The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 127 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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…”
Databricks has migrated eight of Snowflake's top 10 customers
“We've done 250. Snowflake, the Databricks migrations, eight of their top 10.”
Peets: Databricks is not worth 2.5x Snowflake's $55B market cap
“Snowflake today is worth what? Fifty five billion. So is somebody going to make the argument to me that Databricks is worth two and a half times snowflake? You are, nobody's making that argument to me.”
Reyna: Professional services models fail in AI due to two-day copycats
“In the world where, like, Snowflake grew up like, that made sense. In the world we are in today with AI, that doesn't make any sense. Because fundamentally, like, anyone can spin up a competitor of your product in the next two days. Anyone.”
Snowflake could have killed Databricks by building a notebook and Spark connector
“I would just would have hired more salespeople and focused on new logo acquisition and pounded on product to give me a notebook and a spark connector, and we would have kicked the shit out of Databricks and they would be dead.”
Databricks is growing at three times the rate of Snowflake
“And if you look at it too, right, we're three times their growth rate.”
Ron Gabrisco claims Snowflake is five-plus years behind Databricks
“Five plus years, in my opinion. You know, we bet on the future early days. We bet on AI. We bet on the lake house. We bet on open source. They're just dipping their toe into that.”
Ramaswamy: Databricks Buys Revenue and Has Double Snowflake's Sales Headcount
“It's very clear that they're buying a bunch of business. That they don't have to worry about things like you know free cash flow. They have doubled the number of sales people that we have.”
Legacy Oracle reps do not do real new-logo pipeline generation
“A reps at Oracle right now. He's selling software, right? He's selling software. That's what he's going to say, and I'm going to say, okay, are you doing pipeline generation? Yeah. I'm selling our new X product into all these Oracle accounts that have never br…”
Gerstner: Altimeter invested over 30% of its debut fund into Snowflake
“Our first fund VC won hell. I couldn't even raise it. I was 20 or 25% of the fund. And I put, we put over 30% of that fund in Snowflake at a point in time that the world thought we were crazy.”
O'Driscoll: Databricks fetches a higher private multiple than public Snowflake
“Databricks can get capital at a higher revenue multiple because they're higher growth rate than Snowflake can and on hassle-free terms.”
Chris Degnan: Slowing sales hiring at Snowflake for IPO was a mistake
“We, and I mean, we said it earlier and I said on your last podcast, we should have kept hiring. We slowed down. Because we optimized to be public. And that was a mistake, my opinion. And by the way, I, I'm, I w my hand was on that wheel.”
Lemkin: Three of today's top six B2B stocks will retain 2026 leadership
“My Pekumumusukus, Pekumumusukus, Palantir, Cloudflare, Mongo, Shopify, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, I'll bet you 10 grand, three of them are in the top six of this cohort at the end of next year.”
Snowflake Grew Its Sales Organization Faster Than Any Company in History
“Chris and I took a sales organization and grew it faster than any sales organization has ever grown in history. It's snowflake. There might have been others since that have grown faster, but at the time, nobody's done that, right?”
Chris Degnan Is the Only CRO to Scale From $0 to $3B
“Chris is the only guy that's ever gone from zero to three billion.”
Snowflake neglected new customer acquisition for two years while optimizing for IPO
“And so we took our eye off the ball for, I want to say, like two years on new logo acquisition, and that hurt us.”
Snowflake eliminated its dedicated Customer Success department entirely
“And so I got rid of customer success. Now, customer success is a responsibility of the entire company.”
Databricks has double Snowflake's headcount but generates less revenue
“Look at Databricks. Their sales team is, they're less revenue than Snowflake. Their sales team is twice the size of Snowflake. Their engineering team is twice the size of the engineering team.”
Former Snowflake CRO admits making more money made him a worse leader
“Worse. Because I don't want to do the hard things. When I say the hard things for a CRO is when you're five hundred million dollars, billion dollars in revenue, getting on a plane and traveling around the world, going on two week trips away from your family.”
Databricks outbid Snowflake for startup acquisitions by two to three times
“They buy companies that Snowflake Has had term sheets on for three times or two times the amount of money that Snowflake is offering to buy the companies for, because there's no consequence.”
Degnan: Snowflake and Databricks are complementary, not direct competitors
“They're a pretty dominant, in terms of the data estate, Snowflake and Databricks own the data estate together. And they're complementary for the most part, not, not really competitive.”
Snowflake Fired Second-Line Managers Who Couldn't Pitch the Product
“So we have fired managers last year. I went through a certification of second line managers and we fired people because they couldn't sell the product.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake is Ahead of Databricks in Generative AI
“They were first to market. That was their sweet spot, and they've been good at it for a for a while. We were very much in in catch up mode. But AI is a much younger field. Didn't really exist, let's call it pre-ChatGPT. There, I feel incredibly confident that …”
Snowflake's sales organization was the fastest growing in history
“Chris and I took a sales organization and grew it faster than any sales organization has ever grown in history. It's snowflake. There might've been others since it have grown faster, but at the time, nobody's done that.”
