Scaling a business — the road to the largest software IPO. Marcin Żukowski, Snowflake
Today we publish my interview with Marcin Żukowski, Co-Founder of Snowflake.
Snowflake is a cloud computing data warehousing company. It allows corporate users to store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software, generally termed as “data warehouse-as-a-service”. The company was founded in 2012 by three data warehousing experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Almost from the beginning it is backed by Sutter Hill Ventures (other VCs joined along the way). In 2018 the company became a unicorn. And on September 16, 2020, Snowflake became a public company via an initial public offering raising $3.4 billion, making it the largest software IPO in history.
I sat down with Marcin to discuss: his experience in joining Snowflake as a Co-Founder, how it all happened, how they scaled from a small team to the largest software IPO in history, and how he perceives cooperation with VC funds.
You can also find this episode on: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spreaker.
Hello, Marcin.
Hello, Tomek.
Marcin, it is 2021. As it stands today, on the stock exchange, Snowflake is valued at $ 67 billion and was created somewhere in 2012. Can you tell us how it was that you ended up there? What did the beginnings of the company look like?
Snowflake was founded in 2012. The story is that I wasn’t at the conception of Snowflake. It was founded by my former friends, Benoit and Thierry both from France, and both previously worked at Oracle and Sutter Hill Ventures, our first investor and the main investor until today. It’s an interesting story and it also shows how it was a bit of an unusual path. It started with Benoit, our first founder. We always say he was the main founder of Snowflake. He went for an interview with another company. And there they offered him a job. He said that he wasn’t interested, but he caught the attention of the investor with whom they spoke, Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill and they started meeting to chat. They met and spoke about what cool things to do and for many weeks they went to restaurants and talked. They thought it would be cool to make databases in the cloud. It took several months. Benoit then recruited Thierry, with both eventually deciding to leave Oracle. It’s interesting that in Oracle they were very high up technically. They were architects of key solutions in Oracle but they were also friends, this is important. At some point, they decided to leave and open Snowflake in August of 2012.
I think in October, they contacted me that such a company exists. I was in Europe at the time in the process of leaving my previous company. It’s one part luck and one part coincidence that I was going to Silicon Valley to talk to my previous company that I would be leaving, and perchance, Snowflake asked if I didn’t want to talk. I said I will be there in a few days so I can talk. We met, they liked each other. I told them that I wished them luck but that I’m not interested and I came back to Amsterdam because I lived there at the time. When I did leave my previous company. They called me from the States a few days later and asked if I was sure I didn’t want to join. At that 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.
It’s a long story but it shows how big a role coincidence played. I should add that I didn’t know of Beniot and Thierry, but they knew about me before. They knew about my doctorate. My doctorate was quite famous in that world and based on that they wanted to speak with me. It is also lucky that what I did in the scientific world turned out to be useful in the real world.
And can you tell us, because you said a moment ago that your first reaction was negative? Why didn’t you want to do it?
You know, it felt like I had just finished a marathon. First, I spent six years on my doctorate, working on my technology. Then, based on this doctorate, we created the company that we sold. That took another four years. So one aspect was that I was just a little tired. This is the intensity of a startup’s work, I tell everyone, if you are not tired then you’re doing something wrong. I mean it doesn’t have to be so intense, but it is intense. So, then that was one argument. I just wanted to get some rest. That was the main reason. And the second thing is probably the short amount of time from the first meeting to the first offer. So, I hadn’t had time to digest it all. When that offer came back I was more mature, emotionally and intellectually. I was also thinking a bit, “ what can Snowflake achieve?” The vision of Snowflake is amazing. We were lucky in the fact that many companies at the beginning have a vision and along the way it changes. We came up with Snowflake, I mean Beniot 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.
What is that vision?
A vision of a data warehouse system, specifically a system supporting a data warehouse. It has aspects that the cloud has in other areas. For example, if you use the cloud or even software as a service. First of all, infrastructure. You don’t have to deal with infrastructure, you don’t have to buy computers, etc. Secondly, the ease of managing it all. It is all done for you, that’s very important. In traditional computer systems, there was always some administrator who had to do all. It must continue to some degree because there are certain things that Snowflake cannot manage, e.g. security. Determining who can do what, all the technical problems that SaaS systems solve in other areas, we wanted to do that for databases. Software update or backup data is not something exciting for everyone. And this is something Snowflake wanted from the very beginning. Provide all these aspects of the service to our clients.
