EP 147: How Chris Degnan Built Snowflake's Sales Org From Scratch

Speaker A: Getting our first hundred customers was impossible, was so hard. Imagine selling with no website stealth Mode on my LinkedIn profile. Having a good sales methodology behind that was what I think helped us a lot.

Speaker B: Eleven and a half years. How many actual near death experiences do you think there was?

Speaker A: There was one really, oh my God moment. We were down for four hours, but if we had not come back, we would have been dead.

Speaker B: What are the types of things you think about setting up day one?

Speaker A: I think number one is having a great enablement. You have to have a sales kickoff. Everybody in your sales organization needs to have a forecast call every week. These are the things that are the non oceans. Well Chris, thanks for doing this, Logan, thanks for having me.

Speaker B: So, for people that aren't familiar, and I'm sure a lot of people are, but can you give a little bit of your um, background and uh, maybe most relevant, your journey at Snowflake?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So I, I started uh, Snowflake in November, uh, of 2013 as the first sales rep. We were in stealth mode. And uh, I was the Director of Sales, uh, hired by an interim CEO in Mike Spizer from Sutter Hill. Um, and I worked with a bunch of founders. So I was like, depending on who you ask, either the 13th or the 16th employee at Snowflake. And um, from there became VP of Sales under Bob Muglia. And then Bob then promoted me to Chief Revenue Officer. Um, and then Frank Suitman came in after they fired Bob. And 11, uh and a half years later I retired or, you know, stopped working at Snowflake, most recently in May of uh, 2025. So just very recently.

Speaker B: So you had four different CEOs along the way? Uh, I don't know if I've ever heard of anyone, um, actually having gone on that journey. I, uh, guess. What do you think uniquely, um, allowed you to uh, survive and then thrive among such different leadership and transitions?

Speaker A: Well, the, you know, first of all, I think throughout the entire journey I probably had imposter syndrome and still do. Never thinking that I actually belonged, uh, in the seat. Um, so high degree of insecurity along the way. Um, but you know, I guess at the beginning, um, when Mike Spicer was recruiting me, I was really nervous, uh, about working for a company with no products, no customers, um, uh, and really no CEO. Most importantly no CEO because the founders didn't want to be CEOs. And so, um, I said to Mike, I said, mike, it would be great for you to have someone on the board, uh, who cares about me, who knows about me, and he said well, what do you mean? I said well at my last company I had like a year, a little over a year stint. Uh, I had spent eight years at emc and then I went to a startup in the security software space, uh, called Avexa where a guy by the name of John McMahon was uh, on the board. And so I got to go meet know John and really respect the heck out of John. And so I said, you know, it'd be great for you to put someone like a John McMahon on the board. And, and I kid you not, you know, Mike was on the board of a company called Sumo Logic with John and, and and had a board meeting the next day, asked John to be on the board of Snowflake and said okay, I've taken all your objections, uh, uh, you know, off the table. So having a guy like John was incredibly helpful when Bob Muglia came on board. And There, there are two reasons. Number one is Bob had never, Bob had run 15,000 person organization at Microsoft but he had never managed a, ah, direct Salesforce. And so uh, there was a constant friction um, between finance and sales around what productivity means of a sales rep, how fast should we hire, um, and how do we measure. And really John helped me deal with that in a number of ways. Um, number one is are we getting enough leads for marketing if we weren't? John's like you've got to go fix that or you're going to get fired. And then he'd say okay, don't let finance treat uh, people who are employed for three months as a quarter productive or whatever it is that you want or half productive. They're not productive until six months and a day. So he was really helpful in helping me negotiate uh, headcount, uh, uh, rep to manager ratio se to uh, uh really the whole model, the whole sales go to market team, um, and helping me build that out. And that was so important along the way in the beginning. So Bob, Bob would not believe me sometimes and then go to John and John would really validate what I was doing and then I would ask John for a lot of help around what, what does productivity mean? How should I measure this? What does enablement look like? There's a whole bunch of things that John helped me and Bob with. And then um, you know, when uh, when Bob got, I mean I, I owe, I would say m, you know I owe Bob um, you know a major part of, of my career because even at my retirement party Bob and Spicer were there and Bob you know made sure to make a Point of saying, you know, Mike wanted to bring someone in, um, over me. Um, and Bob had said, you know, I really, you know, I said to Mike, well what are you looking for that Chris is not doing? And he said that, you know, look, Chris is hitting his number. He's hiring great people. He's you know, driving a great culture in the organization. I'm unsure of what I'm trying to hire for. And, and really that was obviously that was meaningful enough for, for Bob to then promote me to the chief revenue officer. And then. So I was devastated. I, I mean really devastated when, when uh, the board let. Let Bob go and, and Slman, you know, even Bob and I joke, you know, he's, he's like, um, he's like uh, I. There. There was no chance. I thought you would keep your job under, under Sloopman. And uh, when Frank came in, um, he was doing one on ones with the entire executive team. And uh, I walked in and I said to Frank the very first time I ever met Frank and I said to him, m. I said there's really two things Frank that I want from you is number one, we were working on a real first hundred million dollar deal and Bob was right in the middle of that deal. Um, and I said, so I'm going to need your help, uh, with the CEO of that company. Um, number one. And then number two is we have the best marketing department in the world and you should not mess with that. And he's like, wow. He's like, you're the first one of your, uh, peers to walk in here in this one on one and not talk smack about, you know, the other peer, your other peers. I'm like, well, I got nothing but good things to say about marketing. Now. I certainly had opinions about other people, uh, in the organization, but, but I think that you know, set the tone right with, with Frank and, and you know, ultimately Frank. It took up Frank and I, they were touch and go moments for sure. I had to make some material changes under Frank. Like I had to change the, the entire organization. Um, uh, you know, mid year in terms of how we were structured. I had to fire, you know, a very senior leader, uh, in the team. Um, like just kind of like that. Um, and so there were some material changes that I had to make under Frank's watch and we got through that. So the first seven, eight months were really, really, really brutal. Um, but as I got to the other side with uh, Frank, he and I developed this, this great relationship. And, and ultimately you know what I, what I Would say what, what why kind of lasted with, with four CEOs was. And I asked McMahon, this is. He's like, you know, Chris, you, you, you listen and then you, you, you, you don't, you, you don't come here with like this is how it has to be. You're very much humble. You're, you're listening and then you'll take action. Um, and he goes, you know, a. In your situation, as you've seen success, uh, you, you'll come in and you'll say well I know what I'm doing and, and, and I'm not going to listen to anyone else. And I, and I'd say like, you know, I would hire people a lot of times more senior than me, uh, working for me and I would listen to them. I, I mean, geez. The guy who ran APJ for me, uh, in, in John Robertson, he way, way more senior guy than I am. Um, and super helpful and in so many ways. And he was kind of my, my sensei, if you will. Uh, you know, towards the end is he, he was really guiding me on

Speaker B: a bunch of stuff.

Speaker A: And, and, and even with Sridhar. Sridhar came in and he's a very different manager than, than Sukman. Um, he had, he pointed out some pretty big holes I had in the organization. Um, and, and I think when you, you have success sometimes you can get, you know, fat and lazy. And, and Sridhar, uh, very much, you know, was like well let's, let's look at how do we optimize the sales team. And so I think Snowflake had a really great uh, first quarter and the results were just came out. Uh, and I was super proud of the performance of the team. And I will take credit in that we had to do some hard things through the course of last year. Um, and those changes really were difficult. Was, was mentally draining. But getting through those now the organization's set up for success. So I'm, you know, look, I think the, the net net is uh, I'll listen to people, I'll take feedback from anybody. It doesn't mean you're always. I'm going to do everything you tell me, but at least I'm going to contemplate it, think about it, internalize it. And then I'm not arrogant enough to say like you don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker B: There are a lot of stuff I want to unpack there. But um, so 11 and a half years, how many actual near death experiences do you think there was that, that, that it could have gone one way and you ended up surviving it. Sou2ish that you referenced there between, uh, the spicer, um, hiring someone over you, uh, and then the first couple months, I guess with Slootman might have been a little touch and go, but how many do you look back on? Do you think, you know, there was a fork in the road?

Speaker A: Um, well, as a company, um, there was one really like, oh my God moment. Um, we, um. So, you know, when Snowflake was early days, uh, we really went GA in 2015, in middle of 2015, and then, uh, in the middle of 2016. So around the August time frame, we did a mid year sales kickoff to kind of get everyone excited and saying like, look, things are going great. And I brought the entire sales team into. We were in the W Hotel in San Francisco and um, Bob Muglia is about to come out. And Bob's just this incredible motivational speaker. He's awesome. And uh, um, I clearly remember this. I'm like, okay, I get the team all excited and I see a bunch of people checking their phones and I'm like, what's going on? And I'm like, all right, give me five minutes, I gotta go talk to Bob. And I walk into the hallway and Bob is white. Um, and, and he's like, we're down M. And I don't know if we're coming back. And, and, and the product was down. The product was down. Um, and we were down. And uh, the founders were like, you know, it was like open heart surgery. They were like trying to like pump the, the heart, um, and trying to revive the product. And uh, and so that like, was scary. We were down for four hours. Um, and we thought we had this great company, but if we had not come back, we would have been dead, uh, as a company. And, and I clearly remember that that was a wild moment in the middle of a sales kickoff. And to Bob's credit, I said, bob, we have the sales team here. You've got to go tell them it's going to be okay. You've got to make everyone excited about the opportunity. And to his credit, he got up there and did it. But that was, that was like a company near death experience. Um, and then, you know, look, I think there, there's always, you know, I'm sure there's stuff I don't know about where, where people were thinking about replacing me. I think even when, when you go through a CEO transition, there is, you know, a high degree of possibility that, you know, the executive team changes and When Suitman came in, the executive team changed. I mean I think that the, the um, the executive team change has changed materially under, under Sridhar. So it, it happens. Uh, and, and you know different leaders come in, coming, come and go. But, but yeah, so I think that the, those were the kind of the, the big things. When, when, when, when uh, the, when Bob came in I, it was will I be the VP of sales? But then uh, Spicer wanted to you know, bring someone over me and then Slootman there was, and he even admits there were times where he was unsure if I was going to make it. Uh, so, so those are the, the ones that I know about. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Now if you're um, advising a company as you're now doing or joining the board or counseling um, uh, go to market leaders within venture backed businesses. Um what, what are the questions that you view as most important to figuring out um, the maturity of the sales organization and where some of the problems and bottlenecks potentially exist?

Speaker A: Well there's just some basics that you kind of. So, so the good news for me is you know I came, I learned a lot um, of my, in terms of enterprise selling at, when I was at dmc which is now part of Dell. Um, but they, the, the guy who ran my division was, was a, a uh medic, uh you know focused sales leader. And and so I learned that the medic sales kind of methodology, um, and then there were constants uh, that my direct manager uh, uh was just maniacal about and those things were ingrained in me and so that was good. But when you go to these other companies you realize they're not happening all the time. Um and so okay, number one is enablement matters a ton. Uh so you need to have a world class enablement that focuses on you know, whether whatever methodology that you want to follow. But we follow medic or medpic, um because of course McMahon was on our board. I came from that methodology and I believe in that. That's a great compass uh, to drive uh, a forecast and understanding, you know, how real deals are and stuff like that. So uh, I think number one is having a great enablement um, and focus investing in that. A lot of times it's hard because you're a startup, you're not making money, you're losing money. Hiring and spending money on enablement is scary but it's so critical if you're going to go hire out an enterprise sales team. And then number two is it's just like the basics. You would be surprised um, on Things like having, uh, forecast calls. You need to have a forecast call every week and everybody in your sales organization needs to have a forecast call every week. Um, and sometimes as Snowflake scaled, I thought because I did something, everyone else was doing it. Well, it turns out that's not even true. So you need to babysit that in a way, figure out how you can micromanage it without being a micromanager. Uh, but forecast calls, one on ones. Um, uh, you know, enablement, like, you know, monthly weekly enablement sessions, uh, you know, team, uh, your direct team meetings. Uh, those are the things that are like the, the non negotiable. So like if I'm a, if I'm a, ah, founder and you know, or, or I do this with, with uh, the, the companies I advise is like, this is the job description of the VP of Sales, SVP of Sales CRO. This is what they are supposed to do and if they're not doing that, that's okay. Here is their job description. They need to know that this is what their expectations are. Because sometimes these people that are the heads of sales don't, don't come from the backgrounds that maybe I came from. So I'll help them. Like, you know, if you have a, someone that is really good at selling your product and a really good sales leader but just needs some coaching, that's where I'll come in and say, okay, this is how we'll shape your day and your week and your month and your quarter. These are the things that are the non negotiables. You have to do a quarterly business review. Like everybody in your organization has to do that and you have to have a sales kickoff. These are things that people don't necessarily understand. You have to do all. And it's kind of weird for me because it's second nature, but those are things that are missing a lot of times. Um, in organizations.

Speaker B: You talked about enablement in laying the foundation for successful sales enablement, uh, within an organization. Like what do those primitives actually entail? Uh, and what are the types of things you, you think about setting up day one?

Speaker A: Well, look, you know, you know, in full transparency. I think in the beginning of Snowflake, I was the enablement person. So, so I, you know, I, I kid you not. Like there, there was a, I remember clearly, there was one of our, our first BDR hires I hired out of uh, uh, University, ah, of Colorado. Um, Tommy and, and Tommy came in and I had to show Tommy what it was, how, how a computer, uh, connected to the Internet and then, and like that and I was like whiteboarding it for him. So um, you know, and, and that's a, that's a kind of basic fundamental that you know, as you're a sales leader, you, you actually own. I don't care if you're the head of sales or a frontline sales manager, you own an element of your team. Ultimately it's on you. Um, and so at the beginning it was on me. It was on me to show people on how to, how to sell Snowflake. I would whiteboard uh, the pitch, I would record how I did that. I would show that to everyone. Um, but it was on me. I'm very much a lead from the front salesperson or sales leader. So I need to know how to sell the product and I expect all my sales leaders to know how to sell the. If you have a sales leader that, and you're a, at any level of a, you know, startup and you know, unless you're like a massive, massive company, you, you need a sales leader that knows how to sell the product because otherwise why are, why are they there? Because they're a great operations person. I'm sorry, that's not going to build you a great company. Um, and so, so to me, um, enablement starts with the sales leader and then if you can within enablement, you know, hire someone who's good at uh, making it a full program. Okay, we, we brought in like we brought in this company force management to help uh, you know, show uh, you know, the sales methodology of medpic, um, and really make that you know, you know, a real living thing for the entire sales organization. We did that and then we, we institutionalized that in our enablement. Um, so that when a new hire came on board they, they were going through that, they were being trained on what medic was or medpic was and so, so you, you can do that through E learning, um, but then, then you have to then make sure that it's in the system. So you make sure if you're using Salesforce you need to have medic med pick uh, uh, fields uh, that are filled out, um, and really filled out and you have to inspect those things. There's, there's all sorts of things that, that go into uh, enablement.

Speaker B: What question if you were a CEO, uh, of a business and at the end of the day there is a scorecard to some extent that is reflective of um, how a go to market team is doing. Um, but there's obviously a lot of inputs that go into that that are Outside of the go market team's, um, control related to the product and the, the market and marketing, as you alluded to customer, um, success, all these different things all kind of tie in together. Is there a question you would ask as a CEO, uh, that is the most confirmatory, uh, on whether or not the blame if you miss a quarter lies within the go to market organization versus somewhere else?

Speaker A: Well, you know, again, going to my, my, my training at emc, the way that I, I view a sales leader, um, in any level, um, is they have to. There's kind of three things. Um, you have to. First and most important thing as a sales leader or any leader, uh, you have to hire great people. So um, if, if you hire great people, uh, you develop those people that will drive revenue. So the, the, the, the kind of, the, the leading indicators are can they hire like who, who's coming in the door? So, so, so number one, who's coming in the door? Number two is are they being trained? And then you can look at the leading indicators. So like, you know, there's enough tracking tools out there today that you could see are they going on sales calls? Like are they able to go out and get meetings? M. And then are they able to convert those meetings to sales qualified opportunities? Um, and then you know, from that point on, are you then able to make a sales rep productive? That is ultimately. So, so for me, and what measured, you know, my success at Snowflake was the productivity of, of an individual contributor. Could we hire someone and get them to do a minimum of after six months? So it's not like on the first day of the sixth month, it's the first day of the actual seventh month by month, by month, you know, seven, day one of month seven. Can they actually sell $250,000 of net new ACV, or ARR, um every quarter consistently? Um, and that was the ultimate uh, metric that I was managed by. Um, and so what was happening is our productivity was going jumping through the roof. So we were seeing like in an inside sales organization you're going to see like, I don't know, 400k in productivity. We were seeing like a million dollars in productivity from our inside sales team. We were seeing like $2 million of annualized productivity out of our sales reps. And that's what got the, the investors excited. Now on the inverse, the investors were scared of Snowflake because you know, there was a time when I actually um, uh, met with someone, uh, who actually worked at Redpoint, is now at Snowflake, who told Me, uh, you know, that we needed to focus on um, on profitability. And I and, and Mike Spinezer was like we've got to get market share uh, before we get uh, before we focus on um, profitability uh, because our competitors are the largest companies in the world and they will kill us if we do not get market share. And um, we had product market fit. So I think the, the ultimate metric, you know, it's a long story, long story short is it's, it's the productivity of the sales team.

Speaker B: Yeah, got it. Um, as you think about AI uh being injected into every organization, I'm curious how you think about that changing elements of, of sales and what types of things you think it can be utilized for versus what's going to stay true about sales as it is today as it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

Speaker A: You know, I think when AI is, is going to be incredibly helpful with this is task automation. Um, so task automation on, on things like hey, you know I was hand picking at the beginning of Snowflake. I was building my own lists of customers to send emails to. I was sending 2500 emails, you know, as you know a week. If I could do it in a day, I was doing that. Um, but that was like very, very manual. Like that's a, that's a thing that you know I will be really good at. The other thing is like, like even at, even when I was um, at the end of my tenure at Snowflake, you know we would look at um, you know, because snowflakes a use a consumption based model. We uh, were actually using Snowflake's product uh, in our, in our AI product called Cortex to actually identify uh, use cases uh by, by notes uh, that were in uh up in, in in Salesforce that were updated by the sales team. So like hey for example how many migrate uh, uh data warehouse migrations, how many data science M migrations was Snowflake doing? And we use AI to pick that stuff out and say okay great, we have these leading indicators. Can we track that? So I think there's just a bunch of uh, more intelligence that you'll learn about you know, your sales team coming out of that. I do think that what will not be replaced is the, the relationship because you know ultimately people buy from people. Um and as long as you're selling to another human, uh, they want that relationship. And so um, you know I will tell you that you know one of my strengths is, is being a passionate salesperson and that you know I would come in and be controversial about my competitors sometimes in terms of saying like, good luck, you're going to fail in six months and I'll talk to you in six months. But, and they would, and then, and then I'd get back to them and we'd build this relationship and that carries on. So I think um, the relationship part of the sales, as long as you as the salesperson know what you're talking about, you have to know what you're talking about and you build these trusted relationships and you help your customers get promoted and also other stuff, you'll end up uh, being in a good spot. So I think the relationship, the human interaction can't not be replaced at least

Speaker B: for the near term in hiring sales reps and focusing on that human interaction. Um, what were the things that you would try to tease out in an interview that were non negotiable for success within your organization?

Speaker A: So, so we did, we did an actual, um, uh, early days, we did assessments of our uh, sales teams. Um, so basically I took myself and all of the early snowflake sales people and we all took these assessments and in these assessments we were looking for, you know, things that were consistent across people that were successful because we had, we had people that failed as well. And, and for us it was, you know, high intelligent, highly intelligent salespeople that basically, uh, uh, did not trust anybody, were very mistrusting of people. Um, and um, and you know, high energy and, and sometimes even low social because they were out there. You know, when someone says, yeah, no problem dude, I'll get you a deal, they would all be suspect of that. They'd be like, okay, tell me why. And that's part of the having a sales methodology is like you're going to qualify, like why now? Why us? Why anything? Um, and those are the things that uh, really good salespeople start to do is even then when someone says that they're going to do something for them, they don't trust them. And, and I think that was probably you're looking for that in their, um, in their background. So for, for me, you know, like, I didn't, when we were early stage, I was not looking for people that managed one account. I, I, I was looking for people. Show me in the last two years, uh, where you've worked and you successfully opened up new logos. Tell me about those new logos. How many new logos did you open? Um, tell me about the deals that you lost. Uh, tell me why you lost them. Um, tell me who was your champion when you won. Tell me who was the champion of your, of your competitor when you lost? Like, these are things that you can ask in the interview to start figuring out if they're, if they're BSing, because like, they could say, yeah, I won this logo. Okay, tell me more about that. Like, you could just ask like three levels deep and all of a sudden their story starts to fall apart or it doesn't make sense. Then you're like, okay, this person's full. Full of it.

Speaker B: So you talked about how the quality of the team is one of the most important, um, indications of a sales leader. And if they're consistently hiring great, uh, people around them, there's a, there's a tension that can exist between the need to hire people and ramp quickly, uh, with keeping the quality bar high for the totality of the people within the organization. Obviously Snowflake went through hypergrowth, but how do you think about that tension of needing to get butts and seats, but also making sure that the talent bar stays, um, to a quality that allows the organization to continue to pursue excellence?

Speaker A: Well, so, so, so first of all, you have to agree on a hiring process, especially when you're hiring fast. So, so, uh, you know, I'll give you an example is I, I am, I won't tell you the name of the company, uh, but that I, I'm an advising in a company right now, um, that they're in the. They, they need to hire over 30 people, like now, like right now. And their, their current hiring process, um, has uh, like multiple stakeholders in it. And at the end, uh, it has a committee. Um, uh, like you have to present to this group of people a panel interview. Um, and uh, they have a 50% failure rate at that panel interview. And it's like my head is exploding and I'm like, okay, uh, you can't do that. Um, number one is how the heck does someone get to the panel interview and fail? Like, what is happening in that interview process? Like, you've got, you've got some fundamental issues there with that. And the reason why I hate the panel interview is getting a group of people together, uh, uh, at any given time is going to be hard, um, from a, from just a timing perspective. So if every single person has to be a part of a panel interview that you hire, you're, you're, you're screwed. If you have to hire quickly, it's okay if you have to hire like one or two people a quarter, but if you're going to hire 30 people, 40 people in a quarter, no chance. And so you basically have to have an agreed upon hiring process that everybody follows. Um, and there are basic things that you're looking for. They have to have these things in the, in the um, fundamentals of it. So for us we did. Our assessment was part of that, that there was the sales rep that we were going to hire. So the way that it worked is you basically have a uh, four, effectively uh, four interviews. You have a, the hiring manager's selling on their first interview. Hopefully they're talking to someone that is currently employed, unemployed. I'm not super psyched on going out and hiring. There's got to be a really good reason why you're going to go hire an unemployed person. Number two is, all right, so you're selling the hiring manager. The second interview is you're buying like, okay, now you're doing the hard interview. Okay, great. Then you're going to have on the, on the uh, third interview they're going to meet with your manager and that manager is going to ask some really hard questions. And then finally it's going to be the, the, the second or sorry, the third line manager. So in, in my case I interviewed all of the, in the early days of stuff like all of the sales reps and I was looking for, you know, all these things. Now I had a great recruiting partner, um, that, that, that um, that worked with me and this guy, uh, by the name of Chad Pete. So Chad was incredibly influential, um, on it. And he would not like. There were also uh, VPs of sales that say I want to interview 10 people for this one position. Okay, again you're going to fail. So, so Chad would be like, I'm putting one to two people in front of you and you can say no, but these are the people like you've got to basically figure out are these your people? And he's making sure he's qualifying that we've done the assessments. He's making sure that he's babysitting that process. And we're getting through that process in two weeks. And, and, and when he would get on the phone with the uh, the uh, the candidate and they were, they kind of first they'd him and uh, haw. Because they're employed. Okay. You know, Johnny, you're gonna, we're gonna, at the end of two weeks we're gonna make a decision on whether or not you're gonna work at Snowflake or not. Um, but it's two weeks. So you have two weeks to go through this process. And um, at the end of two weeks you're either gonna get an offer or you're gonna get declined. But you have to make a decision. Two weeks. And if they say, oh well, I just want to meet them, get to know them, no, you're not in the process, not until you want actually to come and work at the greatest company, here's what they're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you've got to have a good pitch and all this other stuff.

Speaker B: It's fascinating. I've heard you talk in the past about uh, the board dynamics and maybe uh, at different points in time and I think you were being partially tongue in cheek but also uh, entertaining. And I think there's a kernel of truth, uh, in this being somewhat distrusting of uh, board members and VCs and the interests that maybe investors have versus uh, executives within the company. Um, can you maybe speak a little bit to, to that dynamic and how you think about as a go to market leader, um, interacting with, with investors and board members and all of that.

Speaker A: So, so Bob Muglia, you know, to quote him, said it best is, you know, the board is your friend until they're not. And uh, and so I, you know, do uh, not think of the board as your friend. They are not your friend. They, their job is to make sure that the investors, the shareholders, uh, are, are going to get a return on their investment. That is their job. And, and if for whatever reason, um, they think they're, that you are not going to give them that return, they will fire you in a heartbeat. And I've seen that, I've seen that firsthand. Uh, I, I've watched some like, you know, again going through the, you know, uh, Suitman transition, uh, with, with Bob. That was, that was wild. I mean it was like boom, overnight. And so to me, um, you know, I learned a really good lesson as you know, as the chief revenue Officer, I was not trusting of any of the board members. I would ask them for help. We had some wonderful board members, everyone from John McMahon, Carl Eschenbaugh, um, uh, but man, don't think that I didn't think that they were my friend, um, because again they're in there trying to maximize shareholder value. And that's what Suitman also said to me. He's like, look, do you think the board is. And he, he was just more just self aware of it than Bob was is. He just said, do you think they're my friends? He goes, they could care less who I am. They want to make sure that they're going to make money. And that's it. And if you do not operate that way, you're mistaken. They are not your friend. Um, and so I think I've just kind of gone into that knowing. And so like, you know, look, when Sequoia invested in stuff like, Carl Eschenbach is a world class guy, he sat on our board and he's now the current CEO of, of Workday. Um, I was very, you know, Carl, Carl came from VMware. They did six month quotas. I had never done six month quotas. And I would kind of do what VCs do to people when, uh, they're not really going to invest in the company and say, that sounds good, Carl. Uh, and so like when a vc, and I've been in plenty situations, there are a lot of VCs that passed up Snowflake, uh, for many reasons. Uh, and they would say, oh yeah, that sounds great, we'll get back to you. Um, and that's the VC way of saying, I'm not doing anything. We'll get back to you in a week, a month, a year, whatever it is. Um, but not now. And so that would kind of be the thing for me is I would never be like argumentative with a board member, but you gotta be careful, uh, because you can't just say yes to them and not do it. So I would say, let me think about it. Um, that would be the thing. I would never say no. But if I said yes to something, I would go out and do it. And that would be the thing that I would just encourage people to do is just be aware if they're strongly suggesting something and you don't do it, um, you're going to probably lose your job. Um, and so just like when Suitman said, okay, um, you've got to reorg the sales team, um, in the middle of the year when he just arrived, I'm like, well, can we wait to the end of the year? And he's like, no. I'm like, okay, well there's, I guess I'm doing that right. There's not a, there's no choice. Um, and, and so those are the things that you just have to be very, you know, software. I think, you know, having a, you know, high EQ is, is helpful, um, in these roles because you've got to read the room and you've got to figure out when, when like they say something, how much you actually have to do it because then you'll start to

Speaker B: realize it sounds like you had a, uh, strong advocate and mentor in John McMahon who's um, certainly a legend, um, in selling, uh, and uh, in enterprise sales. And obviously the tree, uh, of people that have learned under him speaks for itself. But do you think that's important for a go to market leader to have an advocate at the board level? Be it ideally someone that's done it before or a legend in their field, but also potentially an investor, just someone that you, you know, is, is in your corner or was that just a unique, um, set of circumstances to have someone like that, uh, given the connection you had and, and my consumer logic that led to McMahon joining Snowflakes board,

Speaker A: I think it's critical. I mean I, I, I think, um, look, I always tell the founders you don't want to hire. Like people always reach out to me and say I would, I would like, hey Chris, I'd like you to be the Chief revenue Officer. And I'd say, no, you don't, you don't want me to be the chief. I'm an officer because I'm, I'm not desperate. Um, I was desperate when I took this job. I was desperate to be successful and that matters. Um, but, but me having McMahon on the board, it was incredibly impactful. Like, there's zero chance I would have made, made this journey without him. Not no chance. And so I owe a lot to John because John very much, like I said, coached Bob through different phases and kind of helped me also help me recruit people. So you know, when I was out there saying, you know, hey, John McMahon's on, uh, our, on my board, it helped me recruit sales leaders. I had John interview people for, for me. And, and so like, you know, I would recommend, if you want to build a strong enterprise sales team, I would recommend having a guy like John McMahon on the board because I think it's, it's just, it helps on the sales side in terms of recruiting great talent. Um, it knows that, hey, the people that follow Medic, uh, they know that you're, you're the godfather of Medic is on your board. Um, and they want to learn and you want to come learn from a great sales leader. Like, these are all the things that, you know, good, good sellers are looking for. Um, so for me, yeah, it was, I would recommend having that. Now what I also come to find out, especially in the role, the role I'm in now is that these, there's a lot, there's, there's a ton of arrogance in founders. Like these young kids that went to, you name the Ivy League school, um, they think they know all and I don't want to work with those people. In fact, I make it a point of not working with those people because they think they're, they're these unicorns. They built this great company and they could do it their own way. Well, guess what? You could do it to your own way until you can't. Um, and that you can't is you're gonna fail because you did something so stupid. You're wasting money, you're doing all these stupid things and they're not willing to listen. And so to me, um, I'm looking for humble founders. I'm looking for smart founders. I'm looking for people that elicit feedback and ask for feedback and do stuff. But if you go to someone and say, well, we're unique, and my response is, no, you're not. No you're not. Um, and I don't like in the enterprise software space. You are not unique. And I'm like, Snowflake was this amazing, magical thing, but we had a sales process and a sales methodology that got us. Getting our first hundred customers was impossible, was so hard. Imagine selling with no website. Imagine selling with, I couldn't, uh, stealth Mode on my LinkedIn profile. Those were all things that were really hard. And having a good sales methodology behind that was what, what I think kept us alive. So, so I think, um, you know, those are all things that, that making sure that the, the, the founders value sales and putting someone like, like a McMahon on, on their board, they should absolutely do it.

Speaker B: I'm curious, you, you've, you've worked under a number of, I would say, legends in the industry. It's probably safe to say between Spizer and Slootman and McMahon. Um, these are, these are some of the iconic names and I guess I want to um, unpack a little bit of your, your um, biggest learnings or biggest takeaways from some of those people. Um, so I guess question as it relates to John. What do you think has made John, um, such a, uh, legendary sales leader, uh, in what he was able to do at um, you know, BMC and Blade Logic and ptc, but then perhaps even more interestingly, such a legendary sales mentor over the course of the last decade?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, look, John, what I think people, people think that John is this like, hard ass. And what I would say is John, John is. But a lot of the guys that, that, that actually have worked In a John McMahon sales organization try to be John McMahon. And, and John and I have had this conversation. John is. There's only one John McMahon. Um, and you cannot replicate John. You can take and learn from John and try to do that. So a lot of these guys come out. In fact, one of the reasons that I, I took the job at Snowflake is there was a, there was a bunch of sales leaders that wanted me that, that actually had, had worked under John at bmc that wanted me to work for them. Um, and all of them were a bunch of. And I don't mean to use a bad word, but they were just arrogant. And I'm like, I'm not gonna go. I just didn't. I was turning 40. I didn't want to go work for these people. I'm like, I. It was calling my midlife crisis, if you will. But number one is John is not an. John is, uh, very, very metrics driven. John is, is, is very much like his. He, he has a way about him of figuring out, is this person doing what I'm telling them to do? Are they following the rules? Are they doing, uh, do I believe what they're saying? He has this intuition that is just, hands down amazing. John is hard. He'll hold you accountable, but he's not an asshole. Now I'm sure people have been fired by John. I'm sure they're going to say he is, but, but he's, but he's, he's, he's really a very, uh, good guy that every time I get off the phone with John, I just talked to him last week. Every time I get off with him, he still says, call me anytime, Chris, call me anytime. So he has this way about him that he's a hard ass, but he has some empathy in him. Um, and he's very much, uh, someone that will listen and then act versus act and then deal with the consequences later. So I respect the heck out of John. Um, and he's like that. And Suitman is the same way. Suitman's like, hey, man. People would say, what's the Frank Suitman's playbook? And Frank's like, I don't have a playbook. I, uh, it's, it's situational. And I think that's, you know, all these great leaders that I've, I, I had to, you know, I've got an opportunity to work with. They have these, in these, these intuitions that are just amazing. And they can, it's situational leadership. It's not like this is how you do it there. This is like, you have to be open to saying, like, well, I did it this way over here. But it makes sense that you're doing it this way. Like Suman had such a bad experience at Servicenow launching Japan and he looked to me because I was a sponsor for Snowflake Japan. He looked me in depths of my soul basically saying I had this consultant in saying we should do it. He almost said go away to the consultant and said Chris, are you going to make this successful? And I was like, I had, it was a scary moment and I had to look, you know, Frank in the eyes and say Frank, I got this and I, I was all in like that. I, I had to spend so much time ah, launching Japan and it was, it was a lot of work but great. You know, it turned out really, really great for something. So, so I think those are the, these, these guys are just have these unbelievable intuitions and, and it seems, it

Speaker B: seems like one of the meta points in that is a level of um, perhaps self awareness to not try to recreate um, what uh, like B. John McMahon. It sounds like you, you, you uh, were able to internalize a lot of different aspects of what made him successful without directly trying to emulate him. Is that, is that a trait that you purposefully hire for or is that a circumstance of your own personality?

Speaker A: You know, I, it's probably even, you know, goes back to like, you know, you know, you were raised by your parents and there are things that your parents did well. There are things that your parents didn't do well. Um, and it's one of those things of like okay, I want to take the good and try to make that part of how I bring up my, my m. Kids. Um, and, and that's, that's no different than um, but I don't want to, I don't want, I want to take the bad out. Like, I don't, you know, like hey, back in the day when I was growing up, you know, you, you get spanked, right? Like I guess what, that's not, not allowed nowadays, right? So you, there's ah, there's different things that you just have to make sure that okay, I, I, I'm going to learn from that. And so I think you know, I worked for the same guy at, at EMC for eight years that I learned so much from him, but there were a lot that I didn't like about how he treated people and stuff like that. But man, I learned a lot from him. So uh, to me I'm so thankful for the guy that I worked for because he taught me so much some of the fundamentals of sales. Um, and I think it's just Important to any leader that you take that good, you make it your own, um, and you not be an asshole about it. I think those are the things that you can still have empathy. You could still be a real human, but hold people accountable. And, and, and I think you learn from both your successes and failures.

Speaker B: You touched on some element of this with regard to Frank Slootman. But, um, I'm curious, like, what's something that's maybe superhuman about Frank, and it's just like, uh, not replicable, um, but something that you admire? And then I'm curious, what is something that you were, um, able to internalize or you would recommend other people, um, just do that. You kind of learn from him.

Speaker A: Well, you know, Frank. Frank wrote a book. And, and, you know, people are like, did you read the book? I'm like, no, because I lived it. Um, and, and, um, you know, Frank. Frank would say things like, he, he, he has this, like, just innate ability to actually read people. His ability to, to read people is just second to none. Um, and he's so, he could, you know, I'm a, I'm a bad liar. Um, and so he would know if I was bullshitting him, he would be like, okay, hey, Degnan's not. Is. I, I, I can read him so well that I know whether or not, you know, the forecast is going well, whatever it is, and I have a little bit of high anxiety about things. So he kind of liked that a little bit. Um, but he would kind of then coach me down of saying, like, dude, it's okay that you and I are worried about things. Um, but you can't let everyone else know. Uh, you can't let the rest of the sales org know that you're super concerned about something. Um, and so you would learn those things. It's like, okay, you need to exude confidence. Frank is a general. Like, you look at Frank, you hear from Frank, you want to. Once you get on Frank's side, you want to run through walls for someone like that. And I've never seen any leader like that. Frank has this crazy ability to lead. Um, and his leadership style is very much, uh, hard. And so he'd say things like, when there's doubt, there's no doubt. Um, and, and, and, you know, and he'd say, like, you know, like, when I'd want to go launch a, uh, you know, a new, you know, sales, uh, group, uh, like an overlay group or something like that, he would say, okay, you know, silly, stupid things. He'd say, like, eat like an elephant Poop like an ant. And so stuff like that. Like, okay, what does that actually mean? So it's basically like you're going to go out and you're going to, you know, uh, uh, eat as much as you, you can, but with a very small, uh, amount of people. Um, and, and, and so I think he, he just would, would very much like, you know, say, hey, go find someone who, who you can actually get the most leverage out of. But don't, don't go out and, uh, and hire a, you know, a ton of people until, you know that this group is going to be super successful. Then we'll scale it. But, but he's like, I'm not scaling it until, uh, you know, we're gonna, until we start to see, you know, the metrics come out of it. So there were a lot of things that I'd learned from him, um, in, in the process. Um, and again, it's his book. You lived it. So he, in every one on one, you know, he would grill me and I, I, he would grill me on all sorts of stuff. But I respected him. I respected how he went about things. He was not a jerk about it, but he was hard, um, and he held me accountable. Um, and so I, I just, you know, I think that's important for everyone is accountability matters. Um, and I think that's, uh, something that Frank was really good at.

Speaker B: Yeah. Interesting. Now, what about Mike, uh, uh, Spicer? Like, what, what, what, what Something that you learned from him? And what, what do you think makes him great at what he does?

Speaker A: Mike is a, a dreamer, um, and an incredible recruiter, probably the best recruiter I've ever met. Um, um, he convinced me to take the job when I probably, you know, in hindsight, like when I walked in day one, I was like, where, what the hell did I get myself into? But I, um, think, um, Mike, Mike thinks so big. Uh, he would be like, you know, when, when, you know, we were early days of Snowflake, he be like, we're going to create a $100 billion market cap company. And everyone in the room would be like, whatever, dude. Like, no chance. And sure enough, we have hit over $100 billion in market cap at some point. Um, and I think so, you know, trending in that direction, uh, again. Um, and I think, I, um, think, you know, the way that I look at Mike, um, is he, he, he, he has this really great ability to understand technology and then apply it to the business world and understand how big of a market it is. Um, he only wants to chase massive markets. Um, and I think and, and he can recruit world class people. He people. When you get in front of Mike, you're walking out there so excited about what you know, what he, he just told you. And, and you know sometimes it's fake it till you make it. And, and Mike does a little bit of that, of getting you excited about something that may not be 100% real but you make it real. And that was really what, what, what was the magic of Snowflake?

Speaker B: Do you, do you think there's advantages to actually being in stealth for an extended period of time? Having, having lived it with Snowflake,

Speaker A: um, certainly made it hard on me. So the reason, um, the reason that Mike wanted Snowflake uh, to stay in stealth was because we were going after architecturally we did something very different um, than anyone had ever done. And it was hard. And you know, as, as we interviewed Bob Muglia. Bob, Bob came from years uh, of working at Microsoft and you know what Bob has said there's probably like you know, 10 to 20 people in the world that can build a database from scratch. Now some of those people sit, sat inside of IBM on Microsoft. Um, and we luckily had three of those people that were working at Snowflake in our, in our three, three founders. Um, and, and he said it's really, really hard to invent like most of the databases like Amazon had launched, uh, had bought some source code of a, of a legacy database um, and launched it. And there was an actual, another data uh, warehouse startup, um, or forget the name of it, that, that, that uh, uh when Amazon launched Redshift they completely steamrolled the company. And the reason they steamrolled the company, there was no, no competitive moat. Um they were, they had taken an open source, I think it was open source postgres and just throw, threw it out there and said okay, we're going to make, we're going to make this a data warehouse. And, and that just didn't, didn't work. Um, and, and so you need to have this competitive mode. So Mike was, and that's something I've learned by the way when I talk to like seed companies, um, that is the thing that I want to look at the most is like what is your competitive moat? Technically I don't care if you have a great business idea, it doesn't matter to me. Um, but you need to have a great world class technologists uh, that are building those competitive moats. Luckily Snowflake had really you know, Benoit and Siri, uh, who were the Original co founders that had built Oracle had some core principle built uh, parts of the Oracle database and they had some core principles that they were so married to and they were like this is what we're going to build for Snowflake. And turns out that those principles mattered. And so um, Mike knew that um, that's why he wanted us to stay stealthy because he didn't want, he wanted to have an 18 to 20 month AH technology uh head start in front of people. So that's why he did um, made it hard on me. But, but it, it also kept the competition at bay. Um, um in terms of knowing what we were doing. Um and that's, that's was and people didn't even believe us or what we had done because building it, as I said earlier, building a database from scratch is hard. So as we started to get out there you actually had to show people all this stuff. And so the competition, the cloud providers, uh, they didn't know what we were doing. I mean even if they did they didn't believe we could do it. And that's why um, uh, uh it was helpful. That's not always the case that stealth matters but again to Spicer's credit if you want to build a big company you have to have a deep competitive moat uh and then you have to get m market uh share before your competition gets prom. And that was really his whole theory is okay get building a world class product and then get market share. And that's ultimately what drove the success of Snowflake.

Speaker B: Snowflake, uh, we were fortunate to be involved uh along the way and as it sits here today I'm looking sitting at a $71 billion business stock is uh right around 212. So a nice little run on over the last bit under um Sridhar's leadership and a lot of the work that, that you put in place over the course of the last couple years. Um, I don't know the right characterization or how you would articulate this or how it has been articulated but there um, was, there was a point in time that um Snowflake was, was materially ahead and scaling weight faster than um Databricks was who I think has become like one of the principal competitors uh out there or like another business that's doing um, exceptionally well. And uh, a lot of this initial AI movement databricks was able to do a good job capitalizing on I'm curious having, having lived that experience as an executive and one of the key people at Snowflake, um, what did you Learn from that experience. And what would you recommend about um, I don't know, paranoia for competitors or things that you would advise for companies going forward?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I certainly have a lot of passion around this subject. Um, look, we were years ahead in terms of market share um, with databricks and there was a point where we actually were partnering with them um, for, for a short bit. Um, but um, you know ultimately um, Snowflake, we optimized Snowflake to go public. Um, and that meant you know, creating leverage in the, in the sales team and also the engineering team, just the whole company. So you're creating you know, a more profitable company. Uh, um, and you know databricks even to this day is private. They're not profitable. Like examples are like they just bought ah, a company called Neon where they, they paid over a billion dollars for Neon. And Snowflake had offered. We just bought. Snowflake just bought a company, it's public information called crunching data for 250 million. Well we had a, they had a deal to buy uh, Neon, uh as well at a similar price point. And databricks doesn't care about profitability or dilution to their shareholders. So they just go out and buy and buy and buy and buy. There's, there's, there actually is some uh, um, goodness that comes out of what, what databricks is doing because they don't care about those things. They can go build these, these massive engineering teams. So soundflake's about a billion dollars ahead, rough on top, about a billion dollars ahead in revenue. Maybe it's, it's, it's, the gap is closed a little bit. But um, their sales team is two times the sales size of the sales team of Snowflake. Their engineering team is two times the size of the team of Snowflake. Snowflake's a public company now. Snowflake has to operate and generate free cash flow and show they're doing all these things to run a successful business. Databrick tends to do none of that. And there seems to be a very much uh, a willingness for people to continue to invest it. Really crazy valuations of a non public company that has no intentions of going public anytime soon. And I think the miss on Snowflake's behalf uh, was that our North Star was to be this cloud data warehouse. We hit that North Star, the number one cloud data warehouse. We won, we won and we should have kept going and we should have put our foot on the gas and we should have run right over databricks and we should have launched a notebook, a data science notebook. So if I diagnosed, uh, and I did diagnose where, where databricks is getting into our best customers, uh, where they were getting into the data science, um, uh, team and we weren't getting access to those people. And those data scientists were then building a bunch of, you know, uh, workflows or ETL jobs with Spark. Geez, if we had only done that. If we only built a notebook, if we only had hosted spark. But there were some core principles the engineering team didn't want to do. If we had done those things, databricks would have been dead. Dead. We would have killed them. Um, and we gave them air. And we gave them air because we didn't build out some of those functionality and we waited too long. Now we have those capabilities. But databricks has a huge head start. But we had a bigger sales team, bigger customer base, more loyal customer base, uh, less complex product. We could have killed them and we gave them air. And it's really unfortunate, um, I think uh, that we did, um, because that was a huge miss and that was on like, hey, look, this is always, you know, looking in the rearview mirror is always easy, um, to say, like, hey, you know this. We didn't know it at the time, but geez, we, there were some decisions we should have made earlier around, around some stuff that we missed and we gave them life when we could have just crushed them.

Speaker B: I'm curious, like those are there. That's the diagnosis. Um, at the tactical level of like how it sort of played out, I guess at a zoomed out strategic level is, is the lesson, just stay paranoid about all your competitors always and think through the low probability scenarios that might play out. Or how do you, um, if you're a founder, listening to this and trying to think about how to actualize that for themselves. What, what lesson did you take away that might be a little bit more zoomed out?

Speaker A: Listen to your customers. Listen to, I mean if you listen to your customers, um, and understand like never be in a situation where you're telling a customer this is how it has to be. Be in a situation where you have to listen to your customer and you take their feedback and you act on your that feedback. So the, the customers were telling us, okay, this is why we're bringing in data rigs. Okay, why? Well, uh, are data scientists need a world class data science tool set. Okay, great. They have a world class notebook. We could have bought, we should have bought a company. There's a great company called Hex we should have bought Hex, uh, and we didn't because it wasn't core to, uh, Snowflake. So to me it's, don't be arrogant enough to think that your customers, um, know better than you. They do know better than you because they're buying, they're speaking with their wallets. Ah. And you have to listen to them. And if you give these companies air, then it is what it is. And that's what we did. And so I think, you know, to any founder out there is like, be curious and be humble and take feedback. Because if you don't do that, there is going to be someone. I don't care who you are. This is going back to like, you know, meeting some of these founders of companies is like, they think they're unique until they're not. And this is like, you know, like I said with Bob Muglia, the board is your friends until they're not. Like, you just have to be self aware, you have to listen. And if you do not listen and you do not read the tea leaves of why is something happening? Um, then you're missing out. And I think it's hard because as you're building a company, there are things that can distract you. Like, for Snowflake, I clearly remember we went into this meeting at one of the major investment banks early on and they'd say this was when private cloud was a big thing. And they were like, hey, we've been trying to build what you guys have built. When are you going to run in the private cloud? And our founder Benoit was kind of master, uh, Yoda, and he said, hey, you'll go to the public cloud ever before we go to the private cloud. And sure enough, that investment bank was our first real big investment bank customer and still a big, uh, Snowflake customer to this day. So. So I think, you know, the reality of it is, is like there are some bets that you have to make that, that like, okay, core principles, like, hey, I'm not going to build on the private cloud, or I'm not going to build in the data center, whatever those things are. Those are some core principles that you kind of have to agree on. But there are other things that you have to be willing to, you know, give up and sacrifice and sometimes you miss on those bets.

Speaker B: I'm curious, one of the things that was implied, um, in your diagnosis of databricks and how they were able to execute in a, in a great, um, way with regard to some of the bets that they've been able to make. Uh, was some implied advantages or maybe explicit advantages in being in the private markets and not having um, the same

Speaker A: uh,

Speaker B: uh, quarterly cadence and public um, rhythm of needing uh, investors to be on board to the same extent that that happens in the public markets. Um, one. Can you unpack that a little bit? And do you think that the uh, the implication of that is that companies actually should stay private longer, uh, when they're taking some of these more ambitious bets or where do you fall on that, um, side of the spectrum?

Speaker A: Look, there are a lot of things I don't think databricks is doing well. Um, so I can't say. And again, if I'm a shareholder, if I'm an employee even, these are things that you just kind of don't understand. Especially when you're maybe a frontline person, um, maybe you're a sales rep or a frontline engineer or something like that. Sometimes you don't think about these things. But like at the same market cap that Databricks is trading in the private market, um, this is prior to this NEON acquisition, they were trading at about roughly $90 a share. At the same price point Snowflake, um, was trading at about $130 a share. Because they're more dilutive. They don't have any cash to buy companies so they buy it with equity. Um, so, so, so they dilute and so they're the CEO, he, he thinks he's doing the right thing. Maybe he is. But I've talked to a lot of VCs and say show me a company that's ever been private for this long and, and, and been successful, you know, in the long run. Um, so again at some point the investors are going to force his hand to go public at some point because they want liquidity. Right now in this world there is a decent sized private market for a bunch of companies. A bunch of Elon Musk companies are private companies. But they have a liquidity. OpenAI has liquidity. I don't know if it's right or wrong. Um, but again, um, if you are going after huge markets, AI is a huge market. So anthropic OpenAI, uh, AX AI, uh, they, they, they're going after these like I don't know the size of their market. It's ginormous. Um, there's some niceness of being private because you do not have to worry about things around profitability, um, or path to profitability as long as investors will give you money. And I think databricks is in that boat is they, they continue to Almost imply they're going to get the profitability, but they're not and they're continuing to lose money. So to their credit, they can go buy companies. They can go buy, they can go spend 3x more than what Snowflake, uh, will buy on a company. They've done it multiple times. They bought a company called Tabular. Snowflake had a deal to buy Tabular. There's a bunch of stuff that they can do that Snowflake couldn't do. So there is some validity in what they're doing. Um, whether or not that's right, time will tell. I don't know. Um, I'm not, this is not an area where I'm going to be an

Speaker B: expert in going from the private to the public markets. Um, what changed for you most in terms of, uh, how you ran the day to day of the business? And ultimately, do you think it made Snowflake a better business than it was in the private markets, or is that kind of a narrative that, that you think VCs maybe put out there to try to get liquidity?

Speaker A: Well, it's not just for the vcs. It's for the employees. I mean, look, you know, you work at. I don't know what the average tenure of an, uh, employee is. You know, look, you know, an average tenure for head of sales is probably 18 months. You know, for me to do it for 11 and a half years is probably, there's not, not a lot of longevity historically in heads of sales. So, you know, I think it's most important for the employees to have liquidity because there are, there's so much of your wealth that can be built in this one company. And if, if you can only sell 10% of your stock, um, you know, you know, and that's typically what happens in a, in a, in a privately traded company. It's hard, especially if you want to go do another job at another company because you're kind of handcuffed with these companies, I think. So to me, it's not just for the VCs. To me, it's also for the employees. And can you create wealth for these employees? Especially when you're, if you've been there from the beginning, I can only imagine some of these employees that have been at databricks for a long time, they've been able to sell some, but in theory I could sell all of my stock. And so, um, if I wanted to, um, and, and, and they can't, uh, because there's, there are some handcuffs you know, put on you when you're, you're treated as a private company. So to me uh, having liquidity um, is, is really important I think for employee retention, employee morale, um, and stuff like that. I think that's probably the most important thing now, um, in terms of operating the company, um, day to day. Yeah, I mean they're, you know, look, we have quarterly earnings. Uh, we have things that we have to make sure that we focus on and there's, there's a bunch of, you know, things around profitability. You know, Wall street cares about free cash flow so we had to make sure there are things that we've had to do to make sure that we hit those free cash flow targets and making sure that we operate in a lean fashion, um, which, which again can be good for the company and the shareholders. You're generating shareholder value. And I think this is to Sridhar's credit. He's re. Accelerating growth at a publicly traded company and running a Lean M. Lean machine. I think he's a world class operator and he's doing a great job, but it's a lot harder. His job is a lot harder than all he's at Databricks because he doesn't have those things that he has to think about.

Speaker B: You're um, you've had a great partnership uh, with, with your longtime counterpart uh, uh, at C. At the CMO role within Snowflake. So much so that I uh, think you guys are working on or writing a book um, together about that relationship and I don't want to um, give away the totality of the insights in the book and people should read it, uh, when it comes out. But I'm curious, what is the kernel that has made that relationship so successful and um, what would you uh, pass along to other companies that are trying to make those sometimes competing responsibilities or roles work? Uh, well together?

Speaker A: Yeah. So. I talk about this all the time with the companies that I advise and, and um, and I learned this from, from again Frank Slootman when I, when I asked, when, when stuff like went public, we became tech famous. Snowflake did and a lot of the executive team came, became tech famous. And so I got a lot of requests to be on whether it's advisor or board or whatever. And I went, I had to get Frank's approval. And uh, and I went to Frank and he said, you know, look, um, it'll be a really good thing for you to do because you'll see how messed up. He didn't use messed up. I just won't, I won't see what the other word he said, you can

Speaker B: say, I think we have the explicit tag on, uh, our Spotify and Apple account. So I think we're comfortable here.

