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
Degnan: Databricks grows faster than Snowflake despite lower total revenue
“They're, they are growing faster. They are behind Snowflake, but they are growing faster than Snowflake.”
Snowflake CMO Denise Pearson eliminated MQLs to focus on qualified meetings
“Denise came in and she said, we're not going to talk about MQLs or SQLs or anything like that. We're just going to talk about qualified meetings.”
Chris Degnan: Snowflake struggled with employee entitlement around office returns
“Coming back from COVID, it was hard to get people to back, back into the offices at Snowflake. And they're like entitled about it.”
Chris Degnan: Former Snowflake Employees Falsely Attribute Company Success to Themselves
“There are people that worked at Snowflake that on the inverse thought it was The company was successful because of them, which was not, never the case. Never.”
Degnan: Snowflake grows 30% year-over-year at scale
“Snowflake's still growing at 30% year over year at billions of dollars in revenue.”
Degnan: Enterprise sales reps need eight face-to-face meetings weekly to avoid failure
“If you don't generate your own pipeline, if you don't go on eight face-to-face meetings a week, You're probably gonna fail.”
A single feature flip made Snowflake 10x cheaper than competitor Qubole
“We turn it on, and we went from being like, five X more expensive to 10 X less expensive by just flipping that switch.”
Benioff: Snowflake, Databricks, and Palantir Foundry each generate $3B-$4B revenue
“When you look at other data clouds, Snowflake, Databricks, Palantir Foundry, they're all in the three to four billion dollar revenue.”
Ramaswamy: Too Many Customers View Snowflake Strictly as a Data Warehouse
“Too many of our own customers who love Snowflake think of us as like, ah, very good warehouse.”
Srinivas: OpenAI generates $2 billion in annual recurring revenue
“OpenAI is building a business for what it's worth. Like, I think they have, like, whatever, two billion in revenue annually, which is, like, higher than Snowflake or at least, like, as good as Snowflake. You know, so they're not as capital efficient as Snowfla…”
Snowflake had zero customers when Chris Degnan joined, despite Netflix rumors
“There was some insinuation that Netflix was a customer. They were not. There was zero customers when I showed up.”
Snowflake abandoned MQL and SQL metrics to focus solely on qualified meetings
“When we hired our CMO almost seven years ago, Denise, I was arguing with the previous marketing team over what a, you know, an MQL was when an SQL was and all this other stuff. And it was driving me crazy. And she said, great news. We're never going to talk ab…”
Mike Speiser barred Snowflake's first sales hire from selling for two years
“Mike Speiser was like, for two years, you're not selling a thing. Like, I don't want you to sell anything. I just want you to get customer feedback.”
Fire sales reps who lack deep product knowledge after six months
“If you go out on a sales call, and the person doesn't know what the hell they're talking about, and they've been on the job for six months, yeah, you're going to be in a world of hurt, and you should just cut bait.”
Amazon has the best sales strategy for co-existing with competitors
“Amazon, they invented the cloud. They invented how to work with companies like us. We were hard for them because we competed with a product of theirs or multiple products of theirs, but yet they make us successful. So it's a hard thing to do, but for them to b…”
Kleinerman: Fine-tuned smaller models outperform large generic models on specialized tasks
“And now there's plenty of examples that have been run where a smaller model fine tune where a specific purpose or a specific data set produces results better than a generic model.”
Kleinerman: Consistent product vision requires top-down leadership over consensus
“In some instances where you want a product to come out with a consistent view, as if it came from a single unified set of principles and individuals, sometimes you have to go and push for something like, Hey, this is what we're doing.”
Kleinerman: AI job displacement backlash will become a major issue by 2025
“So at this point, I would say the incentive should be working maybe, I don't know, A year, a couple of years from now, what you're saying becomes true.”
Kleinerman: AI data monetization will shift toward paid licensing terms
“I don't know if they're going to be able to keep all the existing revenue, but for sure they should be able to capture some amount of revenue. So I don't know exactly what would be the replacement ratios. But clearly their data is valuable. Right now it's not …”
Tunguz: Snowflake struggled to raise external capital at Series C
“The company was burning a ton of capital and couldn't raise money from the outside. And it was the insiders that stepped up and led that round because they believed in the business.”
Gerstner: Most of Altimeter's $6B LP distribution in 2021 came from Snowflake
“Most of that distribution, right, not all, but most of that distribution was Snowflake.”
Battery missed Snowflake by over-indexing on early customer complaints
“If we had looked at the founding team and the infrastructure they built, I think we would have looked past the individual customer feedback, a data point here, a data point there, that said, hey, this is still not quite ready for prime time, and instead focuse…”
Slootman: Doubt during hiring should serve as a tiebreaker to reject
“When you're, I mean, I often have this in hiring decisions, people have doubts. Well, you have your answer. Don't hire the person that you have doubts about. Don't. Ok? And it's a tiebreaker.”
