EP 147: How Chris Degnan Built Snowflake's Sales Org From Scratch

Chris Degnan is one of the most legendary CROs of this generation. He joined Snowflake as employee #13 and the 1st sales hire. He scaled the sales org from 0 to over $3B in ARR, spanned four CEOs, and retired as CRO after 11 years. In his first podcast post-retirement, Chris opened his CRO playbook, from early enablement to hiring rigor and fending off threats from competitors. He also reflects on lessons from working with leaders like Frank Slootman, John McMahon, and Sridhar Ramaswamy. If you’re a founder or running sales at a startup, this one is for you. (00:00) Introduction to Chris's Journey at Snowflake (01:47) Navigating Leadership Changes (04:39) The Importance of Sales Methodology and Enablement (10:22) Near-Death Experiences and Company Resilience (13:39) Building a Strong Sales Organization (27:25) Hiring and Scaling the Sales Team (34:52) Board Dynamics and Mentorship (44:29) The Influence of John McMahon (46:22) Leadership Styles and Intuition (46:56) Launching Snowflake Japan (49:39) Learning from Leaders (55:10) The Importance of Competitive Moats (59:12) Snowflake vs. Databricks (01:07:45) Public vs. Private Markets (01:14:03) Sales and Marketing Synergy (01:26:17) Final Thoughts and Future Plans Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Getting our first 100 customers was impossible, was so hard. Imagine selling with no website, stealth mode on my LinkedIn profile. Having a good sales methodology behind that was what I think kept us a lot.

• 0:10Logan Bartlett?

  11 and a half years, how many actual near-death experiences do you think there was?

• 0:14Speaker 00

  There was one really, oh my God moment. We were down for four hours, but if we had not come back, we would have been dead.

• 0:20Logan Bartlett?

  What are the types of things you think about setting up day one?

• 0:23Speaker 00

  I think number one is having a great enablement. You have to have a sales kickoff. Everybody in your sales organization needs to have a forecast call every week. These are the things that are the non-negotiables.

• 0:34Logan Bartlett?

  Well, Chris, thanks for doing this.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Logan, thanks for having me.

• 0:39Logan Bartlett?

  So for people that aren't familiar, and I'm sure a lot of people are, but can you give a little bit of your background and maybe most relevant, your journey at Snowflake?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. So I, I started Snowflake in November of 2013. As the first sales rep, we were in stealth mode and I was the director of sales.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Hired by an interim CEO in, in Mike Spicer from, from Sutter Hill and

• 1:12Speaker 00

  and I worked with a bunch of founders. So I was like the, depending on who you ask, you're the 13th or the, the 16th employee at Snowflake and you know, from there became VP of Sales under Bob Muglia. And then Bob then promoted me to Chief Revenue Officer. And then Frank Sutman came in after they fired Bob and 11 and a half years later, I, I retired or, you know, stopped working at Snowflake, most recently in May of, of, of 2025. So just very recently, am I

• 1:47Logan Bartlett?

  So you had four different CEOs along the way. I, I don't know if I've ever heard of anyone actually having gone on that journey. I guess, what do you think uniquely allowed you to survive? And then thrive among such different leadership and transitions?

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Well, the, you know,

• 2:10Speaker 00

  First of all, I think throughout the entire journey, I probably had imposter syndrome and still do, never thinking that I actually belonged in the seat. So, high degree of insecurity along the way. But, you know, the, I guess at the beginning, when Mike Spicer was recruiting me, I, I was really nervous about working for a company with no products, no customers, and, and what, and really no CEO, most importantly, no CEO, because the founders didn't want to be CEOs. And so, I said to Mike, I said, "Mike, it would be great for you to have someone on the board

• 2:56Speaker 00

  who's, who cares about me, knows about me." And he said, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "Well, at my last company, I had, I had like a year, a little over a year stint. I had spent eight years at EMC and then I went to a startup in the security software space called Avexa, where a guy by the name of John McMahon was on the board. And so, I got to know John and really respect the heck out of John. And so, I said, "You know, it'd be great for you to put someone like a John McMahon on the board." And, and I kid you not, you know, Mike was on the board of a company called Sumo Logic with John, and, and, and had a board meeting the next day, asked John to be on the board of Snowflake, and said, "Okay, I'm taking all your objections, you know, off the table."

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So, having a guy like John was incredibly helpful when Bob Muglia came on board. And there, there are two reasons. Number one is, Bob had never, Bob had run 15,000-person organization at Microsoft, but he had never managed a direct sales force. And, and so, there, there was a constant friction between finance and, and sales around.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  What productivity means of a sales rep? How fast should we hire? And how do we measure? And really, John helped me deal with that in a number of ways. Number one is, are we getting enough leads for marketing? If we weren't, John's like, you've got to go fix that or you're going to get fired. And then he'd say, okay, don't let finance, you know, treat, you know, people who are employed for three months as, you know, a quarter productive or whatever it is that you want to, or a half productive. They're not productive until six months and a day. So, so, you know, he, he was really helpful in, in helping me negotiate

• 4:47Speaker 00

  headcount, you know, rep to manager ratio, SE to, you know, really the whole, the whole model, the whole sales go to market team and helping me build that out. And that was so important along the way in the beginning. So, so Bob, Bob would not believe me sometimes and then go to John and John would really validate what I was doing. And then I would ask John for a lot of help around what, what does productivity mean? How should I measure this? What is enablement look like? There's a whole bunch of things that John helped me and Bob with. And then, you know, when, when Bob got, I mean, I, I owe, I would say, you know,

• 5:27Speaker 00

  I owe Bob, you know, a major part of, of my career because even at my retirement party, Bob and Spicer were there and, and Bob, you know, made sure to make a point of saying, you know, Mike wanted to bring someone in over me. And Bob had said, you know, I, I really, you know, I said to Mike, well, what are you looking for that Chris is not doing? And he said that, you know, look, Chris is hitting his number. He's hiring great people. He's, you know, driving a great culture in the organization. I'm unsure of what I'm trying to hire for. And and really, that was obviously that was meaningful enough for for Bob to then promote

• 6:09Speaker 00

  me to the Chief Revenue Officer. And then so I was devastated. I mean, really devastated when when the board let let Bob go and and Slootman, you know, even Bob and I joke, you know, he's he's like, um, he's like, I there, there was no chance I thought you would keep your job under under Slootman. Um, and when when when Frank came in, um, you know, he was doing one ones with the entire executive team. And, uh, I walked in and I said to Frank, the very first time I ever met Frank, and and I said to him, I said, there's really two things, Frank, that that I want from you is number one, we have this, we were working on a real first hundred million dollar deal, and Bob was right in the middle

• 6:52Speaker 00

  of of that deal. Um, and and and I said, so I'm gonna need your help, uh, with with the CEO of that company, um, number one. And then number two is, we have the best marketing department in the world, and you should not mess with that. And and he's like, wow, he's like, you're the first one of your peers to walk in here in this one on one, and not talk smack about, you know, the other peer, your other peers. I'm like, well, I got nothing but good things to say about marketing. Now, I certainly had opinions about other people in the organization, but but I think that, you know, set the tone

• 7:32Speaker 00

  right with with Frank. And and, you know, ultimately, Frank, it took Frank and I, there were touch and go moments, for sure. I had to make some material changes under Frank, like, I had to change the the entire organization, um, uh, you know, mid year in terms of how how we were structured. I had to fire something, you know, a very senior leader in the team, um, like, just kind of like that. Um, and and so there were some material changes that I had to make under Frank's watch, and and we got through them. So the first seven, eight months were really, really, really brutal. Um, but as I got to the other side with Frank, he and I developed this this great relationship.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  And ultimately, you know, what I would say, why it kind of lasted with four CEOs was, and I asked McMahon this, is he's like, you know, Chris, you, you, you listen. And then you, you, you don't, you don't come here with like, this is how it has to be. You're very much humble, you're, you're listening, and then you'll take action. Um, and he goes, you know, a lot of people in your situation, as you've seen success, uh, you, you'll come in and you'll say, well, I know what I'm doing. And, and, and I'm not going to listen to anyone else. And I, and I'd say like, you know, I would hire people a lot of times more senior than me, uh, working for me.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  And I would listen to them. I, I mean, geez, the guy who ran APJ for me, uh, in, in John Robertson, he way, way more senior guy than I am. Um, and super helpful in so many ways. And I, he was kind of my, my sensei, if you will, uh, you know, towards the end is he, he was really guiding me on a bunch of stuff. And, and, and even with Shridhar, Shridhar came in and he's a very different manager than, than Sutman. Um, he had, he pointed out some pretty big holes I had in the organization. Um, and, and I think when you, you have success, sometimes you can get, you know, fat and lazy. And, and Shridhar, uh, very much, you know, was like, well, let's, let's look at how do we optimize the sales team.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  And so I think, you know, you know, Snowflake had a really great, uh, uh, first quarter. And, and the results were, you know, just came out and, and, and I was, I was super proud of the performance of the team. And I, and I, I will take credit in that we had to do some hard things through the course of last year. Um, and those changes really were difficult, was mentally draining, but getting through those now the organization's set up for success. So I'm, you know, look, I think the, the net net is I'll, I'll listen to people. I'll take feedback from anybody. Doesn't mean you're always, I'm going to do everything you tell me, but at least I'm going to contemplate it, think about it, internalize it. And then I'm not arrogant enough to say like, you don't know what you're talking about.

