Skip to content
The Twenty Minute VCThe Twenty Minute VC

Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO @Snowflake: Deepseek is Not a Threat to OpenAI & OpenAI Beats Anthropic|E1258

Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO @ Snowflake, the $60BN public company with $3.5BN in revenue growing 30% per year. Sridhar joined Snowflake following his company, Neeva, being acquired by them for $150M. Prior to founding Neeva, Ramaswamy spent 15 years at Google where he had an integral part in the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion. ---------------------------------------------- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:23) Personal Journey to CEO (02:25) Advice for Young Graduates in a Changing Workforce (08:28) Balancing Intensity & Team Sustainability (13:00) Navigating Difficult Conversations (16:59) The Role of Wealth in Leadership (18:25) Sustainable Value in the AI Market (24:41) Competing with Giants: Snowflake's Position (28:48) Innovation Under Constraints (33:11) The Future of AI and Snowflake's Strategy (35:11) Insights from Davos: Utility and Innovation (36:46) Incumbents Innovating at Unprecedented Speeds (39:10) The AI Arms Race: Investment & Innovation (41:12) Growth Strategies: M&A & Product Innovation (43:18) Future Revenue Streams for Snowflake (44:36) The Landscape of AI Models (48:23) Lessons from Google's Distribution Strategy (50:28) Quick-Fire Round ---------------------------------------------- In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 1. OpenAI vs Deepseek vs Anthropic: Why will OpenAI beat Deepseek? What does no one see with Deepseek that they should see? Why has OpenAI beaten Anthropic? What elements turn a model from a commodity into a sustaining product suite? Will model providers become application providers? Will OpenAI be the biggest killer of startups in the next 10 years? 2. Snowflake vs Nvidia & Databricks: To what extent is Sridhar concerned NVIDIA will move into the data layer and compete with Snowflake? How does Sridhar view the competition from Databricks? What have they done better than them? What have they done worse than them and lost on? Does being private hurt or help Databricks in their fight against Snowflake? If Sridhar could, would he take Snowflake private today? 3. Leadership, Parenting, Money: Do richer leaders make better leaders? How does being rich change the mindset of a leader? What are Sridhar’s biggest lessons when it comes to parenting? What about the way that Sridhar was brought up, did he do deliberately differently with his kids? ----------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Sridhar Ramaswamy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SnowflakeDB Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #sridharramaswamy #snoflake #venturecapital #openai #deepseek #leadership #startups #nvidia

Sridhar RamaswamyguestHarry Stebbingshost
Feb 9, 202555mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Snowflake CEO on AI moats, OpenAI’s dominance, and relentless leadership

  1. Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake and former Google Ads chief, discusses how AI is reshaping careers, startups, and large incumbents, while explaining Snowflake’s strategy in a crowded data and AI landscape. He argues that sustainable AI value will accrue to products with deep customer relationships, not just to model creators, and that OpenAI’s real moat is ChatGPT as a consumer product rather than its models. Ramaswamy shares candid views on the risks of building on top of OpenAI, the Databricks rivalry, and how public-market constraints sharpen Snowflake’s innovation. He also reflects on leadership: intensity, hard conversations, demotions, and the importance of presence in parenting and in building enduring teams.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Build your career at the intersection of passion and societal value.

Ramaswamy advises young people to choose fields where they both care deeply and where society demonstrably pays, then stay nimble and open to change as AI reshapes knowledge work rather than trying to avoid it.

Embrace AI as a universal “translation layer” for knowledge work.

He expects all knowledge professions, including software engineering, to be heavily impacted by AI’s ability to understand and transform structured and unstructured information, but sees this as creating new opportunities rather than eliminating entire professions overnight.

Product and distribution, not just models, will determine AI winners.

OpenAI’s advantage is not only model quality but ChatGPT’s half-billion users and rich product features (images, uploads, code execution); DeepSeek and others can improve models, but replicating that product and user base is far harder.

It’s risky to be a startup purely built on top of OpenAI.

Because the line between infrastructure and applications is blurry, players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google can quickly move into any attractive application category (coding assistants, legal tools, etc.), compressing startup moats.

Sustainable AI value in enterprise will flow to incumbents who self-disrupt fast.

Ramaswamy argues that platforms with deep data and customer relationships (e.g., Snowflake, Salesforce) that aggressively embed AI and ‘disrupt themselves’ are better positioned than greenfield startups to own durable enterprise value.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

Find something that you're passionate about that society values.

— Sridhar Ramaswamy

AI is this incredible translation layer between all kinds of knowledge.

— Sridhar Ramaswamy

You're not going to switch from ChatGPT to DeepSeek. It's a product, it's not a model.

— Sridhar Ramaswamy

I think it is terrifying to be a startup building on top of OpenAI.

— Sridhar Ramaswamy

Money doesn't buy you amazing foundation models, doesn't buy you Snowflake.

— Sridhar Ramaswamy

Career advice and the future of knowledge work in the age of AILeadership style, intensity, scaling executives, and hard conversationsWhere sustainable value lies in the AI stack (models vs products vs data platforms)OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic and the blurred line between infra and appsSnowflake’s AI and data strategy vs Databricks and hyperscalersPublic vs private company dynamics and how constraints shape innovationEnterprise AI adoption, ROI, and historical lessons from Google’s rise

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome