He Built $100B at Google, Then Failed. Now He Runs an $80B+ Company | Snowflake, Sridhar Ramaswamy

1. 0:00 – 1:48

   You Are More Than Your Failures

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy0:00

      First of all, failure's hard. It's a little bit like deep gash or scratch that you get. You can deal with it, it is still hard. I'll tell you something, every startup is an act of believing. It's also an act of madness because you think you can do something that other people have never done before. You need to have that kind of a belief. It's a little bit of a religious feeling. When we started Neeva, we wanted to build a product that was 10X better than Google. It's just that that is a very, very high bar. The product that we built was a little bit better than Google, but not really 10X better. And so my biggest message to founders is all of you need to believe that you can do something better. Every failure has important lessons, but it is important to accept failures, accept that you're human, but also accept and internalize that you're more than your failures. I tell people, I tell my s- my children, I tell myself that we are more than our successes, and we simultaneously are also more than our failures. Having that strong conviction in who you are as a person, I think just makes you believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done. And honestly, you cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual. Hi there. My name is Sridhar Ramaswamy. I am the CEO of Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud. I'm also a proud husband and father of two sons that are both, uh, computer scientists. So, uh, data and computing runs in the family.

2. 1:48 – 3:14

   Find Work That Makes Time Stand Still

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy1:52

      I have worked in technology and computing all of my career. I grew up in India, primarily South India. Sometimes people ask me about what my career arc was like, you know, how I navigated my early times. To be honest, when I first came to the US, I didn't even think about working in the industry or what kind of job I would get. I, uh, came to get a PhD, and for somebody that grew up in India, a very technically focused, hyper-competitive but very structured environment, doing a PhD is very strange because most of the time when you go ask a professor what you should work on, they will typically tell you, "You should work on something interesting," which is terrifying for a 22-year-old that does not really know research to figure out what to do. But that itself is a journey where you have to understand existing areas, come up with brave hypothesis for where that area could go, and then do research. To be honest, what I didn't realize at the time was I was okay doing research, but I was never passionate about doing research. When people ask me today what they should work on, I typically tell them, "You should work on something that makes time stand still." There are things that all of us do that we are happy to spend more and more time doing

3. 3:14 – 5:03

   Reinventing Himself as a Software Engineer

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy3:14

      it. And after 10 years of doing research, I actually decided that I wanted to reinvent myself and become a software engineer. Software engineering, writing code, is still my passion. I love the act of creation. I love the act of producing something from nothing. And my success at Google came because I liked software, I liked creating systems, but I also liked creating business impact, and there was no better team on the planet than the Search Ads team, where technology translated into great product and enormous amounts of money for somebody like me to grow. And so my career has been a happy combination of, yes, being at the right place at the right time, but also finding things that were truly resonant to me. And along the way, you know, like with everyone else, I've had amazing mentors. Obviously, the founders of Google, but also people like, uh, Bill Campbell, who is known as the coach in these areas. He's been coach to among the greatest leaders the world has ever known. The first and most important thing that you have to internalize is that every job has its own set of requirements. There are many things that you might know, there are things that you have to learn. As a first-time public company CEO, for example, I had not really dealt with analysts that cover Snowflake from a financial perspective. Getting to know them, establishing relationships with them, and understanding what it takes to work with them is something that I had to learn. I happily learned it. My biggest piece of advice would be every job has its definition of excellence, so try and figure out what that is. If you don't know, that's okay. Find other people that know. Get feedback from them about what it takes to be excellent. That way, you can aspire to be as good as the best in how somebody does their job.

