Snowflake's new leader is inheriting one of tech's biggest rivalries
Sridhar Ramaswamy, who came in through Snowflake's acquisition of Neeva, is the new CEO of the company.
And we’re back! Mostly, as I’m now currently flattened with a very nasty bout of the flu. I’m still aiming to get this week’s second issue out tomorrow, but it may end up coming early next week.
In the summer last year, Databricks and Snowflake happened to have their annual conferences at the same time—one in San Francisco, and one in Las Vegas.
Both laid out a number of significant launches, in particular Databricks’ hyper-aggressive acquisition of MosaicML. But several I talked to around that time made a pretty similar joke: Snowflake’s Summit was full of suits, while Databricks’ Data+AI summit was filled with scientists.
While not exactly accurate, it did in many ways sum up the dynamic between the companies and their two leaders, Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi and Snowflake’s Frank Slootman. Databricks had traditionally leaned into data science, while Snowflake leaned into data warehousing and analytics. And Slootman was known for an enterprise strategy that could convince even the strictest potential customers that a data abstraction layer was the way to go.
As of this week, though, things stand to change remarkably at Snowflake. Snowflake announced that Slootman would be retiring, and Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former Google exec who came in through Snowflake’s acquihire of Neeva, will be taking over as CEO of the company. And in retrospect the acquisition of Neeva—which many considered a concerted effort to get Ramaswamy in the door—stands to be one of the most impactful acquihires in the AI ecosystem yet.
Ramaswamy inherits Snowflake’s remarkably powerful business—particularly at a time when consumption seems on the upswing. Snowflake announced his appointment alongside its fourth-quarter earnings, which beat the expectations of the quarterly financial line judges for public companies (though it fell short in guidance).
Ramaswamy also inherits one of Snowflake’s biggest challenges—or, rather, challengers—that it contends with on a regular basis: Databricks. And while the two companies have periodically skirmished in a limited number of areas, the explosion of interest in generative AI has placed them in a much more direct collision course as the hosts of data critical for powering those applications.
Databricks is one of the most-anticipated upcoming IPOs in tech, both because it has already established a colossal business and that it stands to—perhaps more than any other company—benefit directly from the proliferation of generative AI. Few other companies host the critical, high-quality data needed to extract the most performance from AI tooling.
One of those companies, though, is Snowflake. And Ramaswamy will have his work cut out for him as he has to face perhaps an even more formidable rivalry that Slootman faced as both Snowflake and Databricks try to snap up AI uses with proprietary company data.
Neeva’s legacy within Snowflake
When revisiting Snowflake’s acquisition of Neeva mid-last year, it’s not just Ramaswamy’s cachet as the former head of Google’s billions-and-then-some ads business that proved appealing. Ramaswamy’s Neeva—which in a doomed effort tried going after Google itself—was tackling one of the most important emerging AI problems at a massive scale.