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A
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There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Brew Ride Home. I'm your host, as always, Brian McCullough. We are going to talk about a really interesting book today, but we're also going to talk about a really interesting company. Everybody knows Snowflake, but we're going to talk to the authors of a new book called Make It Snow From Zero to Billions How Snowflake Scaled its Go to Market Organization. We have the authors here, Denise Pearson and Chris Degnan.
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A
Hey, Brian, thanks for having us.
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C
Thanks for having us.
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B
This is a book about the marketing and revenue relationship, the CRO and CMO relationship. So who's the CRO? Who's the cmo?
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C
I'm the cmo.
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A
And I am the ex CRO.
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B
All right, so let's start with your backgrounds because that's going to weave into the story of this book and how it came about. So let's start with you, Denise. Before Snowflake or getting into Snowflake, just briefly, tell me about your career.
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C
Yeah, I've been in Tech since 1993. My first job was with Commodore, the computer company, if you.
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B
If you remember, Commodore 64. Yes, of course.
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C
You had one as well.
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A
Yep.
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C
So I had a gap year between high school and college, and that's really where I got introduced to the world of tech. I mean, back in the days, this was 1993, I grew up in Sweden. At that point, nobody even had computers at home. Right. There were no computers in school. Even. So, it was definitely a complete new world. In opening up to me, I knew that I wanted to do something in marketing and advertising, but I thought more Procter and Gamble, Unilever, those type of companies. After that experience at Commodore, I knew, all right, this is the place to be. So then I went back to college and after college, joined my first startup, spent 12 years there. It was a French startup. And I would say I had really my formative career years at that company. And this was my first startup. And I've been with four startups since then.
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B
When did you specifically join Snowflake?
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C
In 2016. So almost 10 years ago now.
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B
Chris, how about you, what's your background?
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A
Yeah, so I'm originally from the Boston area and went to University of Delaware. And two of my best friends said, hey, we're going to go to Seattle in 1997. And we started driving across the country and wound up in San Francisco, not Seattle. And I've never left since. And when I got out there, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just wanted to make money. And I got a job at a place called Franklin Templeton, and they had a management training program at Franklin where you rotate through departments every four months. And the first rotation was in hr and I absolutely hated it. And then I rotated into sales, and that's where I kind of. It was a really great experience in that I liked the sale aspect of it, of talking to customers on convincing them to do something. And that's where I really kind of figured out that I liked the sales career. And then I would say that I took advantage of being in the dot com boom and was in some massive failure companies in the dot com bust.
- [03:48]
B
Willing to name any.
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A
Well, yeah, so one of them was this company called smartage.com, and we were reselling. We claimed to be a small business network and we were selling advertising clicks. And turns out that that was a bunch of baloney. And so it was made up and it deserved to go out of business. And then I got into tech because I had a boss at Smart Age that convinced me that selling enterprise software was the way to go. And that's when I got into enterprise software. And I'd say I learned the true enterprise selling motion at emc. I spent eight years as a sales rep and a sales manager at at emc and then got recruited out by, ironically, the. The guy that. That was on the kiss cam at the Coldplay concert. He was my boss. Actually learned a lot from him to his credit. And I worked for him only to get reacquired by EMC a year and a half later. So I was back at EMC and wanted to, you know, find something that I was passionate about. And so in 2013, I took a job as the first sales rep at Snowflake when there was no website, no customers, and I think pretty much everyone thought, what the heck are you doing, Chris? And I call it my midlife crisis decision to join Snowflake.
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B
Had your paths crossed before Snowflake at all?
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C
No, we had not worked with each other before.
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B
For listeners who might not follow enterprise software necessarily very closely, just really briefly. But before we get into the Snowflake story. What does Snowflake do?
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A
Okay, so at our core, we started off, you know, our North Star was we wanted to be an enterprise data warehouse. That was, you know, when, when Denise came in, she actually helped us kind of center our focus around the market that we wanted to go after. And why, why was that important for me was in 2013, 2014, the enterprise data warehousing market was roughly, you know, a 10 to $12 billion market with 5 to 7,000 enterprise customers spending that 10 to $12 billion. That's meaningful because as a salesperson you have a budget to go after. So that was our initial kind of, hey, that we wanted to be really good at that. And then as we grew as a company, we became a data platform and then a data cloud. And so that's, that's today what is a data cloud? It's basically helping customers do analytics across any data set they want, whether it's structured, unstructured, semi STR data.
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B
So, you know, perfectly positioned for the times we find ourselves in now. But you're describing that the earliest days. This is a really nascent and really small market. That is what exploded by multiples at this point, obviously.
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A
Yeah, I think it has exploded by multiples. I think the thing that we got super lucky with was that Snowflake has this highly differentiated product. But at the same time, customers were making the decision to move to the cloud. It wasn't our job to convince them to go to the cloud. It was our job to convince them we had the best data platform or data cloud solution on the market. And so that was really the compelling event was that customers thought the cloud was going to be their future. And so they were driving that and they were looking for the best solution. So we happened to ride that wave of cloud migration.
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B
Was there a non obvious at the time sort of decision made early on that allowed Snowflake to get traction in the marketplace?
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A
Well, our founders, they came from Oracle and so they, they were pretty, they, they had a vision and one of their, their core visions was to make Snowflake as a service. And, and that decision was painful for me because I would get into, you know, early days, 2013, 2014, I'd get into enterprises and they'd say, when are you going to run in the private cloud? And the founders would say, never. So I could do one of two things. I could try to fight them and get fired or I could go and sell this as a service. And so it was not obvious that that was the right decision at the time because when we would go and negotiate with customers. We had to, we had to convince them to give us their data, which security people hate. Legal people hate all of that stuff. So that was really painful. It turned out to be, you know, an Achilles heel in the beginning and then a weapon later on because we have this data cloud network where we can share data or customers can share data with other customers in this data cloud network.
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C
And a big part of that service model was also our pricing model. This was really the first time you could buy a database on a consumption based pricing model. In the past, everyone had been storing their data on servers on site and often 90% of that capacity was unused. Really, really expensive. And with Snowflake, for the first time, you would only pay for what you use. So the pricing model was super friendly from everywhere, from startups all the way up to enterprises. So any company could use all the functionality of Snowflake. Right. Usually startups wouldn't be able to implement a data platform like Snowflake. So in the early days, I mean, many of our, the early believers were startups in the ad tech space, gaming space, companies that could really push the limits with their data. And they kind of paved the way for the rest of the market. The bigger companies, they often have to wait. They want to smaller companies to experiment first. And our whole business model really allowed those startups to really go out and experiment and pioneer and prove that this is the platform for the future.
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B
But ironically, we were speaking offline before we started recording. Your customers were actually fighting you on that model. People were begging you, please, can you price it the old way. Why were they doing that?
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C
It was just a little bit hard for them to, in the early days to predict, you know, their usage. It was more discussion often with the finance department who maybe were used to the old kind of capex model. And now they had to kind of forecast their spend in a different way.
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A
Yeah, I just add that we were competing with, we were using Amazon as our cloud. We were competing with a native Amazon service. And that native service actually was selling a fixed. You could buy a reserved instance and you could have that fixed asset at a fixed price. And so, you know, To Denise's point, CFOs do not like variable costs. They like fixed. And so that was really where we had to explain our pricing model. We had to, you know, show them how we could actually have a budgeted item that may be variable. And that was hard.
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B
You rang the bell on the stock exchange yesterday because it was the fifth anniversary of Snowflake's ipo, which we believe is still historically the largest software IPO of all time. For each of your jobs, going from finding product market fit to an ipo, what is the biggest challenge for someone in your job at a startup to go from, hey, we've caught fire here to hey, man, we've made it, we're ringing the bell.
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C
Yeah, but from a marketing perspective, you have in the early days, no brand awareness, no credibility, no trust. At the same time, have the sales organization asking me, denise, where are the leads? Where are the leads that we need to work on? And I mean, that's the hardest part, being a startup. So, of course, the IPO made Snowflake famous overnight, essentially, especially, you know, being the largest software IPO at that time. So from a brand perspective, it had a huge impact on our company for sure. But again, that's the hard thing you're facing as a startup. How do you build that trust? And also, we are asking many of the largest companies on the planet to put their most valuable asset in this startup called Snowflake. At that time, customers thought that we were a ski brand. They thought we were an ice cream company. It was a weird name for a tech company. Overall. That was kind of like the uphill, you know, battle in the early days, you know, for all startups. Right. How do you quickly build credibility, brand awareness? How do you get that demand engine going for the sales organization?
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A
Yeah, I think, you know, when we were, for the first two years of my job, we were in stealth mode for at least, you know, 18 months. So that means we didn't have a website and, and so convincing people we were a real company. And I think one of the things that I appreciate about Denise is when she joined Snowflake, you know, she's one of the most successful CMOs out there. And when she joined Snowflake, she got came in and she sat down with every single one of our sales reps and was like, how can I help you? And she looked at my sales team as her customer. And that was super, super important because it showed me and it established credibility with me because Denise had the ability to roll up her sleeves. A lot of big tech execs will come in and they want to tell people what to do. Denise came in with having a very successful career already coming in and saying, I don't care what I did before, I'm going to figure out how to do it. I think that's the thing that I, that I learned about early stage versus later stage. You, as you grow as a company. It's, it's obviously a different beast. I had no one working for me to then having 3,500 people working for me. Just a dramatically different job.
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B
That, that takes us directly into parts of the book. Because in the book you argue that especially in the earliest, even the stealth stage, you should probably embed sales early, even embed it with the engineering team. Why is that crucial?
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A
Well, so this is to the credit of the Snowflake's original investor, Mike Spizer. He forced the founders to hire me. I mean, that's plain and simple. That's kind of how he did it. And they were like, it's too early. That is exactly what they said. It was way too early to have a salesperson because they were, there were nowhere, no one had ever touched the product. And what Mike really said to me is he said, hey Chris, you're not going to be able to sell a product for 24 months. We're not going to look to actually give you commission. You're going to have a fixed salary. And his focus really was for me to get as many customers to try the product for free and break it. And the reason he wanted to break it is because he knew that our biggest Competitors were the CSPs, whether it was Amazon, Microsoft and Google. And he didn't want them to know what we had until we, we actually had product market fit. And so that was really the focus of our first two years was get customers to break it. And they did. And there was really tough moments for me personally because, you know, I'm a salesperson. My validation in my career is to get purchase orders, to get people to, you know, to buy something for me. And for two years we weren't selling anything and, and they had to do things like do what I would call an open heart transplant to the Snowflake service and change out core components of it because our customers who are using it for free were breaking it.
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B
Denise? Oh, sorry.
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C
No, I'd like to add to that. I think what's very unique is that, I mean, you probably met with 10, 15 customers a week and every Friday you did a write up, right? Here's all the feedback you got from prospects this week. So this was so valuable to the engineering organization. It wasn't just talking to one customer. It was really 10, 15 customers every week who gave specific feedback what they wanted to see in the product and then they could quickly iterate and build that.
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B
But if you do that, how do you avoid engineering losing focus on the product? I understand that getting early feedback from the first customers is key, but you could get overwhelmed by the feedback and it becomes sort of a design by committee thing. So how do you do what you just said but avoid losing the focus of developing again?
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A
I would give 100% credit to the founders of Snowflake. They had this vision of what they wanted Snowflake to be, so they said, this is what we want to build. And there were core principles to that. It had to be a service because they didn't want to have versions of Snowflake. There were certain functionality. They would never decide to run it on premise. They always wanted to be in the cloud. And then I would bring them. One of our earliest engineers would call me the Shadow cto, and there was no. I had no business making any technical decisions for the company around where the product would go. But what I would do is bring the founders to customers. Customers would ask for features and they would decide, okay, this does make sense because this will help all of our customers. And that's how they thought through it. So I think it was a yes. There is a bunch of customers that tried to distract us, and especially ones with big wallets. And they were like, hey, dude, stop bringing us to those customers. And that's what they told me to do. And I said, all right. So I focused on where I could sell.
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B
In the book you talk about how sales and marketing you say should operate as one brain in two bodies. But give me again, for someone at a enterprise or startup, what is the, the actual reality of that on a Wednesday afternoon of sitting down and again, keeping focus? You're, you have two different sort of disciplines but you all have to row in the same direction. Like give me a tangible example of how you do that. Keep that one brain working.