Katz: Following Datadog's PLG playbook was easier than Snowflake's enterprise sales
“Datadog had this PLG self-service developer-led motion, so you could get started, deploy an agent, instrument your application, never talk to anybody in sales. Snowflake went heavy after the enterprise through, you know, very expensive sales and marketing. I j…”
Arora: Snowflake, Glean, and Databricks are reshaping analytics with LLM data lakes
“I think the analytic world is getting reshaped already where you can see people like Snowflake or Glean or Databricks. All these people boast enterprise data lakes where you can bring the data and run LLMs against it and get you much more synthesized analytics…”
Degnan: Snowflake Verticalized Its Sales Team Too Late
“I think, you know, Snowflake did it you know, probably a little bit too late but because it's a consumption model, you have to actually understand the use cases, and then go win those use cases, and get those use cases live, and all this other stuff.”
Chad Peets: Snowflake expanded sales reps from 100 to 300 in one year
“I think one year we went from 100 to 300.”
Lindquist: Databricks breached Snowflake accounts by taking small initial footholds
“You see, I saw this with Snowflake and Databricks, right? Snowflake would own everything, and then Databricks would get one small foothold somewhere, and suddenly now they're fighting over the same workloads, and someone's going to win that.”
Lindquist: Snowflake and Databricks comp reps on net revenue to defend workflows
“You look at like a Snowflake or a Databricks, that's their model, and it's because they're competing over workflows in the account.”
Swisher: Investors passed on Snowflake and Databricks early rounds over low margins
“Snowflake and Databricks. Very low margin early. A lot of people passed on those early rounds because they're, ah, in SaaS, you have to have 80% gross margin.”
Chad Peet: Snowflake maintained sales productivity despite rapid scaling
“As you scale, you would expect productivity to come down. The only place I did not see that was Snowflake. We could not hire fast enough to bring the productivity down.”
Lemkin: Going public enables Databricks to execute tens of billions in M&A
“Maybe at some point, even if you're Revolut, if you really want to do deals for real, it's, there are limits to private stock in cash, and if Databricks goes public, and it's worth two to three times Snowflake, it can buy, it may be able to buy the parts of it…”
O'Driscoll: Databricks and Snowflake Will Fight Fiercely for 10 Years
“They're going to struggle and fight against each other for the next 10 years, just like SAP and Oracle fought against each other for the last 20.”
McMahon joined Snowflake board two years prior to product launch
“Snowflake, I was there two years before they had a product. So I was there very early.”
Early Snowflake Accounts Expanded From $15K to $150K in Six Months
“In the early days, it was crazy. Like people would buy A 15 K land deal, and they'd expand to 150 in six months, right? So when you have product like that, that just expands on its own, you can get away with less customer success. I've not seen that since Snow…”
Snowflake paused sales hiring for six months to replace MySQL with FoundationDB
“And we had MySQL as the metadata store, and it was just puking on itself. And so they had to take that and bring in a new thing called FoundationDB to do that. And doing that was a six-month project.”
Degnan: Skip-Level Frontline Meetings Prevent Bad Middle Management Behavior
“Now, in reality, what I should have done is I should have spent more energy going down to the front lines asking the hard questions on a regular basis. And if I had done that, I would have caught some of these bad behaviors.”
Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan generated zero revenue in his first two years
“The zero to three. Because for the first two years, I didn't get any revenue, and as a salesperson, who you are, is like, you're supposed to bring revenue to the company”
Snowflake achieved a 177% net revenue retention rate at IPO
“Snowflake had this ridiculous net retention rate of 177% when we were going public. Yeah, that was our net retention rate.”
Byron Deeter: Snowflake had negative gross margins late in its life cycle
“And so you can look at a business like a snowflake that had negative gross margins very late in their life cycle.”
Green: I would buy Snowflake and Datadog on a 30% drawdown
“If we could get a 30% drawdown, like I would buy Snowflake or buy, ah, Datadog and put it in, you know, put it in a drawer and let those compound for 10 plus years.”
Green: Lead Edge passed on Snowflake at $500M valuation
“Snowflake. Like, massive. I mean, when we looked at Snowflake, it had, like, horrible gross margins. Like, but again, it was, we looked at it at five hundred million dollars, and, like, we were completely wrong.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake Will Rely on Product Innovation Over Major M&A
“An inorganic kind of unrelated acquisition strategy is not something that I'm excited about. I think it'll be a disruption. Snowflake is a Product-led innovation company. We are not a PE shop. Not that there's anything wrong with being a PE shop. It's just a d…”
Ramaswamy: AI Will Disrupt Traditional BI Into Direct-to-Consumer Data Apps
“Starting with AI. 100%. I think it's going to be a I think it's going to be a big deal. I think it offers the opportunity for disrupting BI as we know it today, more of a direct to consumer.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake's $150M Acquisition of Neeva Has Paid for Itself
“Snowflake spent some hundred and fifty million dollars for Neva. I think it's more than paid for itself.”
Early Snowflake accounts expanded from $15K to $150K in six months
“Like, people would buy A 15 K land deal, and they'd expand to 150 in six months, right? So when you have product like that, that just expands on its own, you can get away with less customer success. I've not seen that since Snowflake.”
Early Snowflake had no customer success organization
“They don't have a customer success organization at Snowflake, or at least they didn't. Maybe they've created one out, but they didn't. The feeling was everybody's in customer success.”
Inconsistent interview messaging destroys startup credibility with candidate reps
“If you get managers saying different things and selling it differently as the reps are going through the process, what happens? You lose credibility. Hey, this manager said this. What the fuck? Now I just don't believe anything you guys are saying. So you gott…”