From data breach scandal to AI darling, with Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/e1cf2d6b4adb5982

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Just separating out what is real.
From what is hype.
I think is very hard.
And I don't think the AI industry helps itself.
Uh with things like not talking about hallucination rates or not talking about
What does it take for something to truly be enterprise great?
There's a little bit of a look ma it's so cool.

I think there is a maturity process that is going to happen.
Figuring out what is real from what is hype.
is the biggest challenge that business leaders face today.
Mm.
That's Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of the cloud storage platform Snowflake. It's been a wild few years for Snowflake, from a record breaking IPO to a plummeting stock price to a data breach scandal.
Sreder took over as CEO in the heat of the turmoil and has helped steady the ship in part by leaning into AI in a very specific way. Today he shares from the company's in-process turnaround, including insigns high-profile partnership with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Why Snowflake embraced China's deep seek early, and how the buzz around agentic AI is being broadly misunderstood.
There's a lot to cover, so let's get to it.
I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I'm Bob Safe and I'm here with Sridhar Ramswamy, CEO of cloud data platform Snowflake. Sri Dark, it's great to see you.
It's wonderful to see you, Bob.
Snowflake has been on
Quite a roller coaster. It had the the biggest software IPO ever in twenty twenty, followed by a somewhat dramatic uh stock fall. You took over as CEO a year ago and almost immediately faced scrutiny related to a high tech data breach. Yet you've also been in uh
The heart of like the hottest
Business.
arena ever. A I
Snowflake was one of the first American companies to tap into deep seek the China based open source AI. It's all kind of head spinning.
How's it going? Like, has your first year CEO been what you expected?
Uh the first year has been amazing.
Uh a little bit more than what I expected in terms of drama.
But uh this is a time of rapid change and
I could not be more excited.
I had a a guest on the show recently who confided that a lot of CEOs were kind of
paralyzed right now by sort of external uncertainties in the world, you know, shifting tariffs and regulations and executive orders. How do you deal with and think about the sort of
the environment and all the changes relative to sort of the things that you can control yourself.
One of my firm beliefs in life is uh
But you need to focus on the things that you're going to have an impact on.
There are many things that
Let's face it.
we are simply not going to have any impact on
Obsessing about unchangeable things in the short term.
is the recipe for being uncertain about life.
There is a lot of micro uncertainty.
businesses will react and w we will have to worry, for example, if the stock market keeps going down or if the business climate gets worse, it will have an impact on Snowflake.
But so far it's been heads down.
Get great product work done, get great customer deployments done.
We first met when you were at Google, you were leading advertising and commerce and then
You started a a search engine company, Niva, that was ultimately acquired by Snowflakes.
Both of those businesses were more
Content focused and and ultimately consumer oriented than Snowflake. What's different about a a like a full-on B2B business?
There are many things that are similar in the sense that uh you make money off of deep relationships with your customers. Absolutely, s like commerce search was a consumer business.
But uh Google has an amazing enterprise business.
It's called ads. It predates, you know, the Google Cloud. And what was unique about Google, of course, was that a massive amount of revenue on Google ads is completely self served. It's quite magical.
Fifty.
of this absurd amount of revenue that Google makes is without ever talking to people. It's all done via web interface. It was quite magical. But
the core of what I did at Google, which is build highly reliable systems that never went down.
And for us that was all about money.
If search ads went down, you were literally losing thousands of dollars every single second.
That's enough motivation to not bring stuff down.
And then work the relationships on the enterprise side. There is a lot of commonality to it, but obviously
It is a new set of stakeholders. Google mostly dealt with CMOs. Here we mostly deal with CIOs and chief data officers, and thanks to AI, quite a bit of CEOs as well.
And so it's building up a new network of relationships, but
You know, that's good honest work and uh learning to cram twenty people's names into your head is a good exercise now as it was ten years ago.
Um it's good fun, man.
You recently said that Snowflake is the most consequential data and AI company in the world. That is
An ambitious assertion, especially for a business that at least previously was known as a data storage company. How do you back up that claim?
The most important data for the most important enterprises in the world is already stored on Snowflake.
Snowflake is the gold standard.
for analytics. We have something like
Seven hundred odd
global two thousand companies are on Snowflake. And if you exclude the folks from China that we are not even going after, that is seven hundred something out of sixteen hundred.
And uh
They all put their most important priced information on top of Snowflake.
large public companies close their books every month on top of Snowflake.
financial institutions share data with each other. Snowflake is the beating heart of the
At least the US financial system in terms of how data moves from place to place.
And uh what we have done over the past year.
Is make AI.
A natural addition.
to how Snowflake operates.
I think we are positioned incredibly well.
To continue what we did for data, which is make data now available.
True.
AI interfaces through conversational interfaces for these things.
to be tied strung together into workflows that are increasingly going to serve higher level business function.
And that's the reason for asserting
But we are the most consequential enterprise AI and data company.
Is there a bit of Benny off there?
You know, there are good qualities to mark.
Yeah.
I I I mentioned at the big at the beginning that Snowflake was one of the first US companies to adopt
Uh deep seek. You're also the only day the platform
a big one to offer models from both open air and anthropic. What did you see in Deep Seek? And second, like why have you leaned into having multiple models available?
Our strength is as a data platform. We are not a foundation model company and honestly
Most companies have no business of pretending that they're foundation model companies. It takes very specialized expertise, incredible talent density, and a very, very big wallet.
And so for this, we decided to go the way of partnerships. We collaborate
With a lot of folks, we focus on developing data products.
which in my mind is the place where value is going to be realized.
When people think about open AI
They think, ah, these are the people that make the foundation models. No no no. OpenAI is an amazing product company. Chat GPT is a legitimate product. It is going to approach the Pantheon.
Of like the greats.
The products that have a billion plus users.
And so
Helping people get value from models and the data that Snowflake has is what we are about.
and hence the leaning into heavy partnerships. Things like hosting Deep Sea quickly, you know.
That's just a little bit of making sure that you can still run the hundred meter sprint in ten seconds.
Um it was a challenge, it was an amazing model, we had it out in two days flat.
There was a lot of um
Anxiety about uh deep seek. You you don't necessarily
feel that same kind of anxiety or even if you do, you feel like you have to have it available.
Hm, let's break that anxiety down.
There are many parts of DeepSeek. One is the open source model. DeepSeq also offers services on servers that are hosted in China, but if you use their app, for example, everything that you're typing in is getting sent to China.
Now, without getting too much into geopolitics, people will rightfully say that sending business data to China is a bad idea.

that we have about TikTok.
Hosting the deep seek model does not introduce any kind of security compromise.
We host it.
We take security and risk management very seriously. Us hosting Deep Seek did not cause issues like that.
And any uh
Anxiety about
sort of, oh, deep sea can do things so much more cheaply than open AI. There are cheaper, faster ways to build these models.
See, that's the part of it that I actually like. That's not anxiety.
Mm-hmm. And the reason I like that is because if there are highly capable models that are freely available,
the value of the data that is in Snowflake goes up, it doesn't go down.
the value of the model companies go down and they have to innovate even harder
But innovation is a good thing for all of us. The cheaper that models get,
The more broadly adoption there is
uh the more benefit that we as society are going to get. And certainly Snowflake as a business hosting these models and running it ourselves without paying at all, let's face it.
You know, it can feel like that sometimes. Um, to a bunch of other parties is honestly a good thing. Competition is absolutely a good thing.
The big buzz in Silicon Valley today is around so called agentic AI. Now there's also some skepticism that like the the buzz doesn't match use cases yet. The customers aren't using AI agents as much as other simpler AI tools and chatbots.
quickly define for folks who may not know sort of what agentic AI is, and then kind of explain like why the buzz and the reality aren't
matching up or or at least not yet.
