Snowflake

“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…”

“Our largest customers move petabytes of information daily, whereas like a data warehouse, as an example, like that might be, ah, a petabyte data warehouse is a huge data warehouse. Like that's for like a Snowflake or a Databricks, like that's a big data wareho…”

“There are gigantic tech partners like Snowflake and Databricks and Google and Amazon. They don't care about you when you're two people or 10 people or whatever.”

“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 …”

“The Snowflake pre-IPO round over a four-year period ended up you know, it was like, five hundred million turned into, like, two and a half billion.”

“It turned out that, you know, it's easier to go from that bod thing that's really good at the scale and ingesting and super low cost and create versions in it that have the speed and features of the, you know, super easy to use, like smaller data for business …”

“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…”

“Just looking back in the last, you know, six months, we've been able to lower our cost per opportunity with 30%.”

“Nobody, nobody gets any Slack messages from me anymore, right? It's quiet because I can get, you know, I can get all the answers to my questions now that I couldn't get before.”

“At Snowflake marketing owns the new business pipeline, right? So that's what I would be, that's what I'm accountable for”

“We have about 700 people in marketing. We also have our whole Customer training, partner enablement, sales enablement team and marketing as well.”

“I think we are, have, you know, 40, 50% growth we need to deliver on this year, but it's not like we, we're not getting more resources. You know, to do that.”

“Now you can create complete, you know, custom presentation depending on exactly on that customers, what they care about. That's pretty, pretty huge time-said.”

“We also have a centralized sort of AI engineering team, which is also very important to understand, okay, what are, again, what are these agencies? Doing that we are, we have developed, right? I mean are we compliant? Is our data safe? Are these agents having …”

“In terms of events, we're just seeing the demand for events, all those in-person experiences, it's going off the roof right now.”

“I think the GTM engineer function has clearly is that's the one we're hiring for business analysts, not so much anymore.”

“So there are certain kind of functions like let's say our content marketing team, they're able to do of course so significantly more than they did on their own. Exactly. So it won't be a function that we will sort of invest more in in terms of, you know, headc…”

“I think we're seeing now the world moving very much towards, we're looking for specific business outcomes. And that's of course where the, this FD function comes in, right? They go in on like, Hey, we're going to help you accomplish this specific outcome versu…”

“Definitely. Because also when you talk to customers, right? They all, many of them now have like, they have a vision, right? They know where they need to go. And they also understand that the technology is here for it. But they don't really have the confidence…”

“This is not a time, right, where that traditional kind of, ah, weekly training sessions, right, is working anymore. And also, also when you deliver training today, right, you might have 80% sitting there saying, I already know all this, and 20%, wow, this is w…”

“If we look, let's say our leaderboard, we actually do have a leaderboard as well in terms of, it is actually sort of a usage-based leaderboard... But again, the leaders on the board are people from our brand team. I didn't expect them to be there, but the top …”

“Also we have, we call our quarterly what matters. Essentially it's like our OKRs on the team and everyone across the team, they need to have a what matter for AI... So we all have sort of an AI skill we need to learn on our quarterly, what matters. And also so…”

“I think that's also what we learned, that we have as a full mandate, right, that we cannot hire anyone before we have met this person.”

“The AI cost for any, again, all, all, all that is actually at an, at the company level at the moment. It will probably change, you know, next year, but the, From a company perspective and from the leadership and our CEO, right, he doesn't want someone's budget…”

“We have our own kind of GTM agent called Raven, that's really what our entire sales organization is using, as well as the market organization, and that is very, again, that one is then also centrally managed, all the kind of skills within Raven is certified”

“So we also have, again, a central AI data organization of Snowflake, and they have people on that team that are dedicated to sales and marketing. I think that might be around 20 people or so that are dedicated to sales and marketing. I mean, we have a quite la…”

“For us right now, we're basically just encouraging everyone at every level of the company to kind of, to build, you know, agents, to build, you know, apps, you know, on their own. It's going to come to a point where we're going to have to kind of rein this in …”

“And actually just a few months ago, we moved our whole sales enablement, partner enablement, customer training over to marketing.”

“So if I look at the sales leadership team, right, I'll make sure we have the VPs under CRO. I have a counterpart, right, on the marketing side that is fully aligned with that individual. So it's so important to have those kind of relationships built at every k…”

“Databricks can get capital at a higher revenue multiple because they're higher growth rate than Snowflake can and on hassle-free terms.”

“Like, 30% of our customers use Snowflake and Databricks both.”

“We had that, I mean, at Snowflake, I had that windfall clause. I probably invoked it five times.”

“At Snowflake, I didn't pay the sellers until they got a book contract, an annual contract.”

“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”

“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.”

“I think one year we went from 100 to 300.”

“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, …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And what I just mean by that is in Anthropik, they added eleven billion dollars of AR. And what is astonishing to me about this is that The SaaS and cloud revolution it created, we'll call it between five and 10 trillion dollars of value. And I would say argua…”

“Back in the day you would essentially, you know, say, okay, how do I build a platform which is very easy to use, right? Where somebody can go, come to your website and start using it and even start consuming it, which is, you know, how Snowflake did it, which …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Except Nvidia. Which is the most unbelievably accretive, well-run company, highest margins, you know, making two hundred billion dollars. And they're treating it like they're treating ServiceNow and Snowflake.”

“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.”

“Airbnb, DoorDash, Unity, Snowflake I'm sure I'm missing a few others. Mongo, Square.”

“And so I am bullish that they will also capture some share of this value. And so I, I'm a buyer of Salesforce and I'm a buyer of Salesforce stock. I'm a buyer of Snowflake stock and I'm a buyer of ServiceNow stock.”

“As the first salesperson on the ground, your job differs greatly than when you're the chief revenue officer of a three and a half billion dollar organization. So how you do the job day one is you have to be the best salesperson on the planet. You have to know …”

“What I learned there is true for any startup is that you have to recruit great people. You have to develop those people and then ultimately drive revenue as your third thing. If you recruit those great people and they know how to sell the product, then they'll…”

“And I think if you have second line leaders in your organization who don't know how to sell the product and say, Are they hiring great salespeople? How do you know they're hiring great salespeople? How do they know what a good sales call looks like? Because if…”

“Before Snowflake, the largest team I had ever managed was probably 12 people, right? Maybe 10 or 12 people.”

“And I'm going to pick the athlete, you know, over the industry expertise every single time.”

“People in Silicon Valley Think because they've made a lot of money that they're exceptional. And that's not true. There's so much luck that's involved in, in, in what we do.”

“Like when Frank came in, we were probably going to, we were trending towards you know, five hundred million.”

“I'm sure someone will break it this year because there's companies that have much more revenue than we did, but the largest IPO software IPO ever and enterprise software IPO ever.”

“We were very much an outbound organization. So everything was like just Cold call, or spam, spam, spam. We didn't have any, we had no PLG.”

“At, I think, 200 employees and below, we started building out an inside sales model, and that thing worked like gangbusters. It worked really well.”

“When you have a fortune, 100 fortune, 500 company, those companies buy just differently. Their evaluation processes are so long... They need more resources, but the upside potential, these are like, 20, 30, fifty million dollar a year accounts eventually, and …”