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C
Yeah, I think it looks different at different faces of the company. In the early days we were on the same floor, right. You know, in the office I could just walk over to Chris and get immediate feedback and then, you know, we can, you know, make a decision right after that. But again, you need to build a culture of that alignment through both organizations. So on the marketing side, right. I always been looking to hire people that can really work well with a sales organization. And in the early days when I, when I joined, I mean they were actually fights between the sales and marketing organization. There were people on the, on the marketing side that just did, didn't play well, you know, with, with the sales team. Right. And it's also as much as, you know, building a good working relationship and really working towards the same mission and goal every day. So on my side, the focus was really at building an organization that really loved that day to day interaction with the sales team. And on the marketing side, especially on demand gen, I have a lot of these more programmatic, analytical people. They are not the marketers that are collaborating with the sales organization on a daily basis. That's more the field market organization and they are more relationship building, you know, focus, really listening every single day. What is it the sales organization needs to be most effective, you know, at the moment? And how do I go out and you know, implementing on that?
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A
I would just add like I think in a lot of startups or a lot of companies in general, what happens between sales and marketing is marketing says hey, here's a bunch of MQLs I and throw it over the fence. And then hey sales, good luck. And then they're sitting down with their CEO and saying, oh, I gave, you know, Chris a bunch of MQLs. That is not what Denise did. She said, okay, we have these MQLs and they are not converting to qualified meetings. So what she came in and the first thing she said to me was, I'M not going to talk to you about qualified MQLs. I'm going to talk to you about qualified meetings. And that's what she cared about because she knew that if we did not hit our revenue target, we weren't going to be a company. And that was how, that was how kind of the, the one brain her, her focus was revenue, not MQL's. And that's how she would diagnose where problems were and that's where the partnership really centered on.
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B
The book is sort of structured around the phases of like stealth, build and scale. One of the things that I've observed in especially startups is not knowing where you are, thinking you're in a different phase than you really are, or wanting to be at the scale phase when you're really not there yet. So what is your advice? Like what sort of metrics are, should people look at to find out where they actually are?
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A
Well, I think what specifically we did so we went GA in June of 2015 and what our CEO at the time, Bob Muglia did was he actually we as a leadership team said this is what is required feature wise to declare Snowflake a GA product. We knew that we had interest, we knew that we had customers willing to pay for the product, but they needed things like encryption, HIPAA compliance, like all sorts of like things. And so what he would do every week is he would get in front of the entire company and say where are we on these feature sets? He would almost haze the engineers because he'd say hey, so and so you owe this feature set and that once we got to these are the features that we can declare victory on that, that is ga. That's when we declare ga. And it was the right move. I mean I think having someone like Bob running the company, it was so critical because he had a, a very much a product mind. And he, he said okay, we have enough traction and you know, today is the day we're going to declare ga. So that's how we did it specifically at Snowflake.
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B
I love the book because of actual practical, tangible examples and advice, which is why I keep coming back to this. For example, like Denise, you lay out like a five pillar marketing strategy like from seed to series B. Right. What would, what would you say over the various course of that evolution? Should be staffed first from the earliest days. What should be staffed first and then what is the most important thing to staff when you're at B?
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C
Say yeah, I mean during stealth, the function that Snowflake had was a product marketing Organization. Right. I mean that's when you start developing, you know, the product offering you're going to take to market. Right. So product marketing was already there working quite well. But when I joined and we started more moving into the build phase was demand gen. That was a key function then and that was really, we had about maybe 20, 25 salespeople and now it was about how do we make them as effective as possible. So that's where the demand function came into play.
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B
And then later on when, when you are ready to scale, what's the most important leads?
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C
Yeah, definitely, yeah. Demand gen for sure.
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A
I, I like, you know, I talk to, I advise a bunch of companies now and in from stealth mode to, to series A and series B. And I just am hyper focused on the marketing side of making sure that they have a world class demand generation team. Because I think without leads, who cares if you have the best PowerPoints or presentations you need? You need leads. And so I think qualified meetings, qualified leads, those are the things that matter. And even at Snowflake scale today, like as when I was the CRO up until March of this year, we were hyper focused on net new customers. And so I mean that's all that matters.
