

Carlos Roman (07:32.492)

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. mean, I think for me, I kind of look at it as everyone does, which is super early days. And the best way I look at this is now it's more of the DIY days. it's, you know, what's happening is if you want to build an agent, you got to use some duct tape and some bubble gum and try and pull things together. You've got your, your LLM that you're going to use and you've got your, you know, these other pieces that you're pulling together and you're just basically

cobbling together something and people are on their own to do this. So whether you and I are doing this ourselves or whether it's an IT department or what, everyone's just sort of cobbling together all these components. And eventually, eventually what will happen is there's gonna be a layer of abstraction that will make things easier. You're already seeing the things where it's low code, no code, right?

And that trend is going to continue where eventually we're just going to have things that are turnkey. And it's kind of like the early days of hosting a website. Remember that? You had to download your web server, make sure you've got your DNS set up, right? You've got your domain name. You basically had to build everything else and then you had to write your own web pages. now, then it kind of goes into, okay, all these other tools that the WYSIWYG editors and you just kind of go in.

and go and go to where we're at now. So it's kind of early days too, where lots of future ahead of us, lots of opportunity to be able to be just, you know, create some opportunities with making it easier, removing friction, so you can kind of take it out and democratize it out to the masses.

Rick Currier (09:22.118)

Yeah, no, I think you're so right, because I've been working on creating some agents myself, and I think duct tape is a perfect way to describe it. So DIY moment, hands down. Where do you think this is going, though? I I love to, if you looked out, you know, for you personally and how you're utilizing AI, mean, is it just going to just get easier in terms of I'm getting the tools of what I need, or are you still going to be able to be creative in terms of how you, what you put into it?

Carlos Roman (09:47.714)

Yeah, think so. So again, early days and I'm by no means an AI expert. I'm just a user, a user and one who wants to benefit from the output here. You know, I think like one of the things we're doing here at Databricks on the marketing team is we've got an AI hackathon where all marketers are reformed into just some organic teams and everyone's just let loose to be able to go, go forth and create, you know,

different use cases on how we could implement and utilize and benefit from AI. So it's really a powerful exercise to be able to just empower everyone at the individual level to come together and just say, you you've got a job and no one knows your job better than you. And what's a use case that you want to be able to leverage the technology. some of, know, it's really interesting to see use cases. Some are generating content.

Some are automating workflows. And a lot of this now is low code, no code. So people are just kind of, you you don't have to be an engineer to be able to do it. You know, our team is taking a partner angle, of course. And so, you know, we're exploring the fact of, hey, we've got Databricks and we've got a repository of content that's typically not available to partners.

And you think about the way that partners would traditionally consume that content, they'd have to either log into a partner portal, download a campaign, or there's very finite sets of assets that are made available to partners. And so we're trying to democratize this and scale it too, where we'll say, you have a thousand different partners, there's a thousand different value proposition that gets combined with the Databricks value proposition, and the partners can create any go-to-market assets they want.

it's a blog or a campaign. so, you know, I mean, again, it's just a concept now, but this is just an idea that came out from this marketing hackathon where everyone's sort of optimizing to say, Hey, look, this is, this is something we want to be able to do.

Rick Currier (11:58.954)

I love that because I think, right now everyone has the mindset, not everybody, but a lot of people have the mindset about how is this AI going to make my job easier? But when you, when you look at a partner team like yourselves, it's, it's not just, how is it going to make our jobs easier, but how is it going to enable our partners? How is, how is it going to, you know, make them more successful? So I think, you know, we're starting to see this extension beyond just our corporate walls, but you know, helping the customer, helping the partners. And at the end of the day, I was here, like, how do we scale?

Right, so the scale is always like that holy grail on the partner side. This is aligned to that, right?

Carlos Roman (12:30.734)

I'm going to

Yeah. And I mean, that's one of the things too, that we're doing at Databricks too is the, you know, the, trick here is, you know, Databricks is basically at the time we're talking here, essentially has got a $4 billion run rate business and is a startup company. So we're acting like a startup company and you know, growing super fast. a lot of excitement around there, but the trick is, you know, what's gotten us to this point may not be the same things that needed are.

going to be out to get us to the next level of growth as well. So as we want to continue to grow, we need to be able to scale. And part of that is using AI and leveraging tools. But it's also just kind of taking a thoughtful approach on how do we rinse and repeat? How do we provide direction and guidance for our partner ecosystem? And how do we take the historical

vehicles that we've used, like the campaigns in a box as all of us, know, partner marketing and before that channel marketing in some cases as well. And how do we actually combine that with a new AI technology and be able to just accelerate out and with the ultimate goal of enabling, you know, broader set of sellers to be able to represent your brand out in the marketplace.

