2012
Nicolai Tangen says Snowflake was founded in 2012 and that separating storage from compute was a radical idea at the time.
“When, when the company was founded in, uh, 2012, uh, to separate storage from compute was was pretty radical, right?”
Topic
Snowflake
101 facts from 13 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2014
Brad Gerstner said Snowflake's enterprise value was around $175 million when Altimeter led its early round.
“I think the enterprise value at the time was somewhere around $175 million.”
2014
A young Altimeter analyst proposed replacing the firm's own data warehouse with Snowflake over Christmas, while Snowflake was still not generally available.
“how about if over Christmas I'll replace our data warehouse with this, you know, with Snowflake, which was non-GA at the time, right?”
2014
Altimeter's analyst wrote a bug report listing about ten bugs he found in Snowflake and sent it to the company's founders.
“But he also wrote a bug report, right, of like the 10 bugs he found. And he sent this bug bashing report to the founders, to Ben Juan and Terry.”
2020
A host said Snowflake's early round was valued at $175 million and that the company went public at a valuation of roughly $4.4 billion.
“I think that round you mentioned was at $175 million valuation. They IPO'd somewhere around $4.4 billion.”
2020
Snowflake held the biggest software IPO ever in 2020, according to host Bob Saffian, and its stock later fell sharply.
“It had the biggest software IPO ever in 2020, followed by a somewhat dramatic, uh, stock fall.”
2020
Ramaswamy says Snowflake's IPO was the biggest software IPO up to that time.
“they had the storied IPO, the biggest software IPO of that at that time.”
2022
Mario Gabriele said Snowflake's stock reached about $403 a share after its IPO and was trading around $183 to $185 in May 2022.
“the stock traded as high as, I think, 403 a share. Today, it's about 183, 185.”
2022
Mario Gabriele said Snowflake's revenue grew about 105% with net revenue retention of 178%, up from 168% the prior year.
“So, revenue's up about 105%. Net retention is 178. It was 168 the year before.”
2023
Snowflake invested in building its own foundation model, Arctic, after it appeared many teams could catch up to GPT-4.
“late last year, it looked very much like many teams could catch up to GPT four. That's when we invested in it”
2023
Snowflake acquired the AI-powered search engine Neva in May 2023.
“Neva, an AI-powered web and personal knowledge base search engine that Snowflake acquired in May 2023.”
2023
Baris Gultekin joined Snowflake together with its current CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy through the Neva acquisition.
“Barish came to Snowflake along with Snowflake's current CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy as part of Neva”
2024
Ramaswamy says Snowflake customers have several hundred AI applications in production and over a thousand in implementation.
“several hundred applications in production, over a thousand applications, um, that are, uh, that are, that are in implementation.”
2024
Snowflake acquired Truera, an AI evaluation company, and was integrating it into Snowflake.
“we, uh, you know, have acquired a company called Truera that we are in the process of integrating with Snowflake.”
2024
Bob Saffian says 165 Snowflake customer companies were affected by a breach that came through customer accounts, not a flaw in Snowflake's software.
“165 companies who use Snowflake were impacted. The breach came via customers accounts, not through your software vulnerability”
2025
Snowflake created a mixture-of-experts foundation model early in the prior year before abandoning that path.
“Early last year, we, uh, actually went down the path of creating foundation models. We created a credible M o E model.”
2025
Snowflake stopped pursuing foundation models because it lacked the capital to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We simply did not have the capital to be able to invest meaningfully in things in things like that.”
2026
Todd McKinnon said Palantir, Snowflake and Databricks let companies pull data into one warehouse rather than connecting AI agents to many separate systems.
“Cause what they allow companies to do is instead of having to actually connect their agentic enterprise to all these separate systems, they pull it into one data warehouse.”
Undated
A host said Snowflake was still over half of Altimeter's public position at the end of the previous quarter.
“I think Snowflake is still over half, or as at the end of last quarter was still over half of Altimeter's public position.”
Undated
Aidan Gomez cited Databricks and Snowflake as independent database companies that succeeded without belonging to a big cloud provider.
“fantastic companies like Databricks and Snowflake, which are independent”
Undated
Some Airtable customers pull data from Snowflake or Databricks into Airtable to build operational workflows.
“now we have a lot of customers who are pulling in data from, for instance, Snowflake or Databricks into Airtable”
Undated
Ramaswamy says that during his first nine months at Snowflake, after the Neva acquisition, he was SVP of AI with no direct reports.
“at Snowflake for the first nine months, famously, um, I had literally no one reporting to me.”
Undated
Ramaswamy says he has done roughly 250 customer calls in about nine months as Snowflake CEO.
“I've also done probably 250 customer calls over the past, like nine-ish months.”
Undated
Ramaswamy introduced boolean metrics to Snowflake's sales organization to describe the state of accounts, in discussions with CRO Chris Dignan.
“I introduced the idea of like boolean metrics, like, how do you describe the state of a world so that you can then describe the state of 5,000 entities in your world?”
Undated
Snowflake created cross-functional teams called war rooms, including ones for AI and data engineering.
“we have a war room for AI, we have a war room for data engineering.”
Undated
Under Ramaswamy, Snowflake wrote company-wide OKRs for the first time, with named owners for accountability.
“we wrote OKRS for the company for the first time. Why? Because I wanted that level of abstraction.”
Undated
Ramaswamy says Snowflake has about 7,500 employees.
“Snowflake has 7,500 people. It's absurd if I believe in nonsense like that.”
Undated
Ramaswamy says Snowflake's sales organization has about 3,000 people.
“how do we make sure that the 3,000 person team that we had in sales is effective?”
Undated
Snowflake trained Arctic as a general-purpose model and used post-training to target retrieval, cited answers and SQL generation.
“SQL generation, including Snowflake specific SQL, those were things that we addressed in post training.”
Undated
Snowflake has partnerships with model companies including Mistral and Reka.
“We have a partnership with Mistral, we have a partnership with, uh, um, with Reka.”
Undated
Cortex AI is a model garden included with every Snowflake deployment that lets SQL users call language models.
“It's a model garden that goes with every Snowflake deployment, not rocket science.”
Undated
Bayer is using Snowflake's Cortex Analyst text-to-SQL product to give business users access to data.
“the talk to your data application is from Bayer.”
Undated
Ramaswamy says Snowflake must ensure talk-to-your-data products are reliable enough for its CFO Mike Scarpelli to use.
“we better not, uh, give Scarpelli, our CFO, you know, a talk to your data product that is not reliable.”
Undated
Healthcare provider Elevance has over 150,000 admin users for its plans and is indexing plan information with Snowflake for call-center chatbots.
“have over 150,000 admin users, um, for for these plans”
Undated
Siemens is working on a Snowflake-based project to help find equipment manuals.
“Siemens has a similar pro project, um, but that one is for, uh, is for manuals.”
Undated
Ramaswamy says the average Snowflake project takes three to six months from start to finish.
“the average Snowflake project takes like three to six months to get done from from start to finish.”
Undated
Snowflake partners include Kumo for predictive analytics and RelationalAI for graph capabilities.
“wonderful partners that are extending, uh, snowflake, like, uh, like Kumo with predictive analytics or relational AI with, like, you know, um, with like graph SQL”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says about 700 Global 2000 companies use Snowflake.
“We have something like 700 odd global 2,000 companies that are on Snowflake.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says large public companies close their monthly books on Snowflake.
“Large public companies close their books every month on top of Snowflake.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake is central to how data moves within the US financial system.
“Snowflake is the beating heart of the, at least the US. financial system in terms of how data moves from place to place.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake hosted the DeepSeek model very quickly after its release.
“Things like hosting DeepSeek quickly, you know, that's just a little bit of making sure that you can still run the hundred meter sprint in ten seconds.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake made DeepSeek available to customers within two days.
“It was an amazing model. We had it out in two days flat.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake's hosting of the DeepSeek model introduces no security compromise.
“Hosting the DeepSeek model does not introduce any kind of security compromise.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy argues that freely available capable AI models increase the value of data held in Snowflake.
“the value of the data that is in Snowflake goes up. It doesn't go down.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake has offered multifactor authentication for over ten years.
“Snowflake has offered multifactor authentication for over a decade.”
Undated
After the breach, Snowflake added systems that detect unusual access locations and warn customers or disable accounts, Sridhar Ramaswamy says.
“We now have systems that can detect access from surprising places and then warn our customers or turn off accounts.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake now monitors the dark web and disables credentials that appear compromised.
“We now have dark web monitoring. So if there looks to be a credential that is compromised, then that credential is promptly turned off.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake grew up as a cloud data warehouse business whose sales approach was well understood.
“Snowflake had come of age as a cloud data warehouse. We knew how to sell the cloud data warehouse.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake aims to train one million people on AI and data products, including in India.
“Our aspiration is to train a million people on using AI and data products.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake's balance sheet is over $5 billion.
“we have a very healthy balance sheet. It's over $5 billion.”
Undated
Snowflake's $200 million startup fund is run together with venture partners, according to Sridhar Ramaswamy.
“So the 200 million dollar fund is in combination with many venture partners to fund the next generation of companies.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy cites Snowflake revenue of $3.5 billion and more than 10,000 customers.
“There is nothing unreal about the $3.5 billion that we made as revenue, about the 10,000 plus customers that we have”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake stopped developing its own foundation models because of the money and talent required.
“We used to develop foundation models, but we backed away from it because we just said we just cannot afford to spend the amount of money and talent”
Undated
Snowflake's original product was conceived more than ten years before this interview by its founder Benoit Dageville.
“Snowflake has always been an amazing product company. The original product that Benoit Thierry conceived of ten plus years ago was many years ahead of its time.”
Undated
Ramaswamy says Frank Slootman voluntarily pushed for a CEO change because he wanted a product-first leader to take charge of Snowflake.
“Frank voluntarily pushed for the change.”
Undated
Before Ramaswamy's reorganization, Snowflake had seven to ten layers of teams between an engineer building a feature and the customer using it.
“there were like seven to ten layers of teams that were involved.”
Undated
Ramaswamy estimates that roughly half of qualifying Fortune 2000 companies are Snowflake customers.
“something like half of the qualifying fortune 2,000 companies on the planet are Snowflake customers.”
Undated
Snowflake built an internal sales data assistant called Raven and then worked with early customers including Cisco, Fanatics and the USA bobsled team on Snowflake Intelligence.
“But it's basically the sales data assistant. Then we started working with early customers, whether it is a Cisco or a fanatics, or the USA bobsled team”
Undated
Snowflake Intelligence is priced on consumption, so customers pay for what they use.
“Snowflake intelligence is very much a consumption product. People pay for what they consume”
Undated
Snowflake rolled out coding agents to its solution engineers, which sharply reduced the time needed to create customer demos.
“We've rolled out coding agents to all of, uh, our solution engineers, and they are excited because that just dramatically lowered the amount of time it takes to create a demo.”
Undated
Snowflake founder Benoit Dageville helped drive adoption of coding agents among Snowflake engineers.
“Benoit, our wonderful founder, who fell in love with, uh, coding agents, did more to drive coding agent adoption with engineers.”
Undated
Ramaswamy says the three hyperscale cloud providers would like to own the data space, but Snowflake and Databricks exist as independent successes.
“The three hyperscalers would love to just own the data space like they own any other space, but yet there's Snowflake, there's Databricks”
Undated
Ramaswamy says Snowflake's relationship with Microsoft was initially mediocre because Microsoft had a first-party relationship with Databricks and was conflicted about its Fabric product.
“Among the earliest places where, uh, this went to work was in our relationship with Microsoft, which was okay, but not that great.”
Undated
Snowflake is deepening its partnership with SAP, including bidirectional data sharing and joint work on analytics, AI and agents.
“So with folks like SAP, we are actually thinking much harder about what is that one plus one equals three with SAP.”
Undated
Christian Kleinerman said he had been at Snowflake for eight years and runs its product team, including product management, design, technical writing and data science.
“I've been with the company eight years, very happy, very proud of what we do.”
Undated
Snowflake introduced a product called Snowflake Intelligence, which lets companies ask questions of their data.
“We introduced at Snowflake something we call Snowflake Intelligence, which we think of it as the next level of unlock on companies being able to do more with their data.”
Undated
Snowflake introduced a coding assistant called Cortex Code, which Kleinerman compared with Claude Code and Cursor.
“we introduced also Cortex Code at Snowflake. You quickly appreciate that this is so much more than a chatbot.”
Undated
Snowflake held a World Tour visiting 23 cities, where customers said they had compared its technology with two other vendors.
“We did this Snowflake World Tour, where we take our message to a number of cities, twenty three cities”
Undated
Snowflake started a cross-company consortium to make semantic models interoperable.
“We started a cross-company consortium to do interoperability of semantic models.”
Undated
Snowflake uses a 'semantic view', a curated translator between business terms and where the answers to business questions live in the data.
“you end up curating what we call the semantic view, which is a translator between business terms and where the answer to certain business terms or certain business questions may lie.”
Undated
Snowflake launched capabilities that extract semantic information from sources such as existing business intelligence tools and query logs.
“we have launched capabilities to help extract semantic information from a number of sources, whether it's existing BI tools or query logs.”
Undated
Snowflake enables customers to log AI responses and track evaluations to monitor AI solutions in production.
“At Snowflake, we've enabled our customers to do logging of responses, track evaluations, be able to see that what was intended to happen is delivering the answers that customers need to deliver.”
Undated
Snowflake describes itself as a data platform and an AI data cloud.
“Sure, so snowflake is a data platform. We call ourselves an AI data cloud.”
Undated
Neva was a web-scale search engine whose technology Snowflake brought into its search and RAG products.
“We acquired, um, a company that that I came with, uh, called Neva, which was a, uh, a a web scale search engine”
Undated
Gultekin says Snowflake Intelligence, its agent product for business users, is the fastest-growing product on Snowflake.
“and it is the fastest growing product that we have on Snowflake.”
Undated
Snowflake is working with Tableau, Omni and other technology providers on the Open Semantic Interchange, an open format for sharing semantic models between platforms.
“we're working with companies like Tableau, um, Omni, uh, you know, BBI platforms, as well as, uh, as well as others technology providers”
Undated
Snowflake built a fine-tuned document extraction model that is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than large language models, making it cheaper and faster for bulk extraction.
“we have a document extraction model that that we've, uh, build and fine-tuned. It is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than these large language models.”
Undated
Snowflake offers DeepSeek among the models available to its customers.
“We also have DeepSeek as a model that we provide for customers.”
Undated
Gultekin says that about two and a half years before the interview, Snowflake customers made clear they did not want data leaving Snowflake's security boundary.
“when we started the journey two and a half years ago or so, we heard loud and clear that our customers do not want to move their data out of the Snowflake security boundary.”
Undated
Gultekin says the models Snowflake uses act as sub-processors and save no state.
“So essentially, these models become sub processors. There is no, there is no state that's saved in any of these models.”
Undated
Gultekin says the cloud providers run model inference in their own stacks, while model providers keep ownership of the weights.
“the inference is run, uh, by, you know, the cloud providers in in in their stack.”
Undated
Snowflake built an internal sales assistant on Snowflake Intelligence and deployed it to 5,000 sellers.
“For instance, for the whole company, we've built a sales assistant and we've deployed to 5,000 sellers.”
Undated
Snowflake offers guardrail products that detect content such as hate speech and violence so the model can be stopped from responding.
“At Snowflake, we offer products to check for guardrails, they're doing things like checking for hate speech, violence, and other violations.”
Undated
Gultekin says Snowflake did not yet support the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and that customers were asking for agent-to-agent communication in general.
“still early, we don't yet support it. Uh, we're starting to hear our our customers don't necessarily ask for A to A specifically”
Undated
A Snowflake customer, identified in the transcript as 'SMP', analyzed earnings calls to see whether CEOs answered analysts' questions directly or indirectly, as a signal for stock selection.
“One interesting study, one of our customers as SMP, they analyze the earnings calls to understand when CEOs are responding to analysts questions in, um, either directly or indirectly”
Undated
Snowflake supports Apache Iceberg, an open file format for storing data.
