Databricks wanted to raise $1B, investors wanted $15B. It settled on $5B at a $190B valuation.

There’s a funny kind of game that the latest of late-stage startups must play when raising money. They often have to sell more shares than they want or risk offending some of their existing VCs.

This scenario recently played out with AI big-data company Databricks and its latest $5 billion raise announced Thursday, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi (pictured above) told TechCrunch.

“We wanted to raise $1 billion, but then The Information printed this article saying that Databricks is doing a big fundraise. They did that in the middle of our conference. We were heads down with our conference, and we were not actually at all focused on fundraising,” Ghodsi recalled, referring to a conference that took place in June.

“As soon as that article went out, there was a long line of investors that started calling. My phone blew up. It was like the worst timing for us because we were busy with our conference,” he said.

It was an enviable problem that turned the news report into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“The interest level was just insane. Just from this select group of investors that we looked at, there was $15 billion of interest,” he said.

When there’s that much desire to get into a deal, telling some long-term backers no is a recipe for hard feelings. Databricks decided to issue more stock, and in July, sent out a press release announcing it had closed its new round at a $188 billion valuation. (The company didn’t disclose at the time how much it had raised.)