The second important element of this vision was to use the cloud as a platform. The potential the cloud gives because the cloud is such a technologically amazing platform, it gives such opportunities like nothing else in history has been able to in relation to the flexibility of a platform. Access resources when you want to and how much you want to; with the financial model that you only pay when you use them, it’s amazing. If you can take advantage of it, you can do amazing things.
And the third aspect that fascinated us about the cloud, which was part of the vision from the beginning is that all cloud users, if you look in a certain way, are gathered in one place within one platform and the barriers between them, typical technological and physical barriers, disappear, and the barriers that do exist are strictly contractual. These are logical barriers, e.g. if there are two companies in the same cloud at the same cloud provider and they want to give themselves access to something on their side, it will be enough that they just click. There is no data transfer, no copying data to disks, etc. So, this aspect of the cloud fascinated us from the beginning and we wanted to do something about it. And for several years now, Snowflake has been putting a lot of pressure on this aspect of the cloud, which is related to such things as data exchange, cooperation, access to data that previously were difficult for companies to recover. It was that vision, and as I said of course, along the way there were a lot of small improvements or adjustments but basically, the vision we had in 2012 didn’t change.
Because I understand that it is like a cloud database system. There weren’t many such solutions back then?
Yes, this is an interesting topic. I don’t know if anyone else remembers Hadoop. In 2012, everyone was talking about Hadoop; it was a solution for data processing. Some companies still use it, but as a system, it isn’t dead but didn’t live up to its potential. And what is also interesting, which is maybe a lesson, that when we started Snowflake everyone said, “What you are doing? Everyone will use Hadoop and Hadoop will eat you, there’s no point.” I was once counting that in 2012, approximately 10 such systems were created, more or less in the vein of Hadoop. I think to this day, only one has survived. So, we were a bit controversial and we went a bit against the tide. We didn’t do what everyone else said would be and we were right, I say this without any arrogance. You can see what happened. We believed that the cloud was it and in 2013, it was not obvious. There were no similar systems. Amazon launched a similar system a few months after we released Snowflake, i.e. Amazon was already working on something like this which we did not know. A very broadly understood similar system.
Hadoop was not in the cloud?
Hadoop could have been in the cloud but it had other problems. I think Hadoop had many problems but one of them was that they forgot it was a system written by technologists for technologists. It reminds me of another conversation we had with a company here in the States. When the CTO or someone technical told you that they can solve some task with Hadoop. All they need is a team of five people, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and let’s say a year. The CTO’s response would be listen, we’re not Google, we’re not Facebook, we make yogurt. Understand? They didn’t want to have a team that will have to bear some deep technologies. They needed a solution and Hadoop didn’t provide solutions it provided technology that people had to configure, to build. A lot of people were needed to manage it because it was complicated. And we focused on the fact that we provide a service. Therefore, the value of Snowflake is not just that it can do something quickly, that is a huge part of it, but the fact that it could do something easily. It was very important. This is a huge part of our success.
Was it like that from the beginning?
Yes. So, from the beginning, it was a piece of the vision. Some things even at the product level were almost like a religion in Snowflake. For example, the user should not have to set any configuration parameters. Unless it has to, e.g. in many basic systems there are hundreds if not thousands of different things that can be configured. For many years in Snowflake, we did not have a single parameter, except one parameter which was how big you wanted the system to be because it was related to how much you had to pay for it. How much of this system you want to use. Some of this came along the way, but it’s still a bit of a mantra for us today. If the user doesn’t have to, then they shouldn’t have to.
Ok. You said about these beginnings that there was Benoit, a second partner, and then you. When you joined was there already a product? Any clients or not yet?
No, no, no, no. There was a little code that didn’t do too much. I remember it took a few months after I joined before we were able to initiate the first functioning simplified query that was sent to Snowflake. So, it took us a while to build the foundations of the product. Customers came much later.
At the beginning of Snowflake, my first year was 2013. At the end of 2012, it was just Beniot and Thierry. In early 2013, several people had joined. The first year was about building a product prototype. Our second year saw the adaptation of this prototype to the product level. It was also the first year that we started talking to clients at all. In the first year, we practically didn’t even speak to clients. Besides, to get a better sense of who could eventually be a possible tester. We didn’t have a single sale in the first year. On the other hand, we were relatively early in building a sales team. At the beginning of 2014, we started hiring the first person in sales. The first sales engineer or an engineer that supports sales. It was priceless; because they were fighting an uphill battle. If they called a company saying that they were a database. They had to have had very strong nerves and psyche. Because they made hundreds of thousands of phone calls; you know how it is at the beginning. And when they managed to break through and talk to someone, it was priceless. We learned a lot from our clients about what’s important and what’s worth doing to make it work by itself.
For me, it’s interesting that the first year was spent building the product without speaking to the customers.
Yes. What’s interesting here is that we were lucky that we weren’t building a completely new product category. Data warehouses have existed for many decades. There were tons of products. Lots of products in the market, well at least a few huge products from companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Teradata, and Microsoft. So, we did not have to come up with a new product. We thought that we would take this idea, this product, and implement it in the cloud And we’ll make it with a strong emphasis on software as a service. Along the way, we will do it faster, better, easier, and cheaper. That’s it. So, let’s say, anyone could do that, but to do it in the cloud with an emphasis on service, was something unique. We didn’t have to invent the functionality of the product, because there were products that did it before. It’s a lot like when Google thought they would make Excel in the cloud. They made Google Sheets. They did not have to think too much about what it should be, because they had Excel as a base, they only came up with how it will work in the cloud. It’s a bit similar because, look, nothing in the cloud is installed. If someone wants to share their entire Excel that is a Google document with someone else, you click and they have access to it. We wanted a similar effect for something that was traditionally terribly difficult to use: a data warehouse.
But the validation, in a sense, New products are often created and ultimately the customer decides whether they want it or not. You have to have a strong conviction to build a product for over a year without talking to customers knowing that in the end, they would use it.
Yes, we had that but, it came from the fact that we had a lot of people in our team who did it before. So, we knew we could build it. This is very important. We knew what we wanted to build. We knew that we could build it because we had people who did it before, this is the sixth database that I have worked on and my third database written from scratch. People also worked on it for 15 years, they knew what was important. They knew how to build this system, so to build a prototype we didn’t need customer input but to define the product. We didn’t really need clients either, because when we talked with clients, they often said, “ We will be using Hadoop.” Because we were pushing against the mainstream it took a while. Once the customer could use the product, then it started. When customers started using it then the value of discussions with customers grew dramatically because it stopped being abstract. They understood it, loved it. The rest is downhill.
How did you share the responsibility of tasks at the beginning? There were three people. Actually, who were the main people, and what were their tasks?
Yes, it’s also a bit unusual because at the beginning we didn’t have any business people. We had one person, let’s say. At the beginning, of the first 12 people, only two people were not programmers. The office manager dealt with all the formalities like accountants, plus all the other formalities. The product manager dealt with the product as well as relations with potential partners and customers at the time, but it was all in the very early stages someone who helps define the product. So, there were two. We also took care of formalities. I remember an intoxicating weekend when with Benoit, Thierry, and Thierry’s family we put together 20 desks from Ikea. So, we would take care of everything. It’s just a cool story. In the beginning, there wasn’t a strict division of responsibilities because almost all of us were programmers. It wasn’t like the founder didn’t program or that an architect didn’t. Everyone coded. Everyone wrote code and we produced a lot through that first year because we knew that the key is to build a prototype quickly so that we could then start talking to customers and based on the feedback we could develop the product further.
So, you and Benoit and Thierry all programmed.
And to this day, everyone still programs. Not as much but sometimes it is a kind of a respite. We like it. You know we don’t have much time for this, but we are still very, very technical today. It was our very conscious choice. Something that’s important is understanding what you are good at, what you want to be good at, and what you’re capable of being good at. We knew from the beginning that we would never be good businessmen. In the sense of managing the entire company in which you have all the things, not only technical but also other things. None of us had any aspirations to be that, for example, when there were discussions about having a COO nobody wanted to be that COO. I had some experience in managing people, for two or three years I managed an R&D team. But when it happened to be twenty-five people, I might be good at it, but it’s not what I’m the best at. Okay, I said to myself, let’s find someone who is much better than me and let this person do it and I will do something I’m good at. And so, throughout Snowflake, it often happened just like that. There is a saying that people are promoted until they reach their top level of incompetence. I do not know if you’ve heard of that. It is very dangerous because when you reach the level of your incompetence, it means that you’re no longer doing what you do well. So you must stop a level below. I believe that the potential of Snowflake is so amazing that in every area there should be a person who is the best, perhaps not the best in the world but one of the best. Otherwise, if this person is just good enough, we won’t use their full potential in the company.