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C
And also marketing's role is a little bit different in a product led growth type of company versus Snowflake, which is really an infrastructure company. Right. I mean we are selling through a sales organization. So from a marketing perspective the goal is to how do we make our selling machine as effective as possible? And it would not be effective for infrastructure sales reps to go out and do their own prospecting, create their own demand. It's would just simply not be a cost effective way of going to markets.
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B
You talk about partnerships as strategic and otherwise as being key for credibility and capacity, capacity, multiplication. Right? What, what is key about like sequencing that? Do you know what I mean? Like, because sometimes a partnership is key for taking it to the next scale but then you're tied to that partner and you now have obligations and so you're sort of giving up control of your evolution. So like how do you, is there a tactful way to deal with your partners where you're like hey, thank you for taking us to the next level, but also we're still going in this direction and you don't own us.
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A
You mean from like a, like a system integrator or technology partner?
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B
Anything for where you're now dealing with people that are key to the next phase of your success but then not letting them gain control of where you're going for the stages beyond that.
- [26:41]
A
I think, you know, you can look at the, at it from a customer standpoint. I think we talked about it earlier, not letting customers like, demand. This is how you have to build the product. We, we certainly, you know, Snowflake's number one value is putting our customers first. So we would listen to them and take their, their feedback and making sure that we think about how we build, build the product. I think from a partner standpoint, look, we went from no one wanting to partner with us to everyone wanting to partner with us. And I think you have to make your partners comfortable that, you know, hey, you're an important partner, but we're not exclusive. And I think the best company in the world in the enterprise space that does that really well is Amazon. So we very much looked up to how AWS ran their partner programs. It's world class what they did and what they continue to do. So super in awe of what they've done. And one of the things that they've done really well and we had to learn this the hard way is we might compete with them. And there were deals where we would compete with our most important partner with aws. And the mantra that AWS would have with us is partner in public, compete in private. And that's how we ran the partnership. So it was a tricky one. There were definitely times when Amazon, you know, rumors were Amazon was going to kill Snowflake and they would just say, hey, you know, we want you to be successful, but we're also going to sell our first party product and this is how we'll do the partnership together.
- [28:10]
C
And also there are different partners at different phase of the journey. I mean, we had to, in the early days, we had to work with partners that could operate as fast as we did. Right. So looking at the whole SI community, for instance, we worked more with the boutique SIs that really could work at the same pace. Snowflake, right. We couldn't work with the larger GSI that we work with today because the pace were just not a match at that time. And also clear there were a lot of partners that was trying to really put us in a box all the time. Right. They wanted to put us in this little tiny kind of data warehouse box. And it was so important to kind of continue to be brave and to be bold, to kind of break out of that corner that they constantly wanted to push us in.
- [28:59]
B
Culture, you say, should be treated as key to go to market infrastructure. And so I'm curious, how did Snowflake codify Values in who gets hired, who gets promoted, but also the direction of the company. How did Snowflake deal with culture?
- [29:20]
C
And maybe you should start talking about how the eight values were created by the first 50 employees at Snowflake.
- [29:26]
A
Yeah, I think they took it super seriously. And I would, you know, again, it was from the engineers to Bob, our founding CEO, to the entire executive team and all the employees. And we really thought really deeply about, you know, things like get it done, you know, like, hey, like we take ownership of, of what you you're doing. Like there is no extra 5 people to do your job. You've got to do your job. But, but when we centered it around the customer and not being jerks, we didn't say jerks, but I'll say it here, not being jerks, that was really important. So, like, you know, for example, if there was someone that was treating Denise's field marketing organization poorly, Denise would come to me immediately and tell me that and then I would go and investigate that and make that decision really quickly. So, you know, we trusted each other. It's important that you have this trust with your peers because you don't want these jerks to be, to exist. And in, in high performing organizations that you're going to have where you've hired quickly, you are going to have people who think the company is successful because of them. And I would say that neither of us were the reason Snowflake was successful. We were part of a journey together and we had this great team and we took care of the jerks. We got rid of them along the way and we let them exist unbeknownst to us a lot of times. And we had to make tough decisions, which was shocking that some of the bad behavior was happening. So I mean, I think a little bit about that.
- [30:57]
C
Yeah. And also, I mean, I would describe our culture as well as a culture of really individual, you know, impact. And if you're a person who couldn't get things done yourself, you couldn't think big, you couldn't make the rest of the company the best. That's one of our core values. You didn't put the customer first, you just didn't succeed. And it became very obvious. I mean, we had some very senior executive joining us for big companies and some of them lasted for eight weeks. They just couldn't survive in this culture where you actually had to execute on, on your own. Right. It's not a culture where you create PowerPoints and pass those around and point fingers to other people. Right. That's not the Culture, you had to be able to execute and add value and impact. As an individual.
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B
You're talking about getting rid of the jerks and making tough calls. And one of the ideas that I thought was really interesting was that sometimes you might have to make a tough call to protect the culture. And even at the time, it's like, yeah, but that's going to hurt us right now. But down the road, you'll be glad that you made that tough decision to protect the culture.
- [32:05]
C
And we did that several times where it really had huge impact on the business at that time. People that actually contributed in a big way from a number standpoint, but the culture was hurting.
- [32:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, I can specifically remember I had a very senior person working for me, and he was quite good operationally. So he ran a good operational organization. And, you know, come to find out that he was, you know, acting in front of me differently than he was acting in front of others. And so I. I let him go. And I tell you what, you know how many employees came up to me and said, thank you. And Chris, you mean it when you say, no jerks here. And that, that does a lot for the culture. Because when you take someone out of a job because they're not, because their performance is bad, because this guy was crushing it, but because they're a cancer to the culture, the employees feel that. And certainly I felt that when I let that go is hard because letting someone go is not great, not a good feeling. But getting through that and then having employees thank you and saying you mean it, you actually live our culture. And that was really meaningful to me.
- [33:20]
C
In the early days, our values were discussed and talked about on a daily basis. In our weekly leadership meeting, in our weekly all hands meeting, it was always talking about, what do these values mean for us as a company? Every interview was all around the values as well. They were so deeply ingrained in that entire build phase of Snowflake made it very easy to make a decision. I remember right. Every time I had to make a hard decision, I did bring up those eight values. I looked at them and the answer always came back to me from those values. It could be around individuals. Is this a person who really think big enough? Is this person actually able to get it done? Is this person actually someone who is collaborating well, you know, with others? The answer always came back from those values. It made it so easy to make the decision. Our main conference room still today is called the North Star. And those values were really the North Star for every decision, all the time.
- [34:29]
B
What myths about enterprise gtm. Did you want to puncture in this book?
- [34:37]
A
Well, I think because we had this big, you know, software ipo, people like from a Snowflake perspective, thought it was easy. And one of the things that I would say to every new hire class when we would bring in new sales reps, I would say there are basic things you have to do to do your job. Because you're a Snowflake sales rep does not make you good. And so there were things like, hey, if you do not go on eight sales calls a week, two net new business meetings a week, you're probably going to fail. And I would say that to new hires. And I think people coming in thinking, oh, look at this great company. I want to be part of this, this rocket ship. And so I think from my perspective, the myth was that it was a lot easier to sell Snowflake than it actually was. And to this day, it's a knife fight. We're knife fighting with the biggest, baddest competitors in the world. And I think it's super important that be sharp on what you're doing. And just because you work at that company doesn't make you great.
- [35:38]
C
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com I think one thing that has been unique at Snowflake compared to previous companies that I work for is that previous companies have said, oh, we're an engineering led company, we're a marketing led company, we're a sales led company. At Snowflake. We've never talked about that. We are an engineering, marketing, sales led company. If you want to build a world class organization, if you want to go and ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, every department needs to be at its best and you need to get all these functions to operate together. And in so many organizations there's so much dysfunction going on and it's been so unique to work with the leadership team for so many years when there is so much trust, trust, you know, on, on the team.
- [37:24]
A
I, I'd add, I just add one more thing is so when Frank Slootman came in in to be our, our CEO, we certainly Denise and I learned a ton from Frank and you know he, he put, we had a customer success organization and he put that underneath me. And his perspective was the entire company's job is customer success. And so under, you know, his guidance I got rid of the customer success organization completely. And, and we dealt with it a different way. We had sales teams that were more responsible for the custom it way more effective as we scaled the organization is not having to like hey, here's a customer. I'm going to pass it off to some customer success. Org. No, you own the customer. You go open that customer, you own that relationship, you make sure they're successful. And so a lot of Silicon Valley companies think oh I need to have a customer success Org. And I would say no you don't.
