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 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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”
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.”
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.”
Degnan: Snowflake grows 30% year-over-year at scale
“Snowflake's still growing at 30% year over year at billions of dollars in revenue.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Kleinerman: Enterprise platforms are bringing LLMs to data, not vice versa
“What you're seeing many of us, Snowflake for sure on the list, is evolve their platforms where it's easy to bring LLMs to the data as opposed to send Large data volumes to where the LLMs are.”
Henry Schuck: ZoomInfo was third highest-valued software company on relative basis
“Going into that earnings report on a relative basis, we were the third most valuable software company in the world. From evaluation purposes, snowflake, cloud flare, us”
Snowflake Initially Could Only Sell Its Database to Ad-Tech Companies
“In the very early days of Snowflake, we could only sell into ad tech accounts. That's it. They were just selling to ad tech.”
Degnan: Snowflake initially sold exclusively to ad tech and gaming companies
“And that's what we did is we were only selling to ad tech companies and online gaming companies in the beginning. And that's where we failed and broke the product and learned a lot. And then we were ready for prime time.”
Chris Degnan: Snowflake operated with only one SKU, a credit
“Snowflake had one skew, a credit, and so we had to measure use cases, and use case wins that have no purchase order.”
Stebbings: Databricks is valued at $100B, surpassing Snowflake's market cap
“Listen, I want to start with Databricks now at a hundred billion dollars worth more than Snowflake.”
Lemkin: Snowflake recorded a $1B quarter growing at 26%
“Snowflake had a billion dollar quarter, growing 26%.”
Snowflake initially sold exclusively to ad tech accounts
“In the very early days of Snowflake, we could only sell into ad tech accounts. That's it. They were just selling to ad tech.”
Snowflake had no website or CEO when Chris Degnan joined
“I was actually hired at the time. They didn't have a website. They didn't actually have a CEO at the time.”