I don’t know if I understood. What it is for you? What is the thing you want to do and that you are so good at?
I think I am a good technologist. I am a good hacker. In the sense of a hacker not as a burglar but as a low-level technologist. Things that I think I’m good at? I’m definitely not bad at product definition. My team building isn’t too bad either. I’m not good at selling. I’m not good at marketing. I’m not good at managing big teams. I’m pretty good at building desks from Ikea.
Well, I am still curious. When you said that for the first few weeks, Beniot and your other co-founders spoke with someone from Sutter Hill. They had to have a business approach to convince him or analyze with him that this market is very large and it is possible to build something interesting there. How do you see it, in particular, what did the conversations with Sutter Hill look like and how did you approach the potential or even who analyzed it?
The potential was simple because it is also interesting that we did not have to build or define the market. If you look at it, back then, there was no such trajectory. You had a vision that the world would go towards the cloud. Here, it was enough to look at how big the current market for data warehouses was. It was over $ 10 billion, so you didn’t have to wonder if there was a market. The market for it was there only it wasn’t in the cloud. So, there was a question as to whether the market would move to the cloud, which we strongly believed it would. Maybe it came from the fact that when we started to build Snowflake and we started to use the cloud, that our eyes were finally opened to its potential. We knew looking from the side that it was cool but when I started working with it, it was just amazing. Sutter Hill has a history of building products focusing on enormous markets. Products where there is a big technological problem. And where there is, say, a change that allows you to introduce a new product. For example, an earlier Sutter Hill flagship product, before Snowflake, was Pure Storage which focused on systems, simply storing disk data. Just some disk array, etc. And they built it because they noticed that instead of traditional magnetic disks, those that spin, SSD disks were showing up. So, there is some kind of breakthrough. Something changes, something so dramatic that a new company may form and disrupt the market. The same thing happened with databases and the cloud. They approached it similarly. This is not a completely new market. Will there be any change in the market, will people move from one technology to another technology. At this point, there is an opportunity to take over a large part of this market and people have done it several times.
A question came to mind because you talk about it with such confidence, which is fantastic. Was there a moment of uncertainty, was there a moment when you guys said “it won’t work” or this is a big problem.
There were a few moments, but there were never any crisis moments. That didn’t happen. An interesting moment for us was when we were just starting and we didn’t have a complete early prototype, and Amazon released a product that, at some level, is comparable to Snowflake and still is one of our main competitors. We think that Snowflake is much better than our main competitor. To be honest, our first reaction was panic that someone had already done something like Snowflake.
Amazon already did it.
Yes, Amazon already did it and we’re going to have to compete with them. It was, at max, a few days of panic. We believed in two things. First, that our product would be much better. The best thing about it was that we realized that we were not the only ones to see this potential. If Amazon released a product then Amazon saw this potential, too. Pretty soon, about half a year after the Amazon product existed, our phone calls with customers changed quite a bit, because customers would say, “ who wants to store data in the cloud,” and then we could say, “ listen, but Amazon has a product and this product is successful.” We didn’t have to build a new market, but before Red Shift, we would have had to build something completely new. We would have had to build a cloud-based data warehouse market. It would have rested on our tiny, narrow shoulders because we were a 10-person company. At that moment, Amazon came along and they created this area completely and we entered this area with a better product, it was fantastic. In the beginning, it was a moment of panic that was a blessing, when Amazon released their product.
Who is bigger in this segment of the market, today?
Amazon’s data is unknown so I don’t know. But Snowflake’s data is public i.e. what our revenue is, so if I knew how many red sheets we sold I could answer. Unfortunately, I do not. But it’s unlikely that a single company will take over the entire market. There is room. It’s a big enough market with room for at least a few big players.
Can you talk about a later period, did you have a moment that you felt you had a product/market fit? When did it take to the market, and when did you know it had taken to the market?
It took a while. The prototype started working after a year, it was already such a functional prototype, we already felt that something was there. It was very cool and it worked. It could do things that no one else could do. I think for me the biggest breakthrough moment was when we just started taking over clients from other companies. In the beginning, we had new clients that used Snowflake for new solutions. They had a new problem or a new project. Let’s try something new like Snowflake. A relatively small risk. When customers started to move from other systems, both the traditional ones that are not in the cloud and those such as Red Shift. They started to move to Snowflake. This was a huge validation for me because the transfer of a system that is already working, and that’s a high bar to reach. Reaching something like that was perhaps the biggest step in terms of the confidence that it has arms and legs.