Chris Degnan is the only CRO to scale revenue $0 to $3B
“Chris is the only guy that's ever gone from zero to three billion.”
Startup leaders must block new VPs from hiring unvetted former colleagues
“This is the profile. I'm not deviating from it. Back to the conflict thing I said. So let's just say you hire, hire a new VP of the East, right? And he has his background or she, and he's got five people he wants to bring with him, which is a good thing becaus…”
Lemkin: Databricks is outpacing Snowflake at $2.5B revenue
“It seemed like Snowflake was going to be the next great platform, but it is Databricks. I know it's not completely fungible product, but it's growing even faster at 2.5 billion, right? It's just mortal. Databricks, I think proves Snowflake was mortal.”
Sales reps fail without eight weekly calls and deep product knowledge
“If you do not go on eight sales calls a week, if you do not become a student of what you sell, you will fail. You might be a really nice person, but if you don't do those two things, you're going to fail.”
Early startup product marketing literature is a complete waste of time
“Founders love product marketers. They understand the product and they're going to build this marketing literature and stuff like that. That's a waste of time. The marketing team needs to generate pipeline.”
Kleinerman: Data-rich incumbents will win the majority of AI value
“I would bias towards incumbents that have the data. So I would say, think of all the data that a company like Google has. Or that's public data, or not semi-public, but a lot of user data, or think all the private enterprise data that a company like Snowflake …”
Gerstner: Snowflake will eventually surpass its peak market valuation
“The truth of the matter is, I think Snowflake will be worth a lot more in the future than it is today, and even more in the future than it was then.”
Bill Gurley: Power-law returns make late-stage venture investors valuation-agnostic
“It's easy to become valuation agnostic to a certain extent, because you've seen, if you hit a winner, if you hit a snowflake, if you hit a Uber or whatever, it ends up being a hundred X more than where you are today, so you become indifferent.”
Cloud Valuations Over 20x Revenue and Snowflake at 80x Are Unsustainable
“The average multiple is trading north of twenty-x revenue, and you look at a snowflake that's trading at 80 times revenue. That's not sustainable.”
Gurley: Markets favoring growth over profits create massive company wrecks
“When the world is rewarding, aggressive growth, don't care about profitability, you're going to have a mix of end results. You're going to have some of the snowflakes in Amazons, and you're going to end up with a lot of wrecks on the, you know, massive wrecks.”
Curative Used AI Agents To Migrate Dashboard Stack From Looker To Snowflake
“We moved away from Looker, right? Google's Looker product for visualizations. It's super expensive, and we moved to do it in Snowflake. And it's been a lot cheaper. It's worked really well. Part of that migration is moving all of our dashboards and all of the …”
Degnan: Sutter Hill's Mike Speiser is the best board member ever seen
“I think that, I think the best board member that I've ever seen is, is Mike Speiser. I went and in building Snowflake, that guy was so, he was a founder of the company and then he was so involved in the product and he did any, when he didn't know about sales, …”
Chad Peets: Snowflake sales rep productivity rose continuously despite rapid hiring
“Snowflake was the first thing, first company we had ever seen where we couldn't hire fast enough to bring the productivity number down. No matter how fast we hired, it kept going up”
Degnan: Snowflake invoked windfall clauses five times to limit commissions
“We had that, I mean, at Snowflake, I had that windfall clause. I probably invoked it five times.”
Degnan: Snowflake only paid salespeople after securing annual booked contracts
“At Snowflake, I didn't pay the sellers until they got a book contract, an annual contract.”
Degnan: Basing European SDR team in Amsterdam was a mistake at Snowflake
“One of the missed, I made plenty of mistakes in Europe. One of the mistakes was putting the inside sales team and SDRs in Amsterdam.”
Lemkin: Refuses to invest in Snowflake or MongoDB because they lack founders
“The only reason I ding Snowflake is, and this is no, I couldn't do better is it's not founder led. And it's just, that's my thesis today. Like I can't pick Mongo or I killed Mongo or Snowflake just on not being founder led.”
Swisher: Coatue was the only private investor in both Snowflake and Databricks
“I think we were the only private investor that was Invested in Snowflake and Databricks when they were both private.”
Chad Peet was brought into Snowflake to fix go-to-market inefficiencies
“He and Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO of Soflake, asked me to come in, in, 18 months ago to help find inefficiencies within the go-to-market function and maybe to drive a higher level of performance than we were getting.”
Lemkin: Databricks reached $5B revenue and is accelerating at 55% growth
“But Snowflake's AI revenue is pretty small. It's a Gentix strategy is just starting, and Databricks rode this to, now they're both at five billion, and Databricks is growing and accelerating at 55% growth.”
Snowflake Scaled Without Having a Dedicated Customer Success Department
“They don't have a customer success organization at Snowflake, or at least they didn't. Maybe they've created one now, but they didn't. The feeling was everybody's in customer success.”
Cahn: Low early gross margins do not prevent long-term software success
“Plenty of companies that get critiqued for having low gross margins end up being super healthy businesses in the long run. You know, Snowflake was one of the big indicts on Snowflake in the early days was that it had a low gross margin. Obviously it's a very g…”