• 10:22Logan Bartlett?

  There are a lot of stuff I want to unpack there, but so 11 and a half years, how many actual near death experiences do you think there was that that it could have gone one way and you ended up surviving? It sounds like at least two ish that you referenced there between the spizer hiring someone over you and then the first couple of months, I guess with Slootman might have been a little touch and go, but how many do you look back on? Do you think, you know, there was a fork in the road?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Well, as a company, there was one really like, oh my God moment. We, so, you know, when stuff like was early days, we start, we really went GA in 2015, in the middle of 2015. And then in 20, in the middle of 2016, so around the August timeframe, we did a mid-year sales kickoff to kind of get everyone excited and saying like, look, we were, we got, things are going great. And I brought the entire sales team into, we were in the W Hotel in San Francisco. And, and Bob Muglia is, is about to come

• 11:28Speaker 00

  out and Bob's just this incredible motivational speaker. He's, he's awesome. And he, I clearly remember this. I'm like, okay, I get the team all excited and I see a bunch of people checking their phones and I'm like, what's going on? And, and I'm like, all right, you know, give me five minutes. I gotta go talk to Bob and, and I walk into the hallway and Bob is white. And, and he's like, we're down. And I don't know if we're coming back. And, and

• 11:58Logan Bartlett?

  The product was down.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  The product was down. And we were down and the founders were like, yo, it was like open heart surgery. They were like trying to like pump the, the heart and trying to revive the product. And, and so that like was scary. We were down for four hours and we thought we had this great company, but if we had not come back, we would have been dead as a company. And, and I clearly remember that that was a wild moment in the middle of the sales kickoff. And to Bob's credit, I said, Bob, We have a sales team here. You've got to go tell them it's going to be okay. You've got to make everyone excited about the opportunity. And it is kind of, you got out there and did it, but

• 12:40Speaker 00

  that was, that was like a company near death experience. And then, you know, look, I think there, there's always, you know, I'm sure there's stuff I don't know about where, where people were thinking about replacing you. I think even when, when you go through a CEO transition, there is, you know, a high degree of possibility that, you know, the executive team changes. And when Sutman came in, the executive team changed. I mean, I think that the, the, um, the executive team change has changed materially under, under Sridhar. So it, it happens. Uh, and, and, you know, different leaders come in, come and, come and go. But, but yeah, so I think that the, those were that kind of the, the, the big things. When, when, when, uh, the, when Bob came in, I, it was,

• 13:25Speaker 00

  will I be the VP of Sales? But then, uh, Spizer wanted to, you know, bring someone over me. And then Sutman, there was, and he even admits there were times where he was unsure if I was going to make it. Uh, so, so those are the, the ones that I know about.

• 13:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. Now, if you're, um, advising a company as you're now doing, or journeying the board or counseling, um, uh, go to market leaders within venture-backed businesses, um, what, what are the questions that you view as most important to figuring out, um, the maturity of the sales organization and where some of the problems and bottlenecks potentially exist?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Well, there's just some basics that you kind of, so, so the good news for me is, you know, I came, I learned a lot, um, of my, in terms of enterprise selling at, when I was at DMC, which is now part of Dell. Um, but they, the, the guy who ran my division was, was a, a medic, uh, you know, focused sales leader. And, and so I learned that the medic, sales kind of methodology. Um, and, and then there were, You know, constants that my, my direct manager was just, you know, maniacal about. And, and that just, those, those things were ingrained in me. And, and, and so that was good.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  But when you go to these other companies, you realize they're not happening all the time. Um, and so like, okay, number one is enablement matters a ton. Uh, so you need to have a world-class enablement that focuses on, you know, whether, whatever methodology that you want to follow. But we follow medic or med pick, um, because of course McMahon was on our board. I came from that methodology and I, I believe in that. That's a, a great compass, uh, to, to drive a forecast and understanding, you know, how real deals are and stuff like that. So, uh, I think number one is having a great enablement, um, and, and, and focus investing in that. A lot of times it's hard because you're a startup, you're, you're not making money, you're losing money.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Hiring and spending money on enablement is scary, but it's so critical if you're going to go hire out a, an enterprise sales team. And then number two is it's just like the, the basics, like you, you would be surprised, um, on things like having, uh, forecast calls. Like you need to have a forecast call every week and everybody in your sales organization needs to have a forecast call every week. And, and sometimes as, as, as so flick scaled, I thought because I did something, everyone else was doing it. Well, it turns out that's not even true. So, so you need to like babysit that and, and in a way figure out how you can micromanage it without being a micromanager.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Uh, but forecast calls, one-on-ones, um, uh, you know, enablement, like, you know, monthly, weekly enablement sessions. Uh, you know, uh, team, uh, you, you, your direct team meetings, uh, those are the things that are like the, the non-negotiables. So like, if, if I'm a If I'm a founder and you know, or I do this with with the companies I advise is like, this is the job description of the VP of Sales, SVP of Sales, CRO. This is what they are supposed to do. And if they're not doing that, that's okay. Here is their job description. They need to know that this is what their expectations are.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Because sometimes these people that are the heads of sales don't come from the backgrounds that maybe I came from. So I'll help them like, you know, if you have someone that is really good at selling your product and a really good sales leader, but just needs some coaching. That's where I'll come in and say, okay, this is how we'll, we'll, we'll shape your, your day and your week and your, you know, in your month and your quarter. These are the things that are the non-negotiables. You have to do a quarterly business or like everybody in your organization has to do that. And these are the, you have to have a sales kickoff. Like these are the things that people don't necessarily understand you have to do all. And it's, it's kind of weird for me because it's second nature, but those are things that are missing a lot of times in organizations.

• 17:41Logan Bartlett?

  You talked about enablement, like in laying the foundation for a successful sales enablement within an organization. Like what do those primitives actually entail? And what are the types of things you, you think about setting up day one?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Well, look, you know, you know, in full transparency, I think in the beginning of stuff like I was the enablement person. So, so I, you know, I kid you not, like there, there was a, I remember clearly there was a, one of our, our first BDR hires I hired out of University of Colorado, Tommy. And, and Tommy came in and I had to show Tommy what it was, how, how a computer connected to the internet. And then, and like that, and I was like whiteboarding it for him. So, um, you know, and, and that's a, that's a kind of basic fundamental that, you know, as you're a, a sales leader. You you actually own, I don't care if you're the head of sales or frontline

• 18:41Speaker 00

  sales manager, you own an element of your team. Ultimately, it's on you. Um, and and so at the beginning, it was on me. It was on me to show people on how to how to sell Snowflake. I would whiteboard the pitch. I would record how I I did that. I would show that to everyone. Um, but it was on me. I'm a very much a lead from the front, salesperson. So our sales leader. So I need to know how to sell the product and I expect all my sales leaders to know how to sell the product. If you have a sales leader that in Europe, at any level of a, you know, startup in, you know, unless you're like a massive, massive company, you you need a sales leader that knows how to sell the product because otherwise, why are, why are they there? Because they're a great operations person. I'm sorry, that's not going to build you a great company.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Um, and so, so to me, um, enablement starts with the sales leader. And then if you can within enablement, you know, hire someone who's good at uh, making it a full program. Okay, we we brought in like we brought in this company for management to help, uh, you know, show, uh, you know, the sales methodology of MedPic, um, and really make that, you know, uh, you know, a real living thing for the entire sales organization. We did that. And then we we institutionalize that in our enablement, um, so that when a new hire came on board, they they were going through that they were being trained on what Medic was or MedPic was. And so, so you you can do that

• 20:09Speaker 00

  through e-learning. Um, but then then you have to then make sure that it's in the system. So you make sure if you're using Salesforce, you need to have Medic, MedPic, uh, uh, fields that are filled out, um, and really filled out. And you have to inspect those things. There's, there's all sorts of things that that go into, uh, enablement.

• 20:30Logan Bartlett?

  What question, if you were a CEO of a business and at the end of the day, there is a scorecard to some extent that is reflective of how a go-to-market team is doing. But there's obviously a lot of inputs that go into that that are outside of the go-to-market teams' control related to the product and the market and marketing, as you alluded to, customer success, all these different things all kind of tie in together.

• 21:04Logan Bartlett?

  Is there a question you would ask as a CEO that is the most confirmatory on whether or not the blame, if you miss a quarter, lies within the go-to-market organization versus somewhere else?

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Well, you know, again, going to my training at EMC, the way that I view a sales leader in any level is they have to, there's kind of three things. You have to, first and most important thing as a sales leader, or any leader, you have to hire great people. So if you hire great people, you develop those people, that will drive revenue. So the kind of the leading indicators are, can they hire? Like, who's coming in the door? So number one, who's coming in the door? Number two is, are they being trained? And then you can look at the leading indicators.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  So like, you know, there's enough tracking tools out there today that you can see, are they going on sales calls? Like, are they able to go out and get meetings? And then are they able to convert those meetings to sales qualified opportunities? And then, you know, from that point on, are you then able to make a sales rep productive? That is ultimately, so for me and what measured, you know, my success at South Lake.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Was the the productivity of of an individual contributor. Could we could we hire someone and get them to do a minimum of well, after six months? So it's not like on the first day of the sixth month. It's the first day of the actual seventh month. By month by months, you know, seven, day one of of month seven. Can they actually sell $250,000 of net new ACV or ARR? Every quarter consistently. And that was the the ultimate metric that that that I was managed by. And so what was happening is our productivity was going to jumping through the roof.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  So we were seeing like in in an inside sales organization, you're going to see like, I don't know, 400K in productivity. We were seeing like a million dollars in productivity from our inside sales team. We were seeing like $2 million of annualized productivity out of our sales reps. And that's what got the the investors excited. Now, on the inverse, the investors were scared of stuff like, because, you know, there was a time when I actually met with someone who actually worked at Redpoint is now at Snowflake, who told me, you know, that we needed to focus on on profitability.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  And I and and Mike Spicer was like, we've got to get market share before we get before we focus on profitability, because our competitors are the largest companies in the world, and they will kill us if we do not get market share. And we had product market fit. So I think the the ultimate metric, you know, it's a long story. Long story short is it's it's the productivity of the sales team.

• 24:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, got it. As you think about AI being injected into every organization, I'm curious how you think about that changing elements of of sales and what types of things you think it can be utilized for versus what's going to stay true about sales as it is today, as it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  You know, I think what AI is gonna be incredibly helpful with is task automation. So task automation on things like, hey, you know, I was handpicking at the beginning of Snowflake. I was building my own lists of customers to send emails. So I was sending 2,500 emails, you know, as, you know, a week. If I could do it in a day, I was doing that. But that was like very, very manual. Like, that's a, that's a thing that you, you know, AI will be really good at. The other thing is like, like even at, even when I was at the end of my tenure at Snowflake,

• 25:30Speaker 00

  you know, we would look at, you know, because Snowflake is a use, a consumption-based model. We were actually using Snowflake's product in our, in our AI product called Cortex to actually identify use cases by, by notes that were in, up in, in, in Salesforce that were updated by the, the sales team. So like, hey, for example, how many migrate, data warehouse migrations? How many data science migrations was Snowflake doing? And we use AI to pick that stuff out and, and say, okay, great. We, we have these leading indicators. Can we track that? So I think there's just a bunch of more intelligence that you'll learn about,

• 26:15Speaker 00

  you, you know, your sales team coming out of that. I do think that what will not be replaced is the, the relationship. Because, you know, ultimately people buy from people. And as long as you're selling to another human, they want that relationship. And, and so, you know, I will tell you that, you know, one of my strengths is, is being a passionate salesperson and, and that, that, you know, I would come in and be controversial about my competitors sometimes in terms of saying like, "Good luck, you're gonna fail in six months and I'll talk to you in six months." But and they would and then and then I'd get back to them and and we'd build this relationship

• 26:58Speaker 00

  and that that carries on. So I think the the relationship part of the sales, as long as you as the salesperson know what you're talking about, you have to know what you're talking about, you're you're and you're and you build these trusted relationships and you help your customers get promoted and also other stuff, you'll you'll end up uh being in a good spot. So I think the relationship, the human interaction can't not be replaced, at least for for the near term.

• 27:25Logan Bartlett?

  In hiring, in hiring sales reps and focusing on that like human interaction, um what were, what were the things that you would try to tease out in an interview that were non-negotiable for success within your organization?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  So so we did, we we did an actual, um, early days, we did assessments of our uh sales teams. Um, so so basically, I took myself and all of the early snowflake salespeople and we all took these assessments. And in these assessments, we were looking for, you know, things that were consistent across people that were successful because we had, we have people that failed as well. And and for us, it was, you know, high intelligent, highly intelligent salespeople that basically uh he did not trust anybody, uh were very mistrusting of people.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Um, and um, and, you know, high energy and and sometimes even low social because they they were out there, you know, when when when when someone says, yeah, no, no problem, dude, I'll get you a deal. They would all be suspect of that. They'd be like, okay, tell me why. And and that's part of the the the having a sales methodology is like, you're going to qualify, like, why, why now? Why, why us? Why anything? Um, and and those are the things that uh you really good salespeople start to do is even then when someone says that they're going to do something for them, they don't trust. And and I think that was probably, you're looking for that in their um

• 29:07Speaker 00

  in their background. So for for me, you know, like, I didn't, when we were early stage, I was not looking for people that managed one account. I I was looking for people, show me in the last. Two years where you worked and you successfully opened up new logos. Tell me about those new logos. How many new logos did you open? Tell me about the deals that you lost. Tell me why you lost them. Tell me who was your champion when you won? Tell me who was the champion of your of your competitor when you lost? Like, these are things that you can ask in the interview to start figuring out if they're if they're BSing. Because like they could say, yeah, I won this logo. Okay, tell me more about that.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Like, you could just ask like three levels deep and all of a sudden their story starts to fall apart or it doesn't make sense. Then you're like, okay, this person's full of it.

• 29:58Logan Bartlett?

  You talked about how the quality of the team is one of the most important indications of a sales leader. And if they're consistently hiring great people around them. There's a there's a tension that can exist between the need to hire people and ramp quickly. With keeping the quality bar high for the totality of the people within the organization. Obviously, Snowflake went through hypergrowth, but how do you think about that tension of needing to get butts in seats? But also making sure that the talent bar stays to a quality that allows the organization to continue to pursue excellence?

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Well, so first of all, you have to agree on a hiring process, especially when you're hiring fast. So, you know, I'll give you an example is I I am, I won't tell you the name of the company. But that I I'm advising in a company right now. That they're in the they they need to hire over thirty people like now, like right now. And their their current hiring process has

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Uh, like multiple stakeholders in it and at the end, uh, it has a committee. Um, uh, like you have to present to this group of people, a panel interview. Um, and, uh, they have a 50% failure rate at the panel interview. And it's like, my head is exploding and I'm like, okay. Uh, you can't do that. Um, number one is how the heck does someone get to the panel interview and fail? Like what is happening in that interview process? Like you've got, you've got some fundamental issues there with that. And, and the reason why I hate the panel interview is you, you like getting a group of people together.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Uh, uh, at any given time is going to be hard. Um, from a, from just a timing perspective. So if every single person has to be a part of a panel interview that you hire, you're, you're, you're screwed. If you have to hire quickly, it's okay if you have to hire like one or two people a quarter. But if you're going to hire 30 people, 40 people in a quarter, no chance. And so you basically have to have an agreed upon hiring process that everybody follows. Um, and there are basic things that you're looking for. We have to have these things in the, in the, um, fundamentals of it. So for us, we did, our, our assessment was part of that, that there was the sales rep that we were going to hire. So the, the way that it worked is you had basically have a, a four, effectively four interviews.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  You, you have a hiring managers selling on their first interview. They're, they're, hopefully they're talking to someone that is currently employed. Unemployed, I'm not super psyched on, on going out and hiring. There's got to be a really good reason why you're going to go hire an unemployed person. Number two is, all right, so you're, you're selling the hiring manager. The second interview is you're buying like, okay, now you're doing the hard interview. Okay, great. Then you're going to have on the on the third interview, they're going to meet with your manager. And that manager is going to ask some really hard questions. And then finally, it's going to be the the the second or or the sorry, the third line manager.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  So in in my case, I interviewed all of the in the early days of stuff, like all of the sales reps. And I was looking for, you know, all these things. Now, I had a great recruiting partner that that that that worked with me in the sky by the name of Chad Pete. So Chad was incredibly influential on it. And he would not like there are also VPs of sales that say, I want to interview 10 people for this one position. Okay, again, you're going to fail. So so Chad would be like, I'm putting one to two people in front of you. And you can say no, but these are the people like you've got to basically figure out, are these your people? And and he's making sure he's qualifying that we've done the assessments.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  He's making sure that he babysitting that process and we're getting through that process in two weeks. And and and when he would get on the phone with the the candidate. And and they were they kind of first they'd him and hog because they're employed. Okay, you know, Johnny, you're gonna we're gonna at the end of two weeks, we're going to make a decision on whether or not you're going to work at Snowflake or not. But it's two weeks, so you have two weeks to go through this process. And at the end of two weeks, you're either going to get an offer or you're going to get declined. But you have to make a decision in two weeks. And if they say, oh, well, I just want to, you know, meet them, get to know them. No, you're not in the process, not until you want actually to come and work at the greatest company. Here's what they're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  So you've got to get have a good pitch and all this other stuff.

• 34:51Logan Bartlett?

  Fascinating. I I've heard you talk in the past about the board dynamics and maybe at different points in time. And I think you were being partially tongue in cheek, but also entertaining. And I think there's a kernel of truth in this, being somewhat distrusting of board members and DCs and the interests that may

• 35:14Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe investors have versus executives within the company. Can you maybe speak a little bit to to that dynamic and how you think about as a go to market leader? Interacting with with investors and board members and and all of that?

• 35:35Speaker 00

  So so Bob Bob Muglia, you know, to quote him, said it best is, you know, the board is your friend until they're not. And and so I, you know, do not think of the board as your friend. They are not your friend. They their job is to make sure that the investors, the shareholders are are going to get a return on their investment. That is their job. And and if for every reason, they think that you are not going to give them that return, they will fire you in a heartbeat. And I've seen that. I've seen that firsthand. I've watched some, you know, again, going through the, you know, Sutman transition.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  With with Bob, that was that was wild. I mean, it was like boom overnight. And and so to me, you know, I I learned a really good lesson as you know, as the chief revenue officer, I was not trusting of any of the board members. I would ask them for help. We had some wonderful board members, everyone from John McMahon, Carl Eschenbach.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  But but man, don't think that I didn't think that they were my friends. Because again, they're in there trying to maximize your shareholder value. And that's what Sutman also said to me. He's like, look, do you think the board is and he was just more just self aware of it than Bob was is he just said, do you think they're my friends? He goes, they could care less who I am. They want to make sure that they're going to make money. And that's it. And if you do not operate that way, you're mistaken. They are not your friend. And so I think I've just kind of gone into that knowing. And so like, you know, look, when Sequoia invested in stuff like Carl Eschenbach is a world class guy. He sat on our board and he's now the current CEO of.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Of Workday, I was very, you know, Carl, Carl came from VMware. They did six-month quotas. I had never done six-month quotas. And I, I would kind of do what VCs do to, to people when they, they're, they're, they're not really going to invest in the company. And say, that, that sounds good, Carl. And, and so like when, when a VC, you know, and I've, I've been in plenty of situations. There are a lot of VCs that passed up self like for, for many reasons. And they would say, oh yeah, that sounds great. We'll get back to you. And that's the, the VC way of saying, I'm not doing anything. We'll get back to you in a week, a month, a year, whatever it is. But not now. And so that would kind of be the thing for me is I would never be like argumentative with a, a board member.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  But you, you gotta be careful because you can't, you can't just, you know, say yes to them and, and not do it. So I would say, I'll, let me think about it. That would be the thing that would, I would never say no. But if I said yes to something, I would go out and do it. And, and that would be the thing that I would just encourage people to do is just be aware of like, if they're strongly suggesting something and you don't do it, you're going to probably lose your job. And, and so, you know, just like when Slootman said, okay, you've got to reorg the sales team in the middle of the year when he just arrived. I'm like, well, can we wait to the end of the year? And he's like, no. Like, okay, well, there's, I guess I'm doing that, right? There's not a, there's no choice.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  And, and so those are the things that you just have to be very, you know, software. I think, you know, having a, you know, high EQ is, is helpful in these roles because you've got to read the room and you've got to figure out when, when like they say something, how much you actually have to do it because then you'll start to realize.

• 39:14Logan Bartlett?

  It's helpful you had a strong advocate and mentor in John McMahon, who's certainly a legend in selling and in enterprise sales. And obviously, the tree of people that have learned under him speaks for itself. But do you think that's important for a go-to-market leader to have an advocate at the board level, be it ideally someone that's done it before or a legend in their field, but also potentially an investor, just someone that you you know is is in your corner? Or was that just a unique set of circumstances to have someone like that, given the connection you had and and my consumer logic that led to McMahon joining Snowflakes board?

• 39:58Speaker 00

  I think it's critical. I mean, I think, look, I always tell the founders, you don't want to hide, like, people always reach out to me and say, I would like, Chris, I'd like you to be the chief revenue officer. And I say, no, you don't. You don't want me to be the chief revenue officer. Because I'm, I'm not desperate. I was desperate when I took this job. I was desperate to be successful, and that matters. But but me having McMahon on the board, it was incredibly impactful. Like, there's zero chance I would have made made this journey without him. Not no chance. And so I owe a lot to John, because John very much, like I said, coached Bob through different phases and kind of helped me also

• 40:43Speaker 00

  helped me recruit people. So, you know, when I was out there saying, you know, hey, John McMahon's on my board, it helped me recruit sales leaders. I had John interview people for for me. And and so like, you know, I would recommend, if you want to build a strong enterprise sales team, I would recommend having a guy like John McMahon on the board, because I think it's, it's just, it helps on the sales side in terms of recruiting great talent. And knows that, hey, the people that follow Medic, they know that you're the godfather of Medic is on your board. And they want to learn and you want to come learn from a great sales leader. Like, these are all the things that, you know, good, good

• 41:22Speaker 00

  sellers are looking for. So for me, yeah, I was, I would recommend having that. Now, what I also come to find out, especially in the role, the role I'm in now, is that these, there's a lot There's, there's a ton of arrogance in founders, like these young kids that went to, you name the Ivy League School, they think they know all. And I don't want to work with those people. In fact, I make it a point of not working with those people because they think they're, they're these unicorns. They built this great company and, and they're to do it their own way. Well, guess what? You could do it to your own, your own way until you can't.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Um, and that you can't is you're gonna fail because you did something so stupid. You're wasting money. You're doing all these stupid things and, and they're not willing to listen. And so to me, um, I'm looking for humble founders. I'm looking for smart founders. I'm looking for people that elicit feedback and ask for feedback and do stuff. But if you go to someone and say, well, we're unique and I, my response is no, you're not. No, you're not. Um, and, and I don't like in the enterprise software space, you are not unique. And I'm like, stuff like was this amazing, magical thing, but we had a sales process and a sales methodology that, that, that got us

• 42:48Speaker 00

  like getting like our first hundred customers was impossible, was so hard. Imagine selling with no website. Imagine selling with, I couldn't, a stealth mode on my LinkedIn profile. Those are all things that were really hard and, and having a good sales methodology behind that was what, what I think kept us alive. So, so I think, um, you know, those are all things that, that making sure that the, the, that the founders value sales and, and putting someone like, like a McMahon on, on their board, they, they should absolutely do it.