And when was this more or less? Second or third year?
Certainly not a second year, perhaps third or fourth year. Slowly. After some time, it was so much that there was a clear trend that not only these new projects but also migration and emigration, were things that really built our self-confidence.
Awesome. Do you measure… Do you somehow measure, how many people join or migrate? I mean you have to.
We do measure for sure. But even if I remembered, I haven’t been looking at those numbers for a long time because the company has grown so much. Other people look at it.
So what do you look at today?
What am I looking at today? I look at problems related to the product, where we should invest our time and the time of our engineers. I also look not only at what is wrong with the product but also at what is wrong with our internal processes. For example, increasing the efficiency of our teams. Mainly, I focus on the product and on our internal infrastructure. Every team is doing something different. So how big is the whole team? For the whole of Snowflake, I’m not quite sure because it changes. Two thousand something and the whole R&D team is about four hundred, I think today 400 or 500. We just bought Polidea so suddenly it jumped by 60. So. So let’s say about 500 people.
You guys bought a company in Poland. Can you tell us for what purpose and whether you are looking for people, i.e. customers, employees, in Poland.
Of course, we are looking for clients in Poland. For the past two or three years, we have had a very nice sales team in Poland that is growing and we already have quite a lot of strictly Polish customers. In terms of customers, it is interesting on the Polish market is that we have many more Snowflake users than Snowflake customers in Poland.
Why?
Because a lot of our very large customers are from other countries where the sale took place in that country, not necessarily Poland. They have teams in Poland that use Snowflake. So for example, a few weeks ago there was a conference I spoke at in Poland and talked to a few people. These are the things I heard that we didn’t buy Snowflake in Poland, but we work for Company X West. And that’s how we know Snowflake. We have a few customers in Poland but as for users, we have even more.
When it comes to Polidea, we have been considering opening an office in Warsaw for a long time, a development office. For many reasons. Even for personal reasons. I am from Poland and our current boss, VP of Engineering, Grzegorz Czechowski, is also from Poland. So, we have a lot of contacts in Poland and we also know that there are a lot of talented people in Poland and we thought it would be fun to build an office. We started with the idea that we will just build from scratch, but at some point, there was an idea that instead of building it from scratch, it was worth taking over a company like Polidea that has a lot of fantastic attributes. First, a really cool team, very talented people who already know how to work together. We didn’t have to search because we did before. Whenever a new office opens, the biggest problem and the most important decision is to find an office manager, a person who will take it and run with it. We didn’t have that problem, Polidea had very nice management team. So, we decided to take that step, we do not regret it for sure and I hope that the employees also do not regret it. This is not the end, we will not be just 60 people, it is not the end. We are actively working on using this as a very solid base. Now, we will hire additional people.
This is part of your R&D department?
Yes, Polidea was bought with the thought that it would be part of our R&D.
It was previously a software house, right?
They also did a lot of integration and things of that nature.
So did you tell them to thank their current customers but now you do everything for us?
This is such an over-simplification. However, with such acquisitions, it is not always trivial. I will not go into details, but we tried to make sure that neither side was disrupted, as not to cause any problems in terms of personnel and in terms of partners. We tried to make it all turn out well.
And what kind of people are you looking for Polidea?
Well, programmers and engineers mainly. Talented people.
Can you say in what area or technologies they would be working with?
You know what, Snowflake is so large at this point, a lot of people have asked us this question. Polidea didn’t work on things strictly related to Snowflake things, they did many other things. First of all, Snowflake is already such a large company and the product range is so large that. A lot of technology or experience can be applied in Snowflake. And the second thing is that engineers do one thing all their lives. There is quite a lot of overlap in competencies from one area to another, so if someone has worked with A and often the transition to B is not so hard.
I will change the subject. It sounded a little too easy when you talked about the move to Silicon Valley, and it is not such an easy decision from the Polish perspective. Can you tell me how it is to live in Silicon Valley? Where you live? What was the move to Silicon Valley like?