Speaker A: You'll see how fucked up other companies are. Um, uh, and I laughed. Um, and so then one of my first advisory roles, I was like, holy cow. The CEO, uh, almost relished the friction between sales and marketing and would create this awful, you know, competitive situation between sales and marketing. And you know, uh, when, when we were growing, I was doing my own demand generation. I was like the demand generation machine for Snowflake. And that was. And John McMahon was like, dude, you're going to get fired if we don't fix this. Um, and so that's when we went out and hired Denise. And she's a demand generation focused cmo. And the first thing that she did, because I was arguing with the previous regime around what an MQL was, what an SQL was like, how many of the MQLs should I see all this other stuff? And she said, I'm going to stop right now. The day one, um, you are, um, my customer. Um, and we're going to talk about meetings and we're going to talk about qualified meetings and that's all we're going to talk about. Um, and then she would go and sit down and I ran the SDR team. She would go sit down with the SDRs, then she'd go and meet with the sales team and say, okay, tell me about the leads you're getting from the SDRs. Um, and then she created her whole demand generation program around making sure that we got qualified meetings. Um, and to me, that was like, she treated me as customer number one. She treated our sales team as her customer. Um, and she trained her entire team to treat us as the customer. And so to me, revenue matters the most. I mean, I don't care whatever anyone says in an enterprise software company. Um, I don't care if it's AI, whatever it is, revenue matters. And so she knew that and she said, I gotta get you in front of customers and prospects and generate pipeline for you. And that was the start of this wonderful partnership that Denise and I have had. So, yeah, we are writing a book, um, about our journey, um, because there are so many founders that have never managed a sales and marketing team that think there's friction. And they should say, well, this marketing team team is going to generate this many leads. You guys aren't touching those leads. That's a constant. She would always be like, no, we're, we're not having that conversation. Her and I would have it privately around okay, what's working, what's not. And each one of us would take action and even like take action on people. So if there were people that were cancerous to either organization, we would make changes based on feedback that we would get from each other. So we just built this really close relationship um, on working together. And I think that's incredibly important is having a great go to market organization involves both sales and marketing. Sales can't do it alone without marketing. Um, and I think that was the really important thing that kept Snowflake's um, engine going. And Denise is the best in demand generation in one of the top, if not the top uh, uh, chief marketing officers in the software space. Um, and so I was super lucky to get to work with her and her team and she built a world class team underneath her.

Speaker B: When does the, when does the book actually come out?

Speaker A: Coming out this fall. Uh, Let it Snow, I think that's the name of it. So I think, I think we're going to go with that. And uh, and it is, it's kind of a biographical, you know, story of Snowflake, but told in how we built the go to market machine of Snowflake. Um, so we're excited about on it. Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, well I will encourage uh, people to uh, to check it out when it comes out. Snowflake has been a prolific source of um, of uh, books that thus far I guess with Frank's book as well. And so I uh, yeah, excited to read it. Um, so I guess maybe we can wrap with a few rapid fire questions. Uh and I guess the first one, do you think sales um, LED and product led, sort of the PLG motion. Do you think those things can truly uh, coexist within a business or does one of those ultimately win uh, out in the fullness of time?

Speaker A: Look, I think um, it would have been great if we had a PLG motion first. Like hey, that would have been great if we had a bunch of leads uh, that were coming in, um, that people were using the product first. Um, we were, you know, there was complexity to our sales. We're selling a database, um, and so uh, we needed a very much a hands on approach to doing it. And so we focused on scaling out the go to market engine and built the whole team around doing proof of concepts and stuff like that. It worked out well for us if you can have PLG at the same time. So what we did is we focused initially on 100% guarded on who could Touch the product when they could touch it, all this other stuff to then driving a self service motion. So more of a PLG motion that came later. Um, and uh, Denise then focused the marketing team's effort on driving people to the self service portal so that people could sign up. Um, you know look, there's nothing that like more awesome than getting highly qualified leads that are in the pipeline. Eventually even if you're a PLG led organization, you need an outbound motion. You need you know, uh, to, to, to continue to scale your, your, your org. So I think they absolutely should coexist. Coexist. If you, if you're, if you're having a ton of success right off the bat with plg, lean into that. But eventually start in your mind. Like think of the likes of Anthropic. Anthropic's building out their go to market machine now. Um, but they were very much a uh, PLG led uh, uh organization. They have a huge consumer business but they are focused on selling into the enterprise now. And so um, I think there's a ton of that that matters. And I'm not going to say anyone is better than the other but you know, invest, uh, get market share as fast as you can. But you're going to need the other one eventually. Whether that's the uh, PLG or whether that's enterprise uh, software. If you aspire to sell into the large enterprise, you're going to need those motions.

Speaker B: What's one tactic or adage or something in enterprise sales that sounds smart but you actually believe is totally uh, incorrect or maybe just very overrated?

Speaker A: The products sell themselves. I mean you know people, people think that you know, it was easy selling Snowflake. I uh, you know even you know when I would do new hire trainings at Snowflake, even like the last new hire training I did, I told the people in the room, there are people in this room that will fail, um, because they're, they're, you like they're basic fundamentals that you have to do to be successful in a sales job. So the core fundamentals were for me we had a great product. You have to go tell that story eight times a week. So eight face to face meetings a week is like you gotta do it. And by the way, it's grunt work. It's to pick up the phone and cold call people and ask them to meet with you. They don't want to meet with you. Right. And force your way into uh, an opportunity. Those are the things that are, that people think are easy because, and that was a, uh, huge misperception of Snowflake. People would come into Snowflake thinking, look at how great that company is. I remember talking. There's plenty of sales leaders that we've hired that have said that. To me, on the outside looking in, it looked really, really easy. But in the reality is like every day we're knife fighting. And so I was looking for where I couldn't hire people from a Salesforce and have them be really successful at Snowflake because Salesforce Is, is like 98% market share. They don't know how to open up new logos. Uh, they know how to like, you know, manufacture, you know, deals around pricing structures and relicensing things and stuffing other products into the deal. They do not know how to create demand. They do not how to sell through an actual campaign. And so to me, that's where the big difference is, is, uh, is actually figuring, uh, out, like, do. Does a person, does a salesperson have the ability to generate their own demand, um, and close deals? Because to me, like, that's the, the misperception that this journey itself, like, was this super easy journey. It was never easy.

Speaker B: Um, I guess as we, uh, as we hop, uh, I'm curious, like, what's the biggest red flag that you see when talking to a founder, um, or an early sales team that makes you think they, they just don't have the, um, the understanding of what it's actually going to take?

Speaker A: Again, it's arrogance. There's this founder I've met a couple times of a company that's doing quite well, um, but doesn't believe in traditional sales, um, and I'm thinking to myself, uh, okay, um, you know, better than, I don't know how many years of enterprise, uh, selling there is. I don't think you do. Um, and I think it goes back to being arrogant. Um, if you think your shit don't stink, uh, you're wrong. And, um, I think again, it comes back to. My favorite founders to work with are people that want feedback and act on that feedback and are humble enough to admit that they're wrong and act quickly. Um, and if you do not do that, I don't want to work with you. You, um, because I think that's like the, the reality of it is, is like, you know, you can, you can, because you have a great product, it can get you to a place, but that place will come to an end and it's better to get ahead of it, um, and make sure you have a great product and a Great. Go to market organization together and that's when you really can crush it.

Speaker B: Um, I guess, uh, one final one as we, as we wrap. Um, what has you most excited today as you start to move into more, um, board, uh, roles and advisor roles for business? What's the, what's the thing that gets you most excited?

Speaker A: Finding the next Chris Deggan. I mean, I want to, I mean I was, I was, um, no one. I was a frontline sales manager at emc. I was a second line manager for a hot minute. Um, and there were a lot of people that developed me, um, from Bob to Frank to John McMahon to Carl Eschenbach, um, even Sridhar. Um, and so to me, um, I want to develop, uh, the next generation of sales leaders. And to me that's the most exciting part that I get. People always say, hey, Chris, do you want to be a CEO? Absolutely not. I do not want to be a CEO. I want to help, um, build great, go to market organizations and I want to help develop the next great sales leaders. Like, to me that's, that's what gets me up out of it.

Speaker B: Well, Chris, thanks for doing this. This is great. Uh, I have uh, a ton of respect and admiration for how you've, uh, led throughout the Snowflake journey. And as, as an investor, a long time investor, I guess at Redpoint, and a personal investor as well. I'm super appreciative of all the hard work you've, you've done and so excited to see um, what, what these next chapters look like for you.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Logan, it was great talking to you. Thank you for your time and thanks for having me on your, on your podcast.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks, Chris.