• 43:24Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious, you, you've, you've worked under a number of, I would say legends in the industry is probably safe to say between Spicer and Slootman and McMahon. Uh, these are, these are some of the iconic names and I, I guess I want to, um, unpack a little bit of your, your, um, biggest learnings or biggest takeaways from some of those people. Um, so I guess question as it relates to John, what do you think has made John, um, such a uh, legendary sales leader, uh, and what he was able to do at, um, you know, BMC and Blade Logic and PTC, but then Perhaps even more interestingly, such a legendary sales mentor over the course of the last decade.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look, John, what I think. People, people think that John is this like hard ass. And what I would say is. John, John is, but a lot of the guys that that that actually have worked in a John McMahon sales organization try to be John McMahon. And and John and I have had this conversation. John is, there's only one John McMahon. Um, and you cannot replicate John. You can take and learn from John and try to do that. So a lot of these guys come out. In fact, one of the reasons that I.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  I took the job at Snowflake is there was a, there was a bunch of sales leaders that wanted me that that actually had had worked under John at BMC. That wanted me to work for them. Um, and all of them were a bunch of. And I don't mean to use a bad word, but assholes. They were just arrogant assholes. And I'm like, I'm not gonna go. I just didn't, I was turning 40. I didn't want to go work for these people. I'm like, I, it was called my midlife crisis, if you will. But number one is John is not an asshole. John is. Uh, very, very metrics driven. John is, is, is very much like his, he, he has a way about him of figuring out.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Is this person doing what I'm telling them to do? Are they following the rules? Are they doing, do I believe what they're saying? He has this intuit, intuition that is just hands down amazing. John is hard. He'll hold you accountable. But he's not an asshole. Now, I'm sure people have been fired by John. I'm sure they're gonna say he is. But but he's, but he's, he's, he's really a, a very good guy. That he, every time I get off the phone with John, I just talked to him last week. Every time I get off of them. He still says, call me anytime, Chris. Call me anytime. So he has this way about him that he's. He's a hard ass, but he has some empathy in him. Um, and he's very much, uh, you know, someone that that will listen.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  And then acts and for and versus acts, you know, and then deal with the consequences later. So, you know, I, I respect the heck out of John. Um, and and he's like that. And and Slootman is the same way. Slootman's, Slootman's like, hey, man. People would say, what's the Frank Sutman's playbook? And Frank's like, I don't have a playbook. I, it's, it's situational. And I think that's, you know, all these great leaders that I've, I've had to, you know, I've got an opportunity to work with.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  They have these, these, these intuitions that are just amazing. And they can, it's situational leadership. It's not like this is how you do it there. This is like, you have to be open to saying like, wow, I did it this way over here. But it makes sense that you're doing it this way. Like Sutman, Sutman had such, such a bad experience at ServiceNow launching Japan. And he, he looked to me in the, because I was a sponsor for Snowflake Japan. He looked me in the depths of my soul, basically saying, I had this consultant in saying, we should do it. He goes, he, he almost like said, go away to the consultant and said, Chris, are you going to make this successful? And, and I was like, I had, it was a scary moment and I had to look, you know, Frank in the eyes and say, Frank, I got this.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  And I, I was all in like that. I, I had to spend so much time launching Japan. And it was, it was a lot of work, but great, you know, it turned out really, really great for something like so. So I think those are the, these, these guys are just have these unbelievable intuitions. And, and it seems, it seems like one of the meta points in that is a level of,

• 47:46Logan Bartlett?

  um, perhaps self-awareness to not try to recreate, um, what, uh, like be John McMahon. It sounds like you, you, you, uh, were able to internalize a lot of different aspects of what made him successful without directly trying to emulate him. Is that, is that a trait that you purposely hire for? Or is that a circumstance of your own personality?

• 48:15Speaker 00

  You know, it's probably even, you know, goes back to like, you know, You know, you were raised by your parents and there are things that your parents did well. There are things that your parents didn't do well. And it's one of those things of like, okay, I want to take the good and try to make that part of how I bring up my, my kids. And, and that's, that's no different than, but I don't want to, I don't want, I want to take the bad out. Like, I don't, you know, like, hey, back in the day when I was growing up, you know, you, you get spanked, right? It's like, I guess what? That's not, not allowed nowadays, right? So you, there's a, there's different things that you just have to make sure that, okay, I, I'm going to learn from that.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  And so I think, you know, I worked for the same guy at, at EMC for eight years. I learned so much from him, but there were a lot that I didn't like about how he treated people and stuff like that. But, but man, I learned a lot from him. So to me, I'm so thankful for the guy that I worked for because he taught me so much, some of the fundamentals of sales. And I think it's just important to any, any leader that you take that good, you, you make it your own and you not be an asshole about it. I think those are the things that you can still, you can still have empathy. You could still be a real human, but hold people accountable. And, and, and I think you learn from both your successes and failures.

• 49:39Logan Bartlett?

  You touched on some element of this with regard to Frank Slootman, but I'm curious, like, what's something that's maybe superhuman about Frank? And it's just like, not replicable, but something that you admire? And then I'm curious, what is something that you were able to internalize or you would recommend other people just do that you kind of learned from him?

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Well, you know, Frank Frank wrote a book and and you know, people are like, did you read the book? I'm like, no, because I lived it. Um, and and, um, you know, Frank Frank would say things like, he he he has this like, just innate ability to actually read people. His ability to to read people is just second to none. Um, and and he's so he could, you know, I'm a I'm a bad liar. Um, and so he would know if I was bullshitting him, he would be like, okay, hey, Degnan's not is, I I I can read him so well that I know whether or not,

• 50:51Speaker 00

  you know, the forecast is going well, whatever it is, and I I have a a little bit of, you know, high anxiety about things. So he he he kind of liked that a little bit. Um, but but he would, he would kind of then coach me down of saying like, dude, it's okay that you and I are worried about things. Um, but you can't let everyone else know. Uh, you can't let the rest of the sales org know that you're you're super concerned about something. Um, and so you you would learn, learn those things is like, okay, you you need to exude confidence. Frank is a general, like you you look at Frank, you hear from Frank, you wanna, once you get on Frank's side, you want to run through walls for someone like that. And I've never seen any any leader like that. Frank has this crazy ability to lead.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Um, and and hi- his leadership style is is very much uh, hard. And so he'd say things like, when there's doubt, there's no doubt. Um, and and and he, you know, and he'd say like, you know, like when I'd want to go launch a, uh, you know, a new, you know, uh, s- sales group, uh, like a overlay group or something like that. He would say, okay, you know, silly stupid things, he'd say, like, eat like an elephant, poop like an ant. You know, and and and so stuff like that, like, okay.

• 52:07Logan Bartlett?

  What does that actually mean?

• 52:08Speaker 00

  So it's basically like you're gonna go out and you're gonna, you know, uh, uh, eat as much as you you can, but with a very small amount of people. Um, and, and, and so I think he, he just would, would very much like, you know, say, hey, go find someone who, who you can actually get the most leverage out of. But don't, don't go out and, uh, and hire a, you know, a ton of people until you know that this group is gonna be super successful. Then we'll scale it. But, but he's like, I'm not scaling it until, uh, you know, we're gonna, until we start to see, you know, the metrics come out of it.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  So there were a lot of things that I'd learned from him, um, in, in the process. Um, and, and again, it's hi- his book, You Lived It. So he, in every one-on-one, you know, he would grill me and I, I, he would grill me on all sorts of stuff, but I respected him. I respected how he went about things. He was not a jerk about it, but he was hard. Um, and he held me accountable. Um, and so I, I just, you know, I think that's important for everyone is accountability matters. Um, and I think that's, uh, something that Frank was really good at.

• 53:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, interesting. Now, what about Mike, uh, Spicer? Like what, what, what, what's something that you learned from him? And what, what do you think makes him great at what he does?

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Mike is a, a dreamer, um, and an incredible recruiter, probably the best recruiter I've ever met. Um, he convinced me to take that job when I probably, you know, in hindsight, like, when I walked in day one, I was like, where, what the hell did I get myself into? But, um, I think, um, Mike, Mike thinks so big. Uh, he would be like, you know, when, when, you know, we were early days of Snowflake. He'd be like, we're gonna create a hundred billion dollar market cap company. And everyone in the room would be like, whatever, dude, like no chance. And sure enough, we, we have hit over a hundred billion dollars in market cap at some point. Um, and, and I think stuff like, you know, trending in that direction, uh, again.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Um, and I think, um, I think, you know, the way that I, I look at, um, Mike is he, he, he, he has this really great ability to understand technology and then apply it to the business world and understand how big of a market it is. Um, he only wants to chase massive markets. And I think and and he can recruit world-class people. He people, when you get in front of Mike, you're walking out there so excited about what, you know, what he he just told you. And and you know, sometimes it's fake it till you make it. And and and Mike does a little bit of that of getting you excited about something that may not be 100% real. But you make it real. And that was really what what what was the magic of Snowflake.

• 54:54Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think there's advantages to actually being in stealth for an extended period of time, having having lived it with Snowflake?

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Certainly made it hard on me. The the so the reason, um, the reason that Mike wanted

• 55:16Speaker 00

  Snowflake to stay in stealth was because we were going after, architecturally, we did something very different than anyone had ever done. And it was hard. And you know, as as we interviewed Bob Muglia, Bob, Bob came from years of of working at at Microsoft. And you know, what what Bob has said is probably like,

• 55:40Speaker 00

  you know, 15, you know, 10 to 20 people in the world that can build a database from scratch. Now, some of those people sit sat inside of IBM on Microsoft. And we luckily had three of those people that were working at Snowflake in our in our three, three founders. And and he said, it's really, really hard to invent, like, most of the databases, like, Amazon had launched, had bought some source code of a of a legacy database and launched it. And there was an actual, another data warehouse startup.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Or forget the name of it, that that that, uh, when Amazon launched Redshift, they completely steamrolled the company. And the reason they steamrolled the company, there was no, no competitive mode. They were, they had taken an open source, I think it was open source Postgres, and just threw it threw it out there and said, okay, we're gonna make, we're gonna make this a data warehouse. And and that just didn't, didn't work. And and so you you need to have this competitive mode. So Mike was, and that's something I've learned by the way, when I, when I talk to like, seed companies. That is the thing that I I want to look at the most is like, what is your competitive mode? Technically, I don't care if you have a great business idea, it doesn't matter to me. But you need to have a great.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  World-class technologists that are building those competitive moats. Luckily, Snowflake had really, you know, Benoit and Thierry, who were the original co-founders that had built Oracle, had some core principles, built, you know, parts of the Oracle database, and they had some core principles that they had, were so married to. And they're like, this is what we're going to build for Snowflake. And it turns out that that, those principles mattered. And so Mike knew that. That's why he wanted us to stay stealthy because he didn't want, he wanted to have an 18 to 20-month technology head start in front of people.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  So that's why he did it. It made it hard on me, but, but it also kept the competition at bay

• 57:54Speaker 00

  in terms of knowing what we were doing. And that's, that's was, and people didn't even believe us or what we had done because building, as I said earlier, building a database from scratch is hard. So as we started to get out there, you actually had to show people all this stuff. And, and the, and so the, the competition, the cloud providers, they, they didn't know what we were doing. And even if they did, they didn't believe we could do it. And, and that's why it was, it was helpful. That, that's not always the case that, that, that stealth matters. But again, you know, to Spizer's credit, if you want to build a big company, you have to have a deep competitive moat. And then you have to get market share before your competition gets prompt.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  And that was really his whole theory is, okay, get, build in a world-class product and then get market share. And that's, that's ultimately what drove the success of Snowflake.

• 58:48Logan Bartlett?

  Snowflake, we were fortunate to be involved along the way. And as it sits here today, I'm looking, I, sitting at a $71 billion business, stock is right around 212. So a nice little run over the last bit under TreeDars leadership and a lot of the work that, that you put in place over the course of the last couple of years. I don't know the right characterization or how you would articulate this or how it has been articulated. But there was, there was a point in time that Snowflake was materially ahead and scaling way faster than

• 59:29Logan Bartlett?

  Databricks was, who I think has become like one of the principal competitors out there or like another business that's doing exceptionally well. And a lot of this initial AI movement, Databricks was able to do a good job capitalizing on. I'm curious, having, having lived that experience as an executive and one of the key people at Snowflake, what did you learn from, from that experience? And what would you recommend about, I don't know, paranoia for competitors or things that you would advise for companies going forward?

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I certainly have a lot of passion on this subject. You know, look, we were, we were, you know, years ahead in terms of market share with Databricks. And there was a point where we actually were partnering with them for, for a short bit. But, um, you know, ultimately, Snowflake, we optimized Snowflake to go public. And that meant, you know, creating leverage in the, in the sales team and also the engineering team, just the whole company. So you're creating a, a, you know, a more profitable company. And, you know, Databricks even to this day is private. They're not profitable.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Like examples are like they just bought a company called Neon where they, they paid over a billion dollars for Neon. And Snowflake had offered, we just bought, Snowflake just bought a company. It's public information called Crunchy Data for 250 million. Well, we had a, they had a deal to buy. Uh Neon as well at a similar price point and Databricks doesn't care about profitability or dilution to their shareholders. So they just go out and buy and buy and buy and buy. There's, there's, there actually is some uh goodness that comes out of what, what Databricks is doing. Because they don't care about those things, they can go build these, these massive engineering teams. So Snowflake's about a billion dollars ahead, rough and tough, about a billion dollars ahead

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  in revenue. Maybe it's, it's, it's, the gap is closed a little bit. But um they, they, their sales team is two times the sales size of the sales team of Snowflake. Their engineering team is two times the size of the, the team of, of Snowflake. Snowflake's a public company now. We, Snowflake has to operate and generate free cash for them and show, you know, show they're doing that, doing all these things to run a successful business. Databricks has to do none of that. And there seems to be a, you know, a very much a willingness for people to continue to invest it. Really crazy valuations of a non-public company that has no intentions of going public anytime soon. And I think what, what the, the, the miss on Snowflake's behalf uh was that,

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  you know, our North Star was to be this cloud data warehouse. We hit that North Star, the number one cloud data warehouse. We won, we won. And we should have kept going and we should have put, we should have put our, your foot on the gas and we should have run right over Databricks and we should have launched a notebook, a data science notebook. So if I diagnosed, uh and I did diagnose where, where Databricks is getting into our best customers. Uh where they, they were getting into the data science uh, uh, uh team and we weren't getting access to those people. And those data scientists were then building a bunch of, you know, uh workflows or, or ETL jobs with Spark.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Geez, if we had only done that, if we only built a notebook, if we only had hosted Spark, but there were some core principles the engineering team didn't want to do. If we had done those things, Dated Rix would have been dead. Dead. We would have killed them. And we gave them air. And we gave them air because we didn't, we didn't build out, you know, some of those functionality and we waited too long. Now we have those capabilities, but Dated Rix has a huge head start. But we had a bigger sales team, bigger customer base, more loyal customer base, less complex products. We could have killed them and we gave them air. And it's really unfortunate, I think, that we did.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Because that was a huge miss. And that was, that was on like, hey, look, this is always, you know, you know, looking in the rearview mirror is always easy to say like, hey, you know, this, we didn't know it at the time. But geez, there were some decisions we should have made earlier around, around some stuff that we missed. And we gave them life, or we could have just crushed them.

• 1:04:11Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious, like, those were, that's the diagnosis at the tactical level of like, how it sort of played out. I guess at a zoomed out strategic level, is the lesson just stay paranoid about all your competitors always? And think through the low probability scenarios that might play out? Or how do you, if you're a founder, listening to this and trying to think about how to optimize that for themselves? What lesson did you take away that might be a little bit more zoomed out?