It was not a decision to leave Poland. This is the first step. I had left Poland for Amsterdam before. I lived in Amsterdam for 10 or 11 years and just as I mentioned I was at the stage of leaving my previous company. So just like that, the professional connection was disappearing. I always noticed an opportunity for a new adventure. My wife also had Silicon job options. That helped. It made it easier that we did not have to look for a job for two people, but we both had job offers in Silicon Valley at the same time. I live in Mountain View, which is where the Google headquarters are. How is living here? Well, I think that the San Francisco area is a fantastic area to live in, in many respects, e.g. nature, weather, access to smart people. In that sense, it’s good for companies. There are some things that aren’t great because it’s far from Poland if someone wants to visit often, but I think it’s worth it. Especially people working in technology, especially those that don’t have children yet. If someone does not have children, it is worth coming and trying to see if they like it. But the future of Silicon Valley is uncertain. Much will change for sure, because it is already visible. Will it be the same as it was two years ago.
And how do you perceive the start-up culture? Creating new enterprises, technology start-ups?
There are certainly many because there are plenty of sources of people. People come from universities, people come from big companies. After a few years, they think that they’ll found a start-up. There are plenty of sources of financing, so for many companies, especially Enterprise, there are plenty of customer sources, so it helps to facilitate. However, one thing that I often have to explain is that I do not know the startup world. I have never been to a meet-up or tap or another. My path was very unusual. The first company was closely related to my doctorate. The second company was the result of this direct invitation. I, for example, was never looking for a company. We never had to look for investors really, because we had it easy with investors. We already had the first investor from scratch, so I don’t really have much experience with the start-up world. I often talk to people who are setting up a company or have just set up a company. Often these are companies that I have already met in some way through someone, so often they are people from the company who I know have something interesting in them. They aren’t random companies, so I have never been in a situation where I suddenly see a hundred companies and I wonder what do I do here. I guess it’s like in the show, Silicon Valley. Certainly, there are many interesting things in this world, a lot of good. There is definitely more noise, but, personally, I don’t have a lot of experience with it.
I would ask the question like this, to start a company worth $ 60 billion, a leader in its segment, and that it can be done today in Poland? If someone dreams about it, should they go to Silicon Valley?
I think it is possible. I think a great example, or rather proof that it is possible is UI Path. Not every company in every segment and, not every person can set up an enormous company in Poland. For now, we do not have such comparable companies in Poland yet, like UI Path. It is definitely possible. Will it be easy? Certainly not. I think that all companies, as I can see at the moment when they start to develop, very often move and change. They are officially moving to the United States or growing in the direction of Western Europe. So, it won’t be easy. There are also gaming companies that are of Polish origin that are huge but not as large as some of the American ones, but it is possible, but it is very difficult for sure.
UI Path in Romania, the company originally handled robotic process automation is only a few times larger than CD Projekt Red.
Yes, but they are. It is an interesting company because they are definitely a leader in their industry and also a company from Romania, i.e. from a similar area to ours, which now has a value of $20 or $30 billion.
The last round was $40 billion.
So if it is possible in Romania, I hope it can be possible in Poland as well.
VC funds collected 17 funds on this one prospect. From a VC perspective, awesome.
I hope that there will be more such companies from Poland because the potential of Central and Eastern Europe is enormous.
It’s also my belief.
I’ll ask you about investors, such a well-known example for you is Sutter Hill, but can you tell us which one of your investors brought the most value? How did they do it?
I can speak Sutter Hill because they brought so much value compared to all the others. It is just a whole other level. We were lucky enough to work with Sutter Hill, our first investor was Mike Speiser. Recently, he’s been in the press because of Snowflake and his influence. He never looked for other voices. A few things first about the vision of the company and the product, Beniot, Thierry and later myself. Mike was there from the beginning And he believed it from the beginning. So he helped and Mike is a good soul. He helped us to have the confidence that it will work. Because technologists are like “Gosh, it won’t work.” But, let’s say, maybe that was a little less important. Mike brought a few priceless things. One is he helped us build our initial team. Mike has a recruiter that is, in my opinion, the best in the world. And that recruiter helped hire the first fifteen to twenty-five people. One recruiter. This is just amazing.
I assume in different fields as well.
Mainly in R&D, because at the beginning, it was almost all R&D. The second thing was that he built us a supervisory board. So, let’s say in areas where we needed support, we didn’t need any technical advice, we needed sales and marketing advice. In our supervisory board meetings from the very beginning, he was a guru in sales and a very experienced marketing person. He found us our first salesman, a young guy.
Mike Speiser found him, right?