Isn't D A I is a vastly misused, misunderstood kind of word. It can honestly mean anything.
I talked to a bunch of search companies, friends of mine that have started companies
And they make honest to goodness like a search index that you can use to power a chat bot.
And they pretty much will look at me in the face and say, Shriar, we are powering agent D K I. That's what we do for a living. And I go, Wait, you make a search index. But
Be that as may be.
Ай тінь та промис.
Is
That
Language models.
are very good at coming up.
With plants.
for tasks. If you ask them a question, I'm a bank, I have access to
portfolios of stock that my customer owns, I want to create a report for Bob about his portfolio. What should I do?
It'll come up with a very good plan of okay, go talk to this table, get a list of all the tickers that Bob owns, get additional information about these.

Produce a great report for him.
At its core, Agentique AI is about stringing together
Different systems.
Also AI based
to do something larger than what any individual system can do.
Of course, you can imagine in the same example that I gave you that there is also access to a news corpus, some API that can f get news about the different stocks that are in your folder.
The same agent can go search for news that has happened over the past three days. And if something is deemed worthy enough, there's a little bit of coding involved in defining worthy enough.
It can say, Hey Bob, this is the current status of your portfolio, these are the movements and the fundamental metrics you care about, and here are top ten articles about the companies that you have in your portfolio in case you are interested in in reading.
What I've described here is a very simple agent tech system that is able to talk to multiple sources, make a little bit of decisions about what is worthwhile news to show to you versus not.
But you can imagine this getting more complicated.
Um I I tell people I dream of the day.
When uh I can have an agent talk to both United dot com.
and southwest to figure out what flight I should take. Right now I have to do stuff like that manually.
So I think those are coming
These are also pretty hard problems, Bob.
It all feels like it's just moving so fast.
Sort of like what's the next thing. I mean, you're'cause you have to plan further out to build these products and
Yeah, you're
It's hard to know what's gonna come next.
That's life in AI. It is pretty hard to keep up.
But on the other hand, the value that some of these tools can create is truly extraordinary.
Uh I've been using Gemini Deep Research, I use Chad GPD Deep Research.
and the amount of value that I can get out of them
is astounding.
I think tools like that are here to stay. We are driving the adoption of those tools all across our sales teams.
Because right now, before you meet a customer, for example, it is literally two minutes of work to be able to say,
Give me recent news about this customer. If there is any update to their financial performance, tell me about it. And if this person I am meeting has been in the news, give that to me as well.
And like a minute later, you have all of that in front of you, the briefing ready.
I think that's pretty magical. Embrac absolutely is very hard.
I struggle with it, my team struggles with it.
It's one of those things that you just have to accept that it is uncomfortable.
Um and
You know, that becomes a way of life.
Sridhar is definitely living life in AI.
I appreciate his acknowledgement that he struggles with the pace of change, that it makes him uncomfortable.
Of course, he's had plenty of experience being uncomfortable, including around last year's big data breach. We'll talk about that and more after the break.
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Before the break, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy made the case that Snowflake is the most consequential company in AI and data in the world.
Now he shares what he learned from last year's big data breach of Snowflake customers, his use of weekly war room meetings, and why AI hype is the biggest challenge facing today's business leaders. Plus, how he looks at the immigration debate in the US as an immigrant himself.
Let's jump back in.
I wanted to ask you about the
data breach controversy that hit last year, soon after you came on as CEO. 165 companies who use Snowflake were impacted. The breach came via customers' accounts, not through your software vulnerability, but still I'm sure the public Francis wasn't um welcome. I'm curious how you face that.
Episode, whether it was an advantage or a disadvantage that you were early in your tenure.
And whether there were any l lessons you you take away from it.
Security.
We are very clear with our customers.
It's a shared issue. Snowflake has offered multi factor authentication.
for over a decade.
We offered something called network policies where you can restrict who can connect to your snowflake instance.
Having said that
We are in it together with our customers.
Me going out and saying that so and so is at fault is simply not helpful.
We were very clear.
After doing a lot of studies with external partners,
That there were no breaches or vulnerabilities.
in snowflake systems.
We also started putting in place.
A series of schemes to make sure.
that we would act on our customers' behalf.
A lot more quickly. We now have systems that can
Detect access.
From
Surprising places.
and then warn our customers or turn off accounts. We now have dark web monitoring. So if there looks to be a credential that is compromised, then that credential is promptly turned off.
And um
You know, we use this opportunity also to do other things like make sure that we had direct connections to the security folks and all our customers. So there was a lot of learnings in terms of
How do we make sure that we are in true collaboration with our customers? How do we make sure they understand that this is a shared responsibility?
And hopefully things like the incident that we experienced last year is a thing of the past.
Hm when the crisis first hit.
I think a lot of folks impressions were ooh, this is this is not gonna be good for Snowflake.
And yet in some ways
Obviously you wouldn't want it to happen again, but in some ways it was
Good for your business.
Like look uh
Many of our customers went through very unpleasant experiences as a result of this. This is not
Anything that I would wish on anybody?
But having
having had it happen, you use it as an opportunity
to both make yourself the relationships
And the overall posture much, much better.
You've attributed a lot of Snowflake's recent progress to weekly war room meetings. I'm I'm curious what those meetings entail and w whether we should all be doing war rooms.
War rooms, as you know, they have particular connotations and uh one of my Google colleagues famously, I think it was ten, fifteen years ago, objected to war rooms, so I renamed one war room to be a basket weaving room.
Um
But
You know, the idea is how do you bring together people quickly in effective forums
To help
Get
past a stumbling block that we have.
Snowflake's war room was in the context
of the product, the engineering, uh, marketing.
And the sales teams?
needing to work together, uh especially on new product offerings.
This is because Snowflake had come of age as a cloud data warehouse. We knew how to sell the cloud data warehouse. We didn't need to bring these different functions together.
in order to figure out how to sell these things. On the other hand,
Something like AI. We didn't know how to position it. We didn't know what our customers were exactly looking for. We didn't know the kind of problems that they were running into.
This is where the close collaboration between the different teams
that were responsible for taking new products forward were really helpful.
And the war rooms is much more in that context of
How do you do something new?
But you know you're going to struggle
and get that to a point of maturity. So it's for a very, very specific purpose.
Snowflake has invested in a lot of AI startups. You recently announced an expansion of your startup accelerator,$200 million in new commitments. You also announced plans to build a new big AI hub at your Menlo Park campus, a$20 million AI upskilling program.
How does this fit together? Where does this ladder up to?
Let's start with the enablement uh investments.
Our aspiration is to train a million people.
on using AI and data products. And uh we are doing this in a number of different countries, including in places like uh India
Where an increasing number of Snowflake's customers, often based in the US,
or moving their technology operations to
On the startup side, we have a very healthy balance sheet. It's over five billion dollars.
And uh
There are lots of startups that want to build on top of Snowflake, use Snowflake as a data platform. So the two hundred million dollar fund is in combination
with many venture partners to fund the next generation of companies.
Ти айб із море фізика с
We want to host a set of companies uh that want to experiment with AI and it's a continuation of how we think about working with the technology ecosystem.
To help power the next generation of companies.
And we're just happy to continue that.
Because we see that as being mutually beneficial.
You mentioned uh
The trend of
Businesses moving

You are an immigrant to the US
from India. You came from India with just a a few suitcases and a couple of hundred dollars, as I recall. Um there's so much angst in the US around immigration right now.
How much
Do you think about it, given your your personal experience?
Look, I'm very
Uh I'm incredibly blessed.
I came with
Uh
A viceverse degree.
Yes, like I think it was seven hundred, uh seven hundred dollars. Neither of my parents went to college.
I got a doctorate from Brown that Brown entirely paid for.
I got a monthly stipend and a free PhD.