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Listen to your customers. I mean, if you listen to your customers and understand, like,

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Never be in a situation where you're telling a customer, this is how it has to be. Be in a situation where you have to listen to your customer and you take their feedback and you act on that feedback. So the customers were telling us, okay, this is why we're bringing in data rigs. Okay, why? Well, our data scientists need a world-class data science toolset. Okay, great. They have a world-class notebook. We could have bought, we should have bought a company. There's a great company called Hex. We should have bought Hex. Uh, and we didn't because it wasn't core to Snowflake. So to me, it's don't be arrogant enough to think that your customers, you know, um, know better than you. They do know better than you because they're buying, they're speaking with their wallets.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Uh, and, and you, you have to listen to them. And if you give these companies air, then it is what it is. And that's what we did. And so I think, you know, to any founder out there is like, be curious and, and be humble and take feedback. Cause if you don't do that, there is going to be someone. I don't care who you are. This is going back to like, you know, meeting some of these, these founders of companies is like, they think they're unique until they're not. And, and this is like, you know, like I said with Bob Mugliat, the board is your friends until they're not. Like you just have to be self-aware. You have to listen. And if you do not listen and you do not read the tea leaves of why is something happening?

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Um, then you're missing out. And I think, um, there, there, it's hard because as you're building a company, there are things that can distract you. Like, like for Snowflake, we, I clearly remember we went into this meeting in, at one of the major investment banks. Early on, and they'd say, this was when private cloud was a big thing. And they were like, hey, you know, we've been trying to build what you guys have built. Uh, when are you going to run in the private cloud? And, and our founder Ben Law was like kind of master, uh, Yoda. And he said, he said, you know, hey, you'll go to the public cloud ever before we go to the private cloud. And sure enough, that investment bank was our first real big investment bank customer and still a big, uh, Snowflake customer to this day. So, so I think, you know, the reality of it is, is like,

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  There are some bets that you have to make that like, okay, core principles like, hey, I'm not going to build on the private cloud, or I'm not going to build in the data center. Whatever those things are, those are some core principles that you kind of have to agree on. But there are other things that you have to be willing to, you know, give up and sacrifice. And sometimes you miss on those bets.

• 1:07:29Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious, one of the things that was implied in your diagnosis of Databricks and how they were able to execute in a in a great way with regard to some of the bets that they've been able to make was some implied advantages, or maybe explicit advantages in being in the private markets and not having the same

• 1:07:57Logan Bartlett?

  quarterly cadence and public rhythm of needing investors to be on board to the same extent that that happens in the public markets. One, can you unpack that a little bit? And do you think that the implication of that is that companies actually should stay private longer when they're taking some of these more ambitious bets? Or where do you fall on that side of the spectrum?

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  Look, there are a lot of things I don't think Databricks is doing well. So, so I can't say like, and again, if I'm a shareholder, if I'm an employee, like even like, these are things that you just kind of don't understand, especially when you're like a, like maybe a frontline person, maybe your sales rep or a a frontline engineer or something like that. Sometimes you don't think about these things, but like at the same market cap that Databricks is trading in the private market. This is prior to this Neon acquisition. They were trading at about roughly $90 a share. At the same price point, Snowflake was trading at about $130 a share.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Because they're more dilutive. They don't have any cash to buy companies, so they buy it with equity. So, so, so they dilute. And, and so they're The CEO, he thinks he's doing the right thing. Maybe he is. But I've talked to a lot of VCs and say, show me a company that's ever been private for this long and been successful in the long run. So again, at some point, the investors are going to force his hand to go public at some point because they want liquidity, right? Now, in this world, there is a decent sized private market for a bunch of companies. A bunch of Elon Musk companies are private companies, but they have liquidity.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  OpenAI has liquidity. So like, I don't know if it's right or wrong. But again, if you're going after huge markets, AI is a huge market. So Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI, they're going after these like, I don't know the size of their market. It's ginormous. There's some niceness of being private because you do not have to worry about things around profitability or path to profitability. As long as investors will give you money, and I think Databricks is in that boat, is they continue to almost imply they're going to get the profitability, but they're not.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  And they're continuing to lose money. So to their credit, they can go buy companies. They can go buy, they can go spend 3X more than what Snowflake will buy on a company. They've done it multiple times. They bought a company called Tabular. So like had a deal to buy Tabular. Like, there's a bunch of stuff that they can do that that Snowflake couldn't do. So there is some validity in what they're doing. Whether or not that's right, time will tell. I don't know. I'm not, this is not an area where I'm going to be an expert.

• 1:11:07Logan Bartlett?

  In going from the private to the public markets, what changed for you most in terms of how you ran the day to day of the business? And ultimately, do you think it made Snowflake a better business than it was in the private markets? Or is that kind of a narrative that you think VCs maybe put out there to try to get liquidity?

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Well, it's not just for the VCs, it's for the employees. I mean, look, you know, you work at, I don't know what the average tenure of an employee is, you know, look, you know, an average tenure for head of sales is probably 18 months, you know, for me to do it for 11 and a half years is probably there's not, not a lot of longevity historically in heads of sales. So, you know, I think it's most important for the employees to have liquidity because there are, there's so much of your wealth that can be built in this one company. And if, if you can only sell 10% of your stock, you know, you know, and that's typically what happens in a, in a privately traded company.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  It's hard, especially if you want to go do another job at another company because you're, you're kind of handcuffed, you know, with these companies. I think so. To me, it's not just for the, the VCs. To me, it's, it's all, it's also for the employees and, and, you know, can, can you create wealth for these employees? Especially when you're, you know, if you've been there from the beginning, if, I mean, I can only imagine some of these employees that have been at Databricks for a long time. They, they've been able to sell some, but in theory, I could sell all of my stock in Southland if I wanted to. And, and, and they can't because there's, there are some handcuffs, you know, put on you when you're, you're traded as a private company.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  So, to me, having liquidity is, is really important, I think, for employee retention, employee morale and, and stuff like that. I think that's probably the most important thing. Now, in terms of operating the company day to day, yeah, I mean, they're, you know, look, we have quarterly earnings. We have things that we have to make sure that we, we focus on and there's, there's a bunch of, you know, things around profitability. You know, Wall Street cares about free cash flow. So we had to make sure there are things that we've had to do to make sure that we hit those free cash flow targets and, and making sure that we operate in a lean fashion,

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  which, which again, can be good for the company and the shareholders. You're generating shareholder value. And I think this is to Sridhar's credit. He's, he's re-accelerating growth at a publicly traded company and running a lean, lean machine. I think he's a world-class operator. He's doing a great job. But it's a lot harder. His job is a lot harder than, than, than, than Ali's at Databricks because he doesn't have those, those things that he has to think about.

• 1:14:03Logan Bartlett?

  You've had a great partnership with your longtime counterpart at the CMO role within Snowflake, so much so that I think you guys are working on or writing a book together about that relationship. And I don't want to give away the totality of the insights in the book, and people should read it when it comes out. But I'm curious, what is the kernel that has made that relationship so successful? And what would you pass along to other companies that are trying to make those sometimes competing responsibilities or roles work well together?

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  Yes, so, you know, I talked about this all the time with the companies that I advise, and I learned this from, again, Frank Slootman, when I asked, when Snowflake went public, we became tech famous. Snowflake did, and a lot of the executive team became tech famous. And so I got a lot of requests to be on, whether it's advisor or board or whatever. And I had to get Frank's approval. And I went to Frank, and he said, you know, look, it'll be a really good thing for you to do because you'll see how messed up, he didn't use messed up, I just won't say what the other word he said.

• 1:15:27Logan Bartlett?

  You can say, I think we have the explicit tag on our Spotify and Apple account. So I think we're comfortable there.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  You'll see how fucked up other companies are. And so, and I laughed. And so then, you know, one of my first advisory roles, I was like, holy cow, the CEO almost relished the friction between sales and marketing and would create this. Awful, you know, competitive situation between sales and marketing. And, you know, uh, when, when we were growing, I was doing my own demand generation. I was like the demand generation machine for stuff like, and that was, and, and John McMahon was like, dude, you're going to get fired if you don't fix this.

