Marcin Żukowski’s (Snowflake) Unusual Co-founder Journey
Recently trending story of Marcin Żukowski, (article linked below, highly recommended), one of the late co-founders of Snowflake, is a great case to visualize the role and unique value of Venture Studios.
Knowing that VCs like having big founder stories in their portfolio, it is worth recalling the origins of Snowflake in 2012 and its Venture Building path.
There is a belief among some capital investors that Venture Builders cannot be co-founders. Maybe because of that fact, even in such a headline story, we are not aware of the strategic and essential role of SHV, the Venture Studio behind Snowflake.
“Like a venture studio, SHV leveraged its capital, experience, resources, and networks to help Snowflake develop into a unicorn. (…) This speaks to the venture studio’s mission to develop and grow leaders and their businesses. In an attention-driven culture, they remain invisible, funneling all of the attention to the ventures they co-create.”
Acting as co-founders, venture studios are actively involved in acquiring the best talent to make their ventures successful. They brought on the right leaders for each stage of the company’s development.
And this is how Marcin became Snowflake’s co-founder.
Two years ago, Tomasz Świeboda (Inovo) interviewed Marcin to discuss his experience in joining Snowflake as a Co-Founder, how it all happened, and how they scaled from a small team to the largest software IPO in history.
So how did Marcin join Snowflake?
It’s an interesting story, and it also shows how it was a bit of an unusual path — he said in an interview.
“I think in October 2012, they contacted me that such a company exists.”
Marcin met with Mike Speiser, the Managing Director of SVH who came on as Snowflake’s founding CEO (also came up with the company’s name). They spoke about what cool things to do and for many weeks they went to restaurants, and talked.
“And at one moment, something in my brain clicked, and I decided to do it. A few months later, I was in California, and we were building Snowflake. And that is how it all started” — Marcin said.
“We came up with Snowflake, I mean Benoit and Thierry did in 2012, and later I helped, but the vision that was there in 2012 is more or less what it is today, they hardly had to change anything.”
Speiser and SHV keep a low profile, placing the companies they fund and helping in building front and center.
About Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud computing–based data cloud company. It enables data storage, processing, and analytic solutions that are faster, easier to use, and far more flexible than traditional offerings.
Company was named the biggest SaaS IPO ever, earlier raising money from, among others, Sequoia and Salesforce. Today it has a market cap of $55.3bn.
Sources
- Recommended article: The unassuming Polish co-founder behind the biggest SaaS IPO ever is reinvesting in his home country | Sifted
- Interview: Scaling a business — the road to the largest software IPO. Marcin Żukowski, Snowflake
- Snowflake founding story: How Snowflake took the venture studio path to a $70B market cap | by John Carbrey | FutureSight | Medium
