Chris Degnan
Former Chief Revenue Officer, Snowflake. On 3 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorauthorinvestorLinkedIn ↗makeitsnowbook.com ↗
Chris Degnan was employee #13 and the first sales hire at Snowflake, where he served as Chief Revenue Officer for 11 years and scaled revenue from $0 to over $3.5 billion. Today, he advises founders on enterprise go-to-market strategies and co-authored the book Make It Snow.
3shows
5appearances
143statements
12resolved
11supported
1contradicted
92%fully supported
84said about them ↓ Everything Chris Degnan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Chris Degnan claims startup CROs earn more than public company CROs
“It's better to be a CRO of a startup than it is a CRO of a publicly traded company. You'll get paid more.”
Degnan: Lacework Had World-Class Sales Team But Crap Product
“I mean, like the Lacework sales team was a world-class sales team, just a crap product.”
Former Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan calls Salesforce a terrible product
“Cause God, what a terrible product that is. It is awful.”
Degnan: Startups that reject traditional sales methods will get beaten by competitors
“There are companies that I've spoken to that I'm like blown away that they don't even believe in traditional sales and they're idiots. They're literally idiots. They drive me crazy because like, oh, we're different. And I'm like, no, you're not different. Some…”
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.”
Technical Customer Success reps must be implementation engineers, not renewal takers
“And in a technical product, if they're customer success, they need to be implementation people. They should not be like these like crappy salespeople that don't know how to sell and do just do renewals. I hate that function.”
Degnan: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi's noisy strategy works
“Ali at Databricks, he shouts pretty loud and he's done a good job, and I don't necessarily agree about how he goes about doing things, but It's worked for Databricks.”
Degnan: Avoids hiring sales reps from the cybersecurity sector
“So I actually have an affinity of not hiring. People out of the security space.”
Degnan: Frank Slootman is among the most ruthless executives in tech
“Look, I mean, I had the fortunate, you know experience of working for some pretty ruthless guys, in particular Frank Slootman.”
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.”
Degnan: Every Per-Seat SaaS Company Must Shift to Consumption Pricing
“Yeah, I think they're going to have to, like, every SaaS company that, that is a per seat is having the conversation right now of how do they introduce Some sort of consumption into their pricing model, because there's risk that, you know, companies have less …”
Degnan predicts current AI market bubble will eventually burst
“I think, like we said earlier, there is a bubble to this thing. But I also think it's, it is, like, it is life changing. Mean AI is changing the way that you can interact with technology. So I do think it's important that you build for speed and you go fast. B…”
Degnan: AI will not make salespeople or SDRs obsolete
“You know, I'm thinking about, like, all these questions around, you know, people are saying the sales person will be dead, or SDRs will be dead. I just, I don't buy it”
Sales leaders must prioritize recruiting and development before driving revenue
“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…”
Degnan predicts Snowflake's enterprise software IPO record will be broken in 2026
“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.”
Degnan: LLM companies are just taking orders until they build sales organizations
“CRM is Salesforce is water to the sales team. That's not selling. You don't know how to sell. You know how to do a deal. It's order taking. And so that's what the LLMs are doing right now. They're order taking. At some point, if you build a world-class organiz…”
Enterprise sales reps must be pessimistic because enterprise buyers frequently lie
“Why do I want pessimistic? Because I don't want someone with happy ears. If you're happy ears and you're nice and everyone's nice and you like everyone, well, guess what? There are gonna be a bunch of deals that you're not gonna get because people are gonna li…”
Several Snowflake executives under CEO Bob Muglia were empire builders prioritizing titles
“Towards the end of Bob's tenure, there were a couple execs that were empire builders. They just, they cared more about what the size of their organization, the type of their title, that kind of stuff, than actually doing their job.”
The other half of the tape: Chris Degnan's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 78 times in 14 episodes across the shows. 6 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 51Chad Peets 24Mark Roberge 2Kyle Parrish 1
Statements about Chris Degnan, by other people (6)
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'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…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 78
2026 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20Sales: Why the Best Sales People are F**** in the Head | Why Remote Work is BS | Why Europe is a Nightmare for Recruiting Sales Teams | How to Build a Sales Machine | What Everyone Gets Wrong Today in Sales with Chad Peets
- ElevenLabs: Building an AI Sales Machine & Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 20 mentions in 3 episodes 7 per episode
- 20Sales: Why You Need a CRO Pre-Product | Why Remote Sales Teams Do Not Work | How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine with Chad Peets
- Carlos Delatorre, CRO @Harness: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation | E1251 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Sales: From $2M ARR to $40M ARR: The Playbook | How to Use AI To Supercharge Your Sales Team | Why Pipeline Reviews are BS | The Sales Call Script that Closes 99% of Prospects and How to Hire the Best Sales Reps with Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 38 mentions in 7 episodes 5 per episode
- Chad Peets: Why Most Sales Reps Underperform & Remote Reps Ignore Development | E1193 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dan Fougere, CRO @Datadog: Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading | E1229 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Larry Shurtz: How to Hire, Train & Retain the Best Vertical Teams | E1151 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Matt Plank, Rippling's CRO: How to Build an Enterprise Sales Machine | E1241 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mark Roberge: The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise -Stage 2 Capital|E1176 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dave Kellogg: How to Forecast in 2024 & Why CaC Payback is Flawed and CAC Ratio is Better | E1110 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Schneider: Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs" & VC Value Add - Is it Real? | E1200 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 13 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Chris's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Former Chief Revenue Officer, Snowflake | 3 | 111 | 91% 10/11 | full record on 20VC → |
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Former Chief Revenue Officer, Snowflake | 1 | 29 | — | full record on In Depth → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Former Chief Revenue Officer, Snowflake | 1 | 3 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |