Chris Degnan is the Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake. He reflects on joining Snowflake as employee #13 and sales employee #1.
Insight
Founders should eliminate Customer Success and hire technical sales engineers
“Yes. Get rid of them. Build a professional service organization. Hire more SEs who can do it. Customer success. Look, people think that's blasphemy. I get it. I don't believe in it. I inherited our customer success when Frank came in and he gave it to me. I go…”
Opinion
Former Snowflake CRO calls Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi a dick and liar
“I, you know, I strongly dislike the CEO of Databricks, but I think Mike, cause he's a dick and he's a liar, but you know, I look, I think at the end of the day, if I, if I'm honest about it, I think the two companies as a combined entity, that would be a amazi…”
Opinion
Salesforce salespeople are terrible hires because they are just order takers
“Salesforce. Terrible. Terrible. Because they have no idea how to sell. They, they're order takers. To your point earlier is they don't, if you go to a place that's just an order taker, they'd have no idea how to do it. They have no idea how to sell.”
Opinion
Degnan: Forward deployed engineers are glorified professional services staff
“The forward deployed engineer is a glorified professional services person. If you're a really good engineer, you do not want to be a forward deployed engineer. You want to work on the core product.”
Opinion
Degnan: Salespeople at mega-funded AI startups are passive passengers lacking skill development
“These companies all, pretty much everyone's a passenger, because there is no accountability. You're not learning anything from a sales, you know, perspective. Eventually that will come to bite you in the, in your butt, in your career.”
Opinion
Degnan: 99% of VCs fail at board guidance lacking operator experience
“99% of them are not. They're, I mean. Because they've never been operators. So like, they're just regurgitating, you know, something they heard in another board meeting that they think might be.”