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  Um, and so that's when we went out and hired Denise and she's a demand generation focused CMO. And the first thing that she did, cause I was arguing with the, the previous regime around what a, when an MQL was, what, you know, what an SQL was like, how many of the MQLs should I see? All this other stuff. And, and she said, I'm going to stop right now. The day one, um, you are, um, my customer, um, and, and we're going to talk about meetings. And we're going to talk about qualified meetings and that's all we're going to talk about. Um, and, and then she would go and sit down and I, I, I ran the SDR team. She would go sit down with the SDRs, then she'd go and meet with the, the, the sales team and say, okay, tell me about the leads that you're getting from the SDRs.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  Um, and then she created her whole demand generation program around making sure that we got qualified meetings. Um, and, and to me that was like, she treated me as customer number one. She treated our sales team as her customer, um, and she trained her entire team to treat us as, as the customer. And so to me, revenue matters the most. I mean, I don't care whatever anyone says in an enterprise software company. Um, I don't care if it's AI, whatever it is, you, revenue matters. And, and so she knew that and she said, I gotta get you in front of customers and prospects and generate pipeline for you.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  And, and, and that was the start of this wonderful partnership that Denise's Denise and I have had. So yeah, we are writing a book, um, about our journey. Um, because like you, there are so many founders that don't have never managed the sales and marketing team. I think there's friction and they should say, well, this marketing team is going to generate this many leads. You guys aren't touching those leads. That's a constant. She would always be like, no, we're, we're not having that conversation. Her and I would have it privately around, okay, what's working, what's not? And each one of us would take action and even like take action on people. So if there were people that were cancers to either organization, we would make changes based on feedback that we would get from each other. So we just built this really close relationship on working together.

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  And, and I think that's incredibly important is having a good, a great go to market organization involves both sales and marketing. Sales can't do it alone without marketing. And I think that was the, the really important thing that kept Snowflake's engine going. And Denise is the best in, in demand generation and, and, and that one of the top, if not the top, uh, uh, chief marketing officers in, in the software space. Um, and so I was super lucky to get to work with her and her team. And she built a world-class team underneath her.

• 1:18:58Logan Bartlett?

  When does the, when does the book actually come out?

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  Coming out this fall, um, let it snow. I think that's the, the name of it. So I think, I think we're going to go with that. And, uh, and it, and it is, it's, it's kind of a biographical, you know, you know, story of Snowflake, but told in, in their, in how we built the, the go to market machine and stuff like, um, so we're excited about, about it. Yeah.

• 1:19:19Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, well, I will encourage, uh, people to, uh, to check it out when it comes out. Snowflake has been a prolific source of, um, of, uh, books that thus far, I guess with Frank's book as well. And so I, uh, yeah, excited to read it. Um, so I guess maybe we can wrap with a few rapid fire questions. Uh, and I guess the first one, do you think, um, sales-led and product-led sort of the PLG motion? Do you think those things can truly, uh, coexist within a business? Or does one of those ultimately, uh, went out in the fullness of time?

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  Look, I think, I think it would be, it would have been great if we had, you know, a PLG motion first, like, hey, that would have been great. If we had a bunch of leads that were coming in, that people were using the product first. We, we, we were, you know, there was complexity to our sales, we were selling a database. And, and so we needed a very much a hands-on approach to doing it. And so we focused on scaling out the, the, the go-to-market engine and, and built the whole, whole team around doing proof of concepts and stuff like that. It worked out well for us. If you can have PLG at the same time,

• 1:20:38Speaker 00

  so, so what we did is we focused initially on, you know, 100% guarded, you know, on who could touch the product, when they could touch it, all this other stuff, to then, you know, driving a self-service motion, so more of a PLG motion. That, that came later. And Denise then focused her, the, the marketing team's effort on, on driving people to the self-service portal so that people could sign up. You know, look, there's nothing that, like, more awesome than getting highly qualified leads that are in the pipeline. Eventually, even if you're a PLG-led organization, you need an outbound motion. You need, you know, to, to,

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  to continue to scale your, your org. So I think they absolutely should coexist, coexist. If you, if you're, if you're having a ton of success right off the bat with PLG, lean into that. But eventually, start in your mind, like, think of the likes of Anthropic. Anthropic's, you know, building out their go-to-market machine now, but they were very much a PLG-led organization. They have a huge consumer business, but they are focused on selling into the enterprise now. And, and so I, I think there's, there's a ton of that, that, that matters. And I, you know, I'm not going to say anyone is better than the other, but you'll invest, get, get, you know, get market share as fast as you can,

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  but you're going to need the other one eventually, whether that's the PLG or whether that's enterprise software. If you aspire to sell into the large enterprise, you're going to need those motions.

• 1:22:14Logan Bartlett?

  What's one tactic or adage or something in enterprise sales that sounds smart, but you actually believe is totally incorrect or maybe just very overrated?

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  Products sell themselves. I mean, you know, people think that, you know, it was easy selling stuff like I, you know, even, you know, when I would do new hire trainings at Snowflake, even like the last new hire training I did, I told the people in the room, there are people in this room that will fail because they're, they're, you, like, there are basic fundamentals that you have to do to be successful in a sales job. So the core fundamentals were, for me, we had a great product. You have to go tell that story eight times a week. So eight face-to-face meetings a week is like, you gotta do it. And by the way, it's grunt work.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  It's to pick up the phone and cold call people and ask them to meet with you. They don't want to meet with you. Right? And force your way into an opportunity. Those are the things that are, that people think are easy because, and that was a huge misperception of Snowflake. People would come into Snowflake thinking, look at how great that company is. I remember talking, there's plenty of sales leaders that we've hired that have said that to me. On the outside looking in, it looked really, really easy. But in the reality is like every day we're knife fighting. And so I was looking for where I couldn't hire people from a sales force and have them be really successful at Snowflake because Salesforce is like 98% market share. They don't know how to open up new logos.

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  They know how to like, you know, manufacture, you know, deals around pricing structures and relicensing things and stuffing other products into the deal. They do not know how to create demand. They do not how to sell through an actual campaign. And so to me, that's where the big difference is, is actually figuring out like, does a person, does a salesperson have the ability to generate their own demand and close deals? Because to me, like, that's the misperception that this journey itself, like, was this super easy journey. It was never easy.

• 1:24:37Logan Bartlett?

  Um, I guess as we, as we hop, I'm curious, like, what's the biggest red flag that you see when talking to a founder? Or an early sales team that makes you think they, they just don't have the, the understanding of what it's actually going to take?

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  Again, it's, it's arrogant. I, I, I just, there's this founder I've met a couple of times of a, a company that's doing quite well. But doesn't believe in traditional sales. Um, and, and I'm thinking to myself like, okay. Um, like you know better than, you know, I don't know how many years of enterprise selling there is. I, I don't, I don't think you do.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  And I think it goes back to being arrogant. Um, if, if you think your, your, your shit don't stink, you're wrong. And, um, I think, again, like, it comes back to the, my favorite founders to work with are people that want feedback and act on that feedback and are humble enough to, to admit that they're wrong and act quickly. And if you do not do that, I don't want to work with you. Um, because I think that's like the, the reality of it is, is like, you know, you can, you can, because you have a great product, it can get you to a place, but that place will come to an end.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  And it's better to get ahead of it. Um, and, and make sure you have a great product and a great go to market organization together. And that's when you really can crush it.

• 1:26:17Logan Bartlett?

  Um, I guess, uh, one final one as we, as we wrap, um, what has you most excited today as you start to move into more, um, board, uh, roles and advisor roles for business? What's the, what's the thing that gets you most excited?

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  Finding the next Chris Steggen. I mean, I want to, I mean, I was, I was, um, knowing I was a frontline sales manager at EMC. I was a second line manager for a hot minute. And, you know, there were a lot of people that developed me from Bob to Frank to John McMahon, to Carl Eschenbach, even Shredar. And, and so to me, I want to develop the next generation of sales leaders. And to me, that's the most exciting part that, that I get. People always say, hey, Chris, you want to be a CEO? Absolutely not. I do not want to be a CEO. I want to help build great go-to-market organizations and I want to help develop the, the next great sales leaders. Like, to me, that's, that's what gets me up out of it.

• 1:27:20Logan Bartlett?

  Well, Chris, thanks for doing this. This is great. I have a ton of respect and admiration for how you've led throughout the Snowflake journey and as, as an investor, a long time investor, I guess, at Redpoint and a personal investor as well. I'm super appreciative of all the, the hard work you've, you've done and so excited to see what, what these next chapters look like for you.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  Awesome. Well, Logan, it was great talking to you. Thank you for your time and thanks for having me on your, on your podcast.

• 1:27:45Logan Bartlett?

  Awesome. Thanks, Chris.