Snowflake CEO on Winning the AI Arms Race

Listen to this episode from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck on Spotify. In this episode, we sit down with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, for an in-depth conversation about the company’s transformation from a cloud analytics platform into a comprehensive AI data cloud. Sridhar shares insights on Snowflake’s shift toward open formats like Apache Iceberg and why monetizing storage was, in his view, a strategic misstep.We also dive into Snowflake’s growing AI capabilities, including tools like Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search, and discuss how the company scaled AI deployments at an impressive pace. Sridhar reflects on lessons from his previous startup, Neeva, and offers candid thoughts on the search landscape, the future of BI tools, real-time analytics, and why partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic made more sense than building Snowflake’s own foundation models.SnowflakeWebsite - https://www.snowflake.comX/Twitter - https://x.com/snowflakedbSridhar RamaswamyLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramaswamyX/Twitter - https://x.com/RamaswmySridharFIRSTMARKWebsite - https://firstmark.comX/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCapMatt Turck (Managing Director)LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck(00:00) Intro and current market tumult(02:48) The evolution of Snowflake from IPO to Today(07:22) Why Snowflake’s earliest adopters came from financial services(15:33) Resistance to change and the philosophical gap between structured data and AI(17:12) What is the AI Data Cloud?(23:15) Snowflake’s AI agents: Cortex Search and Cortex Analyst(25:03) How did Sridhar’s experience at Google and Neeva shape his product vision?(29:43) Was Neeva simply ahead of its time?(38:37) The Epiphany mafia(40:08) The current state of search and Google’s conundrum(46:45) “There’s no AI strategy without a data strategy”(56:49) Embracing Open Data Formats with Iceberg(01:01:45) The Modern Data Stack and the future of BI(01:08:22) The role of real-time data(01:11:44) Current state of enterprise AI: from PoCs to production(01:17:54) Building your own models vs. using foundation models(01:19:47) Deepseek and open source AI(01:21:17) Snowflake’s 1M Minds program(01:21:51) Snowflake AI Hub