The Ledger
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why aren't all 63 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
Ramaswamy: Snowflake monetizing storage was a long-term strategic mistake
“My take is that us deciding to monetize storage was a long-term strategic mistake. I think we simply should have said, we will pass through storage costs.”
Kaplan: Lakehouses will absorb adjacent tools like ETL and governance
“You know, from my historical perspective on the industry, I think lots of capability that sits outside those things will fall inside those things. Whether it's data governments, whether it's different ETL, whether it's different conversions, these things are g…”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake will gain more revenue from Iceberg than lose in storage
“I expect us, me and the team, To drive way more revenue in new things we can do with Iceberg, then we are going to lose, potentially, by some of our storage revenue going out to cloud storage”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake's early AI efforts suffered from an infrastructure-first mentality
“And so part of the difficulty that Snowflake had with machine learning and AI was they brought a similar mentality. You're going to write a design doc. It's going to take us 18 months. It's going to be great. Opposite of what you need to succeed in iterative e…”
Ramaswamy: Open formats like Apache Iceberg lack governance and access controls
“This is also where Iceberg or just a data lake strategy or a lake house strategy is not an immediate answer because formats like Iceberg do not understand governance rules, do not understand role-level access control, they don't understand users, they don't un…”
ClickHouse sees demand to migrate workloads off Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift
“In the cloud data warehouse market, to answer your question specifically around Snowflake, we do see demand for customers to migrate off of technologies like BigQuery and Redshift, and Snowflake either for Cost or performance or both.”
Antitrust locks Big Tech out of M&A, empowering Snowflake and Databricks
“But you look at like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all are under an attack trust and basically impossible for them to acquire. So there's, you don't really have the big chip stacks at the table anymore, which means if you're an acquirer like Snowflake o…”
Starting later than Snowflake and Databricks was VAST Data's biggest advantage
“And so I think our The biggest advantage versus those other companies that you mentioned is that we started late, and that allowed us to see this deep learning problem in front of our eyes versus machine learning, again, a lot smaller, a lot slower, and it als…”
Incumbents will dominate text-to-SQL, making it a bad startup problem
“The bigger companies, like Databricks or Snowflake might build these tools and offer it on their sequel editor or, like, some kind of, like, you know, assistant And that could probably solve the problem. It's not a great problem for a startup to work on.”
Turck: Enterprise data market will remain fragmented, avoiding single-platform consolidation
“So the future that we see is, you know, as much as the Databricks and the Snowflakes of the world would want to be The one platform where all things data and all things AI happen we actually from our vantage point, see much more of a particular persistent subs…”
Ghodsi: Snowflake coexists with Databricks in about 70% of accounts
“It's certainly going to coexist, and it already coexists with Databricks in probably 70% of the accounts we're in.”
Elsamadisi: Redshift, Snowflake, and BigQuery perform identically on long tables
“The speed improvement on Redshift and versus Snowflake versus BigQuery becomes interchangeable. Because what they handle is for those edge cases, we have like a bunch of, like Snowflake is really good at a bunch of small tables everywhere trying to load a memo…”
Muglia: Many early Snowflake customers converted directly off Amazon Redshift
“Virtually all of our customers have looked at Redshift. And quite a few of our customers are converted off of it, because we're very fundamentally different than they are.”
Muglia: Dynamic compute scaling is impossible with Amazon Redshift
“In fact, it's possible to change the size dynamically on the fly based on the kinds of queries you're running. And none of that is possible with a traditional data warehouse running on premises or even a traditional data warehouse like Redshift running within,…”
Ramaswamy originally agreed to stay at Snowflake for six months
“My original agreement with Frank, the Snowflake CEO, was that I would stay with Snowflake for six months.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake has thousands of production AI use cases deployed
“The net of this is that we have thousands of deployed production use cases on our AI products.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake initially viewed supporting Iceberg as a defensive move
“And Snowflake initially approached this as mostly a defensive move.”
Ramaswamy: Competing directly against free Power BI is unrealistic
“Power BI is quite good. And it's essentially part of the office offering. And so I've been skeptical of saying that we can just compete in BI with a new paid product at scale when the bar is high quality, no price.”
Rogojan: Databricks and Snowflake are fighting for workflows, not contract lock-in
“It's really been a white fight for workflows versus a fight for like contracts. Cause in the past it was like, okay, you sign a ten million dollar contract for Teradata. You're kind of stuck with it, right? Like there's no choice now for the next three to five…”
Benaich: Databricks will likely become the primary enabler for open-source AI
“Probably Databricks, and Databricks and Snowflake, probably more Databricks will be like this like enabler of open source.”
Snowflake was not engineered for low-latency, high-concurrency workloads, says Katz
“Snowflake is a columnar, a data store with the separation of compute and storage like we have with our cloud service. But I don't believe that it was originally engineered to power these extremely low latency, high concurrent analytical workloads.”
Marking up storage accounts for roughly 11% of Snowflake's revenue
“It's about 11% of Snowflake's revenue is marking up storage.”