Mike Speiser through his contacts as well, but he found him. This guy, Chris Degnan. It’s my favorite story at Snowflake in terms of personnel. He is the first sales associate that was hired with this in mind. Try to build the first small team and sell Snowflake. After a while, we’ll hire someone to be your boss to develop it further. He might end up as head of the region or something. So, he knew from the beginning, and from the beginning he took it on the chin, so to speak. Today, he is Head of Sales at Snowflake. The first salesman that Snowflake had, who called and fought those uphill battles manages all sales at Snowflake. I don’t know, maybe a thousand people. He scaled himself from this level to this level and it’s crazy to me that such people exist. It’s amazing. These are difficult decisions that people make. People who saw something like this before and have done it, that’s what is crucial.
I’ll jump a bit because I have some general questions. What books do you read?
I do not read as much as I used to because I have two young children. Now I am reading a fascinating biography of Churchill. And I had never heard, or rather, never read about him. Of course, I had heard of him but reading this biography; he’s such an absurdly fantastic character that you just can’t fit in your head. So, I really recommend it. Another book I’m reading is how to put children to sleep. It’s a different story.
And have you learned?
We’re working on it.
And what have you learned in the last seven days?
In the last seven days, one of my hobbies is messing around with carpentry and I learned how to do something called pocket connections. It’s a method of connecting two pieces of wood. But seriously, I recently read an interesting study about why people earn less in Poland than in the West. I read the study and one thing that I learned is the difference between the gross domestic product and gross national product. I had not heard this distinction before. It opened my eyes that in Poland there is a lot of production, but it does not translate into benefits for our nation.
Because the owners are foreign companies.
Exactly. I did not know these concepts before, I mean I knew of them but I just realized what the implications are, and it’s actually quite interesting.
Yes, although I’m wondering if a person living in Silicon Valley should not be included in the GDP, maybe the GNP.
You know, I’m not saying if it is bad or good but that I learned and it gave me a lot to think about in many respects.
And the last question. And you have advice for founders from Poland, or for people starting their businesses in general.
A few days ago, I was talking to a friend who wants to start a company. I asked her to pose a question to herself, “why?” Because people have very different reasons for starting companies and there are people who, for example, want to start a company because they have a fantastic vision in which they deeply believe. There are people who want to start a business because they got bored working in a large corporation. They want to make something smaller. There are people who open businesses to earn money. So you have to understand your own motivation and, depending on that motivation, adjust how you do it. If your motivation and strength, for example, is creating a product. Find people who can help you with the business side. If you’re a good businessman, in turn, find a product person. If your aspiration is to set up a company because you’re bored of working in a large company, think about whether it is better to join a company and not to start it yourself. Not everyone has to be a Founder, this is something very important. The second thing is to take care of yourself and your team, it’s something that people often forget. You asked what advice I have to make a company like Snowflake. First of all, the fact that Snowflake is what it is has a lot to do with luck and a lot to do with hard work. It also took a lot of time. It took 8 years, and that is 8 years of very intensive work, so you have to take care of the team because there will be difficult moments. Every team has better and worse times. I always believe in the strength of the team, if they trust each other and work well together, then they’ll get through the tough times. If the leader, I mean management treats the team as a team, not just as let’s say people who do something for you. That we are all in this together, also helps a lot.
At Inovo, we’re currently reading a book on the internal culture at Netflix,I don’t know if you’ve read it but it’s very interesting.
Yes. The team is important, also it’s a question of how the world has changed, for example, that all the people you have in the team, are good. In Poland, I remember all the people I knew had been working in the same companies for 20 years. Here it is different and even in Poland, it has changed. The mobility of people has increased so taking care of the team becomes much more important than ever before.
Thank you very much for your time and for the interview. It was interesting to me. Big congratulations on what you and your team, partners and employees, have created it is truly awesome. And I’m happy that people originally from Poland are building such things in the world in different countries and companies. It’s really great.
I hope that there will be more such companies from Poland. Without a doubt, we have some companies that could.
Inovo Venture Partners is a first-choice VC for ambitious founders from Poland and the CEE region. We back early-stage, post-traction startups with up to €3M of initial investment, and help them build global brands, while driving growth of the local startup ecosystem. We take great pride in being close to top founders who think big. We’re investors in: Booksy, Restaumatic, Sotrender, Infermedica, Spacelift, Tidio, AI Clearing, Zowie, Jutro Medical, Intiaro, Packhelp, Preply, Eyerim, Allset. Our second fund reached a total of €54M.
For more information visit: inovo.vc
Subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on LinkedIn or send us your pitch at pitch@inovo.vc