Rick Currier (13:54.0)

Do you have any advice for someone who's hearing this and they're like, well, we should be doing an AI hackathon, whether that's, you know, at a micro level, just with their team or maybe at a broader level across the company. From your experience, you know, you don't have to tell us, you know, we're doing XYZ, but like just what advice should people think about if they want to set something up like this for their team?

Carlos Roman (14:14.21)

Yeah, I think there's a couple things. So one is in no particular order. I think that all of us are constrained by resource constrained. It could be there's no new headcount that's coming in this year. And so you've got X number of people to be able to do a job or you've got X number of dollars. And traditionally speaking, think people, the natural tendency is throw people and bodies at everything and like, hey,

I need somebody else to do something. And so instead of just thinking about throwing another body at a problem, there's a lot of things that you could do where you can offload or you can do those with some AI technology. And again, it doesn't have to be AI, but it could be repeatability and processes. So I would just think of like, what are the things that you could do with repeatability, rinse and repeat? So that would be one.

So kind of get that foundation in place and identify like here's sort of the biggest bang for the buck in the areas I want to be able to invest. And then the, I forgot what I was going to say next, but.

Rick Currier (15:22.726)

So give it some guardrails though. Don't just say, hey, we're gonna have an AI hackathon for the heck of it. Like, let's focus on some of the core challenges we're trying to solve as a business and kind of direct the efforts in that way. Yeah.

Carlos Roman (15:33.539)

That's right. And then from a, from an AI hackathon, you reminded me, you know, I, I think there's also, there's a lot of, fear out there and people sort of paralyzed by saying, well, I don't know AI, so I'm not gonna, I'm not going to give it a try, but basically, I mean, if you just spend, you know, a weekend or a couple of days, actually doesn't take that long to be able to just dig in, jump in with both feet.

And I would just say, try it, get some hands-on experience and then it will almost demystify itself. And then you're like, Hey, you know what? Like I actually can do this and I can build this. And it's more about just like taking my, my problem that I'm trying to solve and then, kind of putting some logic around it. So what I would say is, but until you dig in and until you actually try it, it's sort of this, you know, this mythical beast that.

Like I will never be able to, to participate in. And I would say just kind of, you know, there's easy, there's quick tutorials, just invest the time. And it actually isn't that much time to be able to get you really dangerous. And then it really unlocks a huge, huge potential there too. But I think many times people are just, you know, they're, too busy. They're, they're, they're, they're afraid. They don't have the confidence, but I think my advice would be just like dive in with both feet, try it out.

Roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, and then just try it.

Rick Currier (17:05.188)

Yeah, would. I think that's great. And I think to add to that, the peer connection from my point of view has been huge because I've been I've been doing that. But I think a lot of my learnings have been from now that I've been doing that, then connecting with people and saying, well, how are you utilizing it? And then they tell me and I go, I didn't even think about that. You know, just just learning so much. And then it's that constant just flywheel of, OK, I learned something new. Now let me go back and try that. Now I'm learning something new. Let me connect with my peer, figuring out something else and just

just constantly just finding new ideas and implementing, experimenting, learning, and then continuing.

Carlos Roman (17:40.847)

And I do feel marketing is actually a really fantastic place to be able to just play around. There's so many use cases that I think people have even thought of too. I think, and even specifically in partner marketing, because of the limited number of resources and because of the need to combine and to branch out of a core process, I think is a really good use case to be able to just say, we can

Instead of throwing people at this, can just invest some time and money and just automate a lot of this and actually have better results that the rest of the organization can look at and learn from.

Rick Currier (18:23.142)

So I want to ask you a little bit about scale, because obviously to what you were just talking about, AI is going to help us scale. Does it solve everything from scale, or are we still thinking about programs in a box? Are we thinking about other aspects to help us kind of achieve the scale that we need with limited resources, limited budget, and having to manage multiple partners?

Carlos Roman (18:44.431)

Yeah, I think it's, it kind of goes back just to the old adage, you have, you know, people process and technology. And so AI can help us with technology, but you really need sort of a process and you need sort of a direction to be able to go. Otherwise, you know, you're just going to have an AI bot that's not doing really anything what you want to. So what I would say is, you know, part of this is just making sure that you have

It's kind of your one-on-one business. One-on-one is if we want to be able to scale and, and, my son's on the rowing team. So I always use rowing as an analogy is, and I love, you know, watching the boats go by and the crew team, you know, everyone's rowing in the same direction. So you see a boat going by and it's super fast. There's no, no splash on the water and it looks effortless and they're going, they're cruising super fast. Whereas you see another boat and.