“Uh, we support, uh, iceberg, which is a, uh, you know, open file format.”
Undated
Tim Crawford said data used by AI agents may sit in systems of record outside central repositories such as Snowflake or Databricks, each with its own governance.
“that data may not exist within a central repository like your Snowflake repository or Databricks or whatnot.”
Undated
Nicolai Tangen says Norges Bank Investment Management holds about two petabytes of data in Snowflake and runs roughly 3 million queries against it each day.
“We have two petabytes of data in Snowflake, which is the equivalent of 2 million gigabytes, and we have roughly 3 million queries into the database every day.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says about half of the addressable Global 2000 companies, meaning those outside China, are Snowflake customers.
“half the uh global 2,000 companies that are addressable, uh, that is non-China companies, are uh, our customers”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake operates out of more than twenty-five countries and has customers in many more.
“we operate out of more than twenty-five countries and have customers in way more than those.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake has over 13,000 customers, which helps it predict demand and smooth out spiky usage.
“we are very good at predicting demand because we have over 13,000 customers.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says customers pay in advance, but Snowflake recognizes revenue only as customers actually use the product.
“You pay first, we recognize revenue when you and your team use Snowflake.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy describes Snowflake Intelligence as an agent-based interface that lets users ask questions of their data in plain language.
“It is roughly an agentic interface to your data, where you can say, how are my biggest investments doing?”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy describes MCP as a way for a language model or coding agent to communicate with a data source, acting as an interoperability layer.
“It is just a way for uh, a language model or a coding agent to be able to talk to a data source.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake is developing agent-driven migrations intended to move data from legacy systems in days or weeks rather than quarters or years.
“We are working on things like agent driven migrations, where you can move data from legacy systems onto Snowflake in a matter of days and small number of weeks”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says he succeeded Frank Slootman as Snowflake CEO, and that on his first day the company guided five percentage points below consensus.
“Of course, it does not help that an unknown person that has never been C E O before was taking over from the legendary Frank Slootman.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake launched Cortex Code, a coding agent, as a decision he regards as central to the company's future.
“we should actually launch Cortex Code, a coding agent, because that is going to ensure our future.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says technology built at Neva eventually became the foundation of Snowflake's AI work.
“We built amazing technology, and it eventually ended up being the underpinnings of what A I became at Snowflake.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy says Snowflake's weekly war rooms gathered everyone responsible for a new product area in one place to tighten the feedback loop between creators and users.
“They brought everybody that was responsible for a new area together into one place.”
Undated
Chris Slovak says that about two to three years before the recording, many companies bought modern data warehouses such as Databricks or Snowflake.
“two, three years ago, everybody purchased a modern data warehouse, whether it's a Databricks or a Snowflake.”
Undated
Slovak says many companies are still in migration cycles of about two years to move data into centralized platforms.
“many, many companies are like, still like smack dab in these two year long cycles to migrate and import.”
Episodes
- 12 May 2022Arena Show Part I: Idea Dinner + YC Continuity1h 27m
- 15 Mar 2022Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner)1h 53m
- 16 Feb 2026CIO Agenda 2026: The Enterprise AI Promise | CXOTalk #90955m
- 27 Dec 2025Advice on Agentic AI: A Top Snowflake Exec Explains | CXOTalk #90344m
- 30 Mar 2026Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity1h 13m
- 10 Jun 2024AI will make money sooner than you think, says Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez1h 15m
- 17 Jun 2026Snowflake CEO: Scaling Data, AI Agents and the New Software Era30m
- 6 Nov 2025Meet Snowflake Intelligence: A Personalized Enterprise Intelligence Agent with Sridhar Ramaswamy42m
- 1 Apr 2025From data breach scandal to AI darling, with Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy35m
- 10 Oct 2024Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy on 700+ LLM enterprise use cases55m
- 12 Sep 2024From No-Code to AI-Powered Apps with Airtable’s Howie Liu1h 12m
- 13 Aug 2026The Predictive Model Reshaping Retail Operations at Scale - with Chris Slovak of Unframe37m
- 14 Jan 2026Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin on Bringing AI to Data, Agent Design, Text-2-SQL, RAG & More1h 36m