Dave Conte

Chief Financial Officer Databricks

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dave Conte is Chief Financial Officer of Databricks, the data and AI platform company built around the lakehouse architecture. He joined in October 2019, reporting to co-founder and chief executive Ali Ghodsi, at a point when the company was running at roughly $200 million in revenue and valued at $6.2 billion — early enough to build the finance organisation that a company of Databricks’ eventual scale would need. He was hired for a specific and rare piece of experience: he had already done the job once, taking Splunk from about $100 million in revenue through an initial public offering to more than $2 billion over eight years as its CFO, and before that running finance at Opsware through its sale to Hewlett-Packard.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Chief Financial Officer of Databricks on October 22, 2019, with responsibility for all financial and operational functions, reporting to CEO Ali Ghodsi.
• Joined when Databricks was growing annual recurring revenue 2.5 times year on year, had reached a $200 million run rate in under four years, and carried a $6.2 billion valuation.
• Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Splunk from July 2011 to May 2019 — eight years covering the company’s IPO and roughly twentyfold revenue growth, from about $100 million to more than $2 billion.
• Chief Financial Officer of Opsware, Inc. from July 2006 until September 2007, through the IT automation company’s $1.65 billion acquisition by Hewlett-Packard.
• Chief Financial Officer of IronKey, Inc., the encrypted storage and security company, from June 2009 to July 2011.
• Director of Anaplan from February 2016, serving as chair of its audit committee and on its nominating and corporate governance committee.
• Began his career at Ernst & Young, and has some thirty years in finance and administration across multinational public and private technology companies.

Professional Journey

Conte trained as an accountant, beginning his career at Ernst & Young before moving into operating finance roles in technology. His first chief financial officer role of note was at Opsware, the data-centre automation company founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz out of the remains of Loudcloud. He took the CFO seat in July 2006 and held it until September 2007, when Hewlett-Packard acquired the company for $1.65 billion — an exit that established his reputation for running finance through a sale process.

He then spent two years as CFO of IronKey, the encrypted storage and security company, from June 2009 to July 2011, before taking the role that would define his career. Splunk hired him as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in July 2011, months before its IPO. Over the following eight years he built the finance function of a company that grew from roughly $100 million in annual revenue to over $2 billion, through the transition from perpetual licensing to subscription and cloud — one of the harder financial transitions in enterprise software, because it destroys reported revenue in the short term while improving the business. He left Splunk in May 2019.

Five months later, Databricks announced his appointment as Chief Financial Officer. The fit was explicit: Databricks was on the same trajectory Splunk had been on when he joined it, and Ali Ghodsi’s public comment at the time pointed to the breadth of his experience and his record supporting growth. Databricks has since grown into one of the largest private companies in software, and Conte has remained in the role through the whole of that expansion — a long tenure by the standards of pre-IPO CFOs.

Alongside the executive roles he has served as an outside director of Anaplan since February 2016, chairing the audit committee, a position he held through Anaplan’s own life as a public company.

Education

University of California, Santa Barbara

Bachelor of Arts, Business Economics.