It looks like everyone's almost fighting each other. There's lots of splashes. Everyone's a little out of sync. They're not going as fast. Maybe they're kind of zigzagging around there too. And I think it's, you know, I think everyone has good intention and they're rowing really hard, but we're just not aligned. And so I think when you try and get scale, you want to be able to just make sure that everyone is aligned in the same direction. And that includes your external partners too. So what you have to do is you have to, there's certain larger companies which,

I will not name, but they do a really good job of this too. They're basically at the end, at the beginning of their fiscal year, they say, everyone's going to go this direction and here's all of our incentives and here's all the programs that we're going to have. And we're to get everyone aligned too. And so I think part of that is just making sure that you're aligned internally, which is step number one. You have, you have the direction that you're setting and the vision and for the rest of the partner ecosystem externally. So part of that is.

setting your message, like what are the focus areas that you want to be able to drive with the partners? And if partners align, then that's great. Here's the incentive programs that we're going to put in place. And it could be MDF, could be rebate programs, et cetera. But you have to sort of align all of that. And then we have to remove friction out of the system. So you actually have to give some sort of content materials to be able to, it's unrealistic to expect the entire partner ecosystem just to come up with.

Carlos Roman (21:10.447)

their own content and messaging as well. So you want to provide as much as you can. You want to augment with AI, but that is a supportive element of the overall plan that you've laid out as well. Something by itself is not going to get you the skill.

Rick Currier (21:30.182)

So knowing that, as you try to solve all the problems, looking at AI and automating this process for scale, what are you most excited for? I know you're 90 days in at Databricks, great company. It's on lot of minds right now. What are you most excited for in the future working in this organization?

Carlos Roman (21:50.137)

Yeah, I think it's for me, I think it's really an opportunity just to put something that is almost like a beacon for the industry here. We wanna be able to just have something that we can reference to saying, this is the industry's, when you think of partner ecosystem, you wanna really think about how Databricks is doing it too, because.

They're enabling the partners, the partners are making money, the partners are growing. Everyone's helping customers solve problems as well. So for me, it's really about putting a stake in the ground around, hey, here's what we think is what good really looks like. Because I think you and I may have talked about it way back when, but you look at the legacy channel programs, and a lot of them are historically, they've been around for decades.

and they've really been centered around like a hardware solution or they've been centered around a software solution. And I think, you you start to move into the SaaS space and then the ownership of the customers shifts from, you know, to be more of a co and then you kind of look at, well, this is what now the next step, which is even more of a consumption model. So I think there's different evolutions. And so for me, you know, I really just want to make sure that we're

We're making our mark in the marketplace. We're positioning Databricks and growing as the market leader, especially with respect to the partner ecosystem. So that's kind of what I'm excited about here over the next several years.

Rick Currier (23:29.39)

Very cool. Well, with you at the helm, no doubt that you're going to be part of that, that next evolution. Carlos has been great. I, you know, we're, we're a small team here at partner Vista, but I think we're going to do our own little hackathon right now. And, and, but, but to your point, like you just, you got to get in, you got to try new things and then just learn from each other. And I think the hackathon embodies that, We're going to, we're going to try new things and we're going to do it in teams and we're going to iterate and we're going to share results. So I, I love that example and thank you for sharing that with us.

Carlos Roman (23:57.273)

Yeah, of course, and I would say that, you know, actions speak louder than words. If you want to talk about it, keep talking about it, keep talking about it, nothing's going to happen until you take action. So just take action, you know, try it, and then that's going to get you much further than just continuously just talking about something, just jumping into it.

Rick Currier (24:15.908)

I love it. love it. Carlos, well, thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate it. And I'll link to your LinkedIn on the show notes. is there anywhere else people should go for more information on obviously databricks.com and anywhere else?

Carlos Roman (24:29.965)

No, I think just databricks.com, go to our partner page and learn more about it. That would be great. But Rick, I do appreciate having me on here. It's been great to catch up. It's always great to catch up and we'll have to grab a drink next time we're in the same place together.

Rick Currier (24:48.076)

Awesome. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Carlos.

Carlos Roman (24:50.383)

All right, have a good one.