- [38:17]
C
And a big shift as well that happened when Frank Slootman joined was really about focusing on a business outcome. And that's really hard to transition a whole organization to not talk about their technology but really put themselves in the customer's shoes and understand what are their biggest problems that they're trying to solve on a day to day basis. So at that point we also verticalized the organization and again I think it's going to be very interesting to see now in the world of AI, those companies are going to succeed are those who are really driving business incomes outcomes. And it's an income outcome should result into income. And it's not about the technology, it's really about the value you are bringing to these organizations.
- [39:06]
B
What are you looking at my notes? We are living through an AI paradigm shift right now. Obviously you write the book hoping that some of the lessons in here are evergreen, that can be used in all sorts of different instances. But as the book is coming out, as you were writing it, as the AI moment is evolving, is there something that you wrote about that maybe is especially applicable to a completely nascent market that also could be everything, every market. Well, so.
- [39:40]
A
So a lot of these founders, the AI founders are young, like they're, and they've never run companies and, and I think they think they're different and in, you know, you know to quote Mike Tyson, you know, everyone thinks they, they're really tough until they get punched in the mouth and, and it's like, and then, then we'll see how you do. And so I think, look, a lot of these AI companies like they're built, they say, oh, I have $100 million in revenue. Well, you talk to a lot of venture capitalists today and they're unsure, even at that scale if they have product market fit. So I think the thing that I would coach a lot of these founders on is like, there are consistent things you can do around making your sales team, product, your enterprise sales team productive. There are consistent measurements, there are consistent things that you can do. And that's a lot of what we talk about in the book around things that, to be consistent to run your organization. So I think AI is super exciting. It's changing the world. But you have to have a return on investment, you have to have value or I don't care if it's a cool product. If there's no return on investment or there's no business outcome, as Denise talked about earlier, you're screwed. You do not have a sustainable business. It might be cool. And I think a lot of CEOs are starting to figure that out. AI is super cool, but what is the applicable business case? Is it driving revenue? Is it saving us money? Those are two things that have to be consistent.
- [41:00]
C
Yeah, exactly. Are those use cases you're selling today? Are they repeatable? Right. Are you driving that business value?
- [41:10]
B
Whose idea was this book.
- [41:13]
A
Denise?
- [41:16]
C
So we talked about Frank Slootman here, our previous CEO. He wrote a book called Amp it up that has been widely successful. It's one of the most top selling business books of all times. And after that success, you know, Wiley the publisher, came back to us and asked, can you write a story?
- [41:36]
B
Are there more lessons from this?
- [41:37]
C
Exactly. Are there more lessons from an execution standpoint? How do you apply the philosophies that Frank Slootman talked about and amp it up? How do you apply that from a sales and marketing standpoint?
- [41:52]
A
Yeah, and I would just add, you know, so, you know, Frank, when Snowflake went public, Denise and I became relatively tech famous. Like, hey, people wanted to know who we were and ask us advice. And so we'd get asked to be on, on boards of companies and, and, or advisors and stuff like that. And, and I'd have to go get Frank's, you know, approval. And Frank's an intimidating guy. So you'd be a little bit nervous, you know, going, asking him, you know, to do something outside of Snowflake. And so I, I went and asked him, I said, frank, is it okay this company wants me to be on the board? And he looked at me and he said, you absolutely should because you'll see how screwed up other companies are. And he's right. I mean, I think, and that's why like when we were writing this book, it made me realize is like we did have something really special in this business relationship that Denise and I had that is that you think is normal. But, but you know, when you go to other companies, a lot of CEOs want friction between sales and marketing, which is the wrong instinct.
- [42:46]
B
Right.
- [42:46]
A
And so, you know, this, this book is really about that relationship of building a company, a sustainable company with a great culture. And I think that's really why we did it. She was definitely the motivator. I would never, it would never have happened without her. And so I'll give her, you know, 99% of the credit.