Handy: Cloud platforms care about compute consumption, not partner revenue
“My read is that people like us, people like Fivetran, while we are critical to their success as platforms, because we drive a ton of consumption. They don't actually really care about the dollars that we make as businesses. Cause they're so tiny relative to th…”
Stancil: Integration standards will be set by Snowflake, not open standards
“I don't think the way we get there is sort of like through open standards and stuff like that. I don't think anybody will actually adhere to that. I think most likely what happens is Snowflake basically says, hey, if you do things in this particular way, we ca…”
Van de Maele: Cloud hyperscalers fail to connect metadata to business context
“The hyperscalers, they're great at kind of managing within their ecosystem, right? If you're purely technical metadata within BigQuery or Snowflake or Databricks and so on. But then how do you tie it to the business? That's not something that they do.”
Turck: Snowflake and Databricks architectures are converging into direct competitors
“And the story of the last few years has been the great convergence of those two stacks. And in particular data breaks has worked on making their data lake more structured and look more like a data warehouse. And Snowflake is still in the early days of taking t…”
Muglia: Snowflake delivers better price performance than Amazon Redshift
“We were even actually found ourselves to be more price performance Than other cloud solutions like Redshift.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake targeted asset managers early due to lower regulatory hurdles
“We very deliberately went after asset managers as our early customers, why they're more progressive. They want to make more money. They're earlier adopters of technology and have less regulation to deal with, say, compared to banks, which just have, it's more …”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake has zero tolerance for 18-month projects without value
“At Snowflake itself, for example, I am very flat with my team that I do not have any tolerance for 18 month projects. If you tell me that you're going to start on a rewrite, and it's going to take you 18 months before it shows any value, you know, it's not, yo…”
Ramaswamy: Progressive CIOs demand vendor-neutral open data formats
“Increasingly what is happening is that the most progressive of the CIOs and the chief data officers What they want is independence with respect to vendors, including Snowflake. So they want their storage, their data to be stored in vendor-neutral formats, in o…”
Ramaswamy: Applications built on data create more value than sharing raw data
“There is a little bit of a hierarchy of needs when it comes to collaboration. You can share raw data, it creates some value. On the other hand, if you can share a predictive machine learning model, That uses the data to predict something, you will likely get m…”
Borgman: Databricks and Snowflake operate strictly as cloud-only data platforms
“Databricks and Snowflake are cloud only, so if you happen to have data on-prem we're pretty much your only bet, and you know, it just so happens that that turns out to be most of the Fortune 500 almost the entirety of the financial Social services sector in pa…”
Borgman: Databricks and Snowflake expand into adjacent markets to justify valuations
“You have a couple giant players in Databricks and Snowflake that are now looking for adjacent markets to continue to grow their TAM and justify their valuations and drive their revenue into the future. And, ah, and that's leading to more overlaps into boxes th…”
Rogojan: Snowflake is difficult to beat for lean, resource-constrained data teams
“Snowflake makes it really easy, and I'd say BigQuery does too, but Snowflake makes it really easy. Like, if you do not have a ton of people to manage things, I think it's hard to go against it.”
Ethereum's market cap was 7.6 times Snowflake's in Q1 2024
“The total market cap of Ethereum is 7.6 times snowflakes market cap.”
ADP uses Databricks for its data layer and Snowflake for analytics workloads
“We use Databricks as our, as that data layer, and we use Snowflake to do very specialized analytical database workloads that it's very, very good at.”
Cloud data warehouses enabled modern multi-tool data architectures
“Architectures like this really have only become possible with the rise of folks like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, and this idea that as a data practitioner, I can have infinite compute at the kind of tips of my fingers without having to go outsid…”
Snowflake S-1 filing entirely omitted the word developer
“If you read Snowflake's S-One, they never mentioned the word developer. That's all about the business analysts, The data scientists, et cetera, to help them kind of get, you know, insight into the data.”
Arjun Narayan: Snowflake succeeded by wrapping cloud architecture in familiar SQL
“Snowflake is a fantastic example of, under the hood, they, you know, they have a very modern microservice architecture, but it's all sort of very neatly wrapped up with a bow on top, such that it looks like a SQL database, and that's much, much more attractive…”
Fraser: Building custom data pipelines works best for large, stable internal sources
“If the data source is really large, it's something that's just yours, so Fivetran's never going to build a connector to it, and it's relatively stable, like it's not constantly changing configuration, then you can build your own data pipeline using the tools p…”
Snowflake plans to expand to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
“And so, you know, we are getting requests for other clouds, and we hear, you know, hear them about Microsoft and Google and so you'll, you'll see some things coming up in the future.”
Snowflake will strictly focus on data warehousing over ETL or BI
“We see ourselves staying very close to home. I think when we think about what can be done with the data warehouse We don't have to become, think about ETL or ELT, nor do we have to think about BI and advanced analytics to do really meaningful things to drive o…”
Muglia: Snowflake customers combine Fluent and Snowflake to replace Splunk
“I mean, some of our customers are taking a combination of, for example, Fluent together with Snowflake and using that as an alternative to other technologies like Splunk.”
Muglia: Snowflake competes with only three AWS services, primarily Redshift
“We do compete with Redshift. I think Amazon has a 150 different services in their portfolio. We compete with maybe Three, depending on whether you want to include Athena and Spectrum in that.”
Snowflake closed a $260 million funding round led by Sequoia
“Sequoia joined us and so we just closed a round that was just north of two hundred and sixty million raised.”