And uh
I think I've contributed in meaningful ways to the country helping create
Great, amazing businesses.
I think the
The larger issue
is one that of
Our population
feeling like there is enough prosperity to go on.
People in our country need to feel like they have a prosperous future.
Before they're willing to lean in and say we want more immigrants to share in that prosperous future.
But I think those are the core issues that our government needs to address.
Where all of us feel
Like they have the opportunity
Like I got the opportunity.
My take is there's no generosity without prosperity.
And as a technologist engaged in in the creation and the advance of technology, it sure sounds like or feels like it's enhancing
opportunity and and prosperity, but that's not translating to
The broader public, necessarily.
It's more than perception.
I think the honest question is.
that all of us need to ask ourselves, not just the immigrants, everybody, the government, the population is
Is the prosperity
Truly broad.
Are there truly opportunities? Me arguing that
you know, people like me are going to create more companies and more jobs
If does not translate, you know, call it
Prosperity in the Midwest is just not going to resonate.
You've said this, you know, that you can only unlock opportunity by embracing change. And for you as a business leader, trying to embrace change.
You know, there's also risk in moving too early when things are changing so much.
How do you know what change is sticky, especially when
You know, headlines seem to blare about new convulsions every day.
Build on strength.
There there are many things that are very real about Snowflake. There is nothing unreal.
about the three and a half billion dollars that we made as revenue, about the ten thousand plus customers that we have.
about the mission critical role that we play.
So with AI, for example, we didn't chase the hype. We didn't say, Oh, we'll fine tune and host models for you. Here is a brand new way of making money that has nothing to do with what Snowflake used to do before.
We said, let's offer AI as a natural companion, as a natural enhancer of what you're already doing with it.
And so you need to be very deliberate and thought how you create value.
What your place in the world is
And finally
You also have to be a little bit of a portfolio manager. There are five or six things that we are going to try. Some of them are not going to work out.
And you have to have unpleasant conversations, hard conversations internally about what you need to stop. We used to develop foundation models, but we backed away from it because we just said we just cannot afford to spend the amount
Of money.
and talent that is required to train foundation models. Was it an easy conversation? Absolutely not. But I think those are also important conversations where you accept that you're not going to know everything.
And when the outside world speaks, you actually listen and adjust and move along.
What a
People and business leaders
most misunderstand about the state of technology right now.
I think their fee they are feeling

Pressure about things like AI.
But are also flooded with options for what to do.
I think there's just so much
Just noise coming.
in terms of partnerships between X and Y or this new agent take this or the other
I think there is
Just separating out what is real.
From what is hype.
I think
Is very hard.
I would say this is less a misunderstanding than
in an amount of confusion.
And I don't think the AI industry helps itself.
uh with things like not talking about hallucination rates or not talking about
What does it take for something to truly be enterprise grade? There's a little bit of a
Look, Ma it's so cool.
kind of attitude to some of the things that happen in AI.
I think
there is a maturity process that is going to happen. But I think figuring out what is real from what is hype.
is the biggest challenge that business leaders, enterprise leaders face today.
Well, um
Shoot our this was great. Thanks so much for uh for doing it.
Thank you, Bob. Really appreciate chatting.

Streter may be soft spoken, but he doesn't mince his words, especially when it comes to AI. I agree that separating what's real from the AI hype is critical for today's business leaders. And if you're a non-technical business leader, that challenge is even harder.
As for Shredder's own hype, is Snowflake actually the world's most consequential company in AI? Might it become that one day?
I don't know.
Still, I feel smarter after listening to him. There's a thread that runs through Shrider's comments that resonates for me beyond AI about confusion in the face of a lot of noise.
Whether we're talking technology, tariffs, immigration, or whatever else, we strive to anchor on what's solid.
Some of our confusion is because we want clear answers when there just aren't any.
And even the most advanced AI won't solve that problem.
That's just something we have to learn to live with.
I'm Bob Safien.
Thanks for listening.
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