- [43:05]
C
So we also have a big startup community that are building on Snowflake. And the book is very much written for founders, for entrepreneurs, sales and marketing leaders. And the book, it's not a book with leadership frameworks or marketing frameworks. It's really, you know, behind the scenes. What happened? What's the good, the bad, the ugly? What are the near misses? What were the hard things that we had to go through on a day to day basis? And a big part is really about leading, you know, teams and making really, really hard decisions on, on both hiring and parting ways with people. But if you're not willing to do those things, it's going to be really, really hard to, to build a company.
- [43:51]
B
Right. We're talking about the tension between sales and marketing. So as a CRO and CMO duo writing the book, were you reliving some of the tensions in terms of what's important, what's the lesson of what should this be? Did you find sort of that tension and then you had to work it out to make a coherent book?
- [44:13]
C
Actually, I don't think there were ever any tension really maybe between individuals, between the two organizations that we need to sort out sometimes. I at least don't. Maybe you think that there were tension, but I don't think so.
- [44:28]
A
I think, look, it wasn't always like Kumbaya, right? I mean there were things that were, were broken. But I think the lesson that we learned is be, you know, be open to communication, be open to feedback. Take that feedback and then act on it. Like my favorite trait about Denise as a business partner is I give her feedback and it's like, okay, let's do that right now, not like in a week from now, right now. And she has this sense of urgency that I, that I also have and I really appreciate it. So yeah, it's important that you know, you have that relationship. But yeah, there was tension sometimes, but we would resolve that tension at our level and make sure that it permeated throughout our organizations.
- [45:10]
C
And looking back at this journey as well, I mean, there were people that didn't succeed in our organization. Often they had got the feedback, they had been given feedback several times. For some reason they ignored listening to that feedback. And though they didn't last, I think that's a very important lesson. Right. Feedback is definitely a gift. It can be really hard and hurtful when you hear it. But if you're not willing to listen to that, it's going to be very hard for you to grow and succeed in an organization. I mean you learn through feedback. And I think if there's something at the moment that is critical is to really be a lifelong learner, to be able to adapt quickly. I mean those are the people you see succeed in business today.
- [46:04]
B
Finally, this is sort of like take your pick. If there's a CRO, a cmo, even a founder listening to us right now, what would be one thing that you hope they're underlining from make it snow that they can bring up at the next all hands?
- [46:24]
C
Establishing the culture and values early. And it's also about as Frank Slootman came in, right. The values are not just, you know, written on the walls, right. It's really about how are you truly executing on those on a day to day basis. And if you're failing on living up to those values, there should be consequences as well. If there's no consequences when you're failing on your values, then you have no values. Right. As well. So I think that has been really critical to Snowflake's success. The alignment not just across sales and marketing, but really the value across every single department. Snowflake has been a very mission driven company and every CEO we've had, we have our third CEO now, Sridharmaswamy. They've all been really driving the organization towards the mission. The mission is really been what's been uniting, you know, every, you know, person in the company. So have a clear mission is super important as well.
- [47:29]
A
Well, I don't want to be super stereotypical of a sales leader, but revenue matters and, and there's no like, hey, Engineering can't say hey, we have a crap sales team. Or marketing. Can't say we have a crap sales team. It's gotta be like, let's look at this as a whole. Do we have the, do we have the right marketing to sales? Are we doing the right things from a demand generation? All of these things are important. So I think, you know, the North Star is revenue. If you are not growing revenue and sustainable revenue. If you've customer churn stuff like that, then you have to look yourself in the mirror and it's not always going to be obvious if you just say well, that salesperson's terrible. Well why, why are they losing? And I think that's really important is, is, is digging a layer deeper in that.
- [48:15]
C
Yeah. I think when you start pointing finger, either you have a fundamental problem in the company, right. You don't have a product market fits, or you have the wrong people. I mean it's either one of those two and you as a leader are going to have to determine kind of what the path is next. But if you start pointing finger at each other, it's such a waste of time. And while you're pointing fingers, your competitors are running, you know, you know, by you right at that time.
- [48:43]
B
The book again is Make It Snow from Zero to Billions How Snowflake Scaled its go to Market organization. I'm a big fan of business books that have tangible examples that anyone at any stage can pull out and use tomorrow. And I think Make It Snow has that in spades. So Denise, Chris, thanks for coming on and talk to us today.
- [49:05]
A
Thanks Brian.
- [49:06]
C
Thanks Brian.