Snowflake CEO: Scaling Data, AI Agents and the New Software Era

Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And today, I'm joined by Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO of Snowflake. Snowflake is basically the data platform that many of the world's biggest companies run on. So when your bank approves a loan or when a hospital pulls together patient data, Snowflake is often the engine underneath. Sreedhar spent fifteen years at Google where he built the advertising business from 1 and a half billion to over a $100,000,000,000. Then he walked away to start his own company, and two years later, he became the COO of Snowflake. Now here at FNB, we are investors in Snowflake, and we are also big users of the products. We have two petabytes of data in Snowflake, which is the equivalent of 2,000,000 gigabytes, and we have roughly 3,000,000 queries into the database every day. So big welcome, Sridhar. Thank you, Nikolai. Happy to be here. Excited for the conversation. Excited for the conversation. First of all, how would you describe Snowflake to somebody who's never heard of it? In brief? We are yeah. We are a we are a data platform. We are like a cloud computing platform, like an AWS, but with a strong focus on data. We help you do everything from bringing data from various different systems, analyze it, get insights from it, and then, take it to the systems where you take action. So we are an analytic data platform. Who are your clients? Gosh. Half the, global 2,000 companies that are addressable, that is non China companies, are, our customers. Hundreds and hundreds, of, customers in financial services, health care, advertising, industries. The list goes on and on. And, we are, we operate out of more than 25 countries and have customers in way more than those. When when the company was founded in, 2012, to separate storage from compute was Yeah. Was pretty radical. Right? Just tell us about it. Yeah. The simplest way to internalize that really important concept is to think about how you and I have always bought or used computers. I tell people for the past fifty years, whenever you and I wanted computing or our company, we would go buy a box. And that box would have a fixed amount of storage, a fixed amount of compute, and a fixed amount of memory. And, you're generally stuck with a box for, I don't know, five years. So if you decided that you wanted more memory, well, too bad. You wait. If you decided that you bought too much compute, too much CPU power, well, that's too bad. You already bought the machine. And so that's the essence of it. By the way, your phone is another box, just a little box. And so and it was also really hard to move data from one box to another. That was an integration project. Snowflake radicalized things, by sitting on top of cloud computing, which effectively are infinitely large databases …