ClickHouse CEO：AI应用收入持久性风险与高增长下的成本权衡

We're just getting started. This seems to be accelerating at an unprecedented pace. We haven't seen revenue growth like this in our lifetime. We went 0 1250 200 and we'll finish this year north of 500. Our guest today just got front of shirt sponsorship for Craven Cottage and for Fulham. Most importantly, welcome Aaron Cass, founder and CEO of Clickhouse, industryleading online analytical processing database management system.

Try saying that after a couple of tequilas. But they've just crossed 350 million in AR. And Aaron is incredible. He was one of the leading execs at Elastic for years. Before that, he spent 12 years working with the one and only Benny off at Salesforce. Now he's obviously the co-founder of ClickHouse, which is worth over 15 billion. We need to get to a billion dollars of ARR as quickly as possible. I'd put the overunder at December 2027, and I would take the under.

We could take the company public next year if we wanted to.

Ready to go.

Aaron, dude, I've done over a thousand shows. I've never had a setting quite like this for a show. So, thank you so much for for hosting at Fulham and Football Club.

Yeah, total joy. Now, I want to start with just a little explainer on what is ClickHouse and what does ClickHouse become in a 5-year period just to set the scene there.

Yeah. Well, as one of our more recent investors, uh, I think you understand the thesis behind it, which is it's the world's most popular open source database, and it satisfies a very broad array of use cases, and it's used by nearly every AI native company, Anthropic, OpenAI, Weights and Biases. Um it's known for its lightning fast query execution and uh extreme resource efficiency in terms of storing vast volumes of data.

When we look at bluntly the fastest growing AI companies, I think the single biggest question that I have right now is where are we in the cycle? You know, I'm really good friends with very smart people and they go, Harry, I've seen this before. The levels of debt that we're seeing is insane. The the prices and the valuations are so exuberant. And then I also look at adoption and revenue scaling. And I have these two paradoxical data points.

We're just getting started. You know, one of the few benefits of age is experience. And so I've been through a few of these before in terms of the internet and mobile and social.

How does it actually compare as a builder? Cuz we hear a lot of pontifications from venture investors. How does it compare for you?

Those cycles in my experience were much more gradual. This seems to be accelerating at an unprecedented pace in terms of how quickly these agentic experiences are maturing and how quickly these companies are growing. I mean, we haven't seen revenue growth like this in our lifetime. And so, and the demands for on the systems of these agentic applications is unlike anything we've ever seen.

Totally agree with you there. In terms of the revenue scaling, a lot of people always look to pick holes. One of the holes they often pick in the revenue scaling is the gross margin profile. Do we just see a new world of lower gross margins? We look at you companies like Fireworks. Lim was on the show and she was like, "Yeah, we're 30 35%. We hope to be more over time." Do we just have a lower gross margin world or do we actually scale into traditional SAS margins over time?

You know, a lot of these companies just seem to have unlimited access to capital right now. So they and they're growing so quickly that I think they can operate with gross margins that most public company investors would not be satisfied with. I think as as long as they can demonstrate a path to margin expansion over the course of the next few years while still growing at these unprecedented levels with very healthy balance sheets, I worry less about gross margins like we did 5 years ago in traditional enterprise software.

What should I worry about then as an investor as I think about navigating this new world? Again, you have the best customer base that you could almost ask for. I was talking about, you know, some of the fastest growing companies on our wall the other day and you're like, well, they're both customers and it was just universal. The best companies were using Click House. What should I be concerned about worry about when I'm investing today looking at these names?

If you were to come down to one, if you were to say this, what's the single biggest risk?

Yeah.

Would be durability of revenue because the switching costs that you and I talked about are very high for infrastructure software. the switching costs can be very low for agentic applications. Um, and we're seeing that with these model providers that are leaprogging one another what seems like every other week. And I would call into question the durability of some of the revenue for some of these AI applications. When I look at like an anthropic IPO at 2 trillion and you look at claw code being the kind of dominant Trojan horse behind that would that not fall into the low switching cost.

I would put it in that category. Now it's that's not showing up in our use of cloud code because our anthropic spend is up 100 times from what it was at the beginning of the year.

Can how much do you spend on anthropic?

A significant amount. You know we I we weren't doing enough at the turn of the calendar year. So I sent an email to the company and the subject was the AI awakening and I said I think we're moving too slowly and I'm not seeing the adoption of these uh coding applications for example that I would expect to see for a leading database provider like click house

and the company rallied uh to the call and we've seen just this explosive growth in terms of our use of these of these applications um and we're now looking at adopting more open weights models whereas just the traditional frontier labs, but I think anthropic specifically and open have the benefit of being both the model provider and the harness provider that the open weights models right now are behind in.

Do you think that is the right approach though? Do you not think it's better to be independent because then you can actually do optimal model routing for different tasks versus being tied into one model provider because they are your harness also.

Yeah. I mean for example some of these open weights models we'll use for code review but we won't necessarily use to ship production code

because we have concerns about the output inference.

Totally get it. You said there about I love this the AI awakening. The challenge then becomes and we had the president of Uber on the show who was much more skeptical of the ROI that it generated internally. Um, how do do you think about token budgeting cost when suddenly you're incentivizing this, hey, run free and then the bill might come at the end of the quarter?

Well, the primary measure that we care about, as you know, is revenue growth. And if we see the sustained revenue growth that we've experienced over the last 3 years and we're a very efficient company as you know um some would argue we're too efficient then I worry less about the expense that we're incurring on coding agents for example because we're covering a very broad surface area and our road map is accelerating at a pace that we've never seen before and as long as we can continue to ship features that satisfy this very broad set of use cases then I can always rein in token consumption and the cost of tokens as we know is going down not up and so they're becoming more efficient not less efficient but our revenue is growing faster than it ever has so I'll take that trade any day of the week

you said that you're too efficient in some people's eyes where should you have spent where you didn't spend and how do you reflect on that

so we've got about a 100 quota caring salespeople for example and I think you know our revenue scale is significantly more than 10