4. 5:03 – 6:08

   3 Leadership Principles for the AI Era

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy5:07

      My Snowflake story, honestly, is a bit of an accident. My original agreement with the company was that I would come, join, and stay for six months. I'm a reluctant leader. I didn't start my career thinking that I would be a leader, but I saw it as hugely impactful to the organization that you are a part of. Too many people think of leadership as purely that of people management. You're also a cultural icon that sets the tone for what is valued in the company, and in my mind, that means that leaders need to truly imbue the spirit of what the company's products are about. I pride myself on being a very hands-on leader that knows the details, that cares about deeply, deeply about the craft of what we do. I think of software engineering as a craft, as something that is a tangible product that makes a difference- To our customers. In Google, it was advertisers and end users. Over at Snowflake, it's our enterprise customers. And

5. 6:08 – 7:45

   Why Great Leaders Stay Close to the Product

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy6:08

      so being obsessive about things like product quality, making sure that it's the highest quality that is there, I think that's an important quality that a leader needs to have, which is feel the mission of your company, is great products are the best defense, especially today when there is so much changing. It means that you really have to focus and understand what is great today and what is great tomorrow, and keep building towards that. I think that high-quality products that are also priced very competitively are the ultimate defensibility. Taking care of your customers, being there for them when things are not going well, is also equally important because customers will remember that you are there for them when things were not going well. These are some of the things that I think create iconic companies. That is the number one. Number two, as a leader, you need to understand that bringing people in, helping them grow, and helping them thrive is your most important job. I look for people that are driven and malleable. Why do I say that? It's because in a time that is changing as rapidly as it is right now, we want people that will go the extra mile to learn how to do things better, will strive to achieve more. I also feel you need to be very malleable, meaning you need to be adaptable, because something that you were very good at yesterday might be better done by an AI model today. You cannot hang on to that. You have to keep learning new things, both in your personal life as well as your professional life. And as a leader,

6. 7:45 – 9:23

   Hiring People Who Can Adapt

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy7:45

      you need to find people like this that are hungry, that want to get things done, and nurture them. Give them opportunity. Be there for them when things are not going well, and be very supportive when things are going well. You need to make sure that you learn how to share credit. Credit is never diluted by sharing, and good leaders always share in the happy news when good things come out of their teams, but they always stand in front when things are not going well and say, "You know, this is my responsibility. These things didn't go well because I could have done better." That kind of giving, both nurturing your team but protecting your team, is very important. This is not to say that you cannot have a very high bar for who should work in your team. I am routinely a very demanding boss. I expect a lot out of my team. I expect a lot out of myself, but everybody who works with me understands that it is always in the spirit of making us, Snowflake the company, us as a team, better. That helps you be an effective leader, and one that is also very genuine. Finally, my life principle is also that I'm an open and transparent leader. I communicate very directly. I give feedback very directly. I take feedback very directly. If people tell me that I can do something better, I never grudge that feedback. I think of that as something, as a gift that they're giving me that can help me be better at it, and that kind of an open environment can be very conducive to things getting done very quickly and us being able to get better very quickly as well.

7. 9:23 – 10:36

   From Google’s $100B Plan to Founder Failure

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy9:26

      Eric Schmidt, our CEO at the time, made me and a few other folks write a $100 billion revenue plan. This is like 2007, 2008. We all thought that this was the funniest thing ever, because the idea that one company could make $100 billion just sounded so preposterous. To be honest with you, the $100 billion plan was a little bit of a planning exercise, and, uh, we worked on it even though we didn't really believe in it. But the real challenge came just a few years later when desktop growth completely flat-lined. People stopped buying new PCs, and so that meant that our query growth at Google stopped. This is when mobile started taking off, but the terrifying thing for Google, the business, was that mobile just did not make any money. So the only place we had growth was in mobile search, and yet mobile search monetized at a fraction of desktop search. So we worked five years to bring mobile monetization on par with desktop search, and that was the key to Google thriving through 2014, 2015, and honestly, through to today.

8. 10:36 – 11:04

   When Mobile Almost Broke Google’s Business

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy10:36

      When you look at it from the outside, it can look like a smooth journey, but it was an ocean full of big turbulence. Something like $100 billion plan was so audacious that you could not immediately translate it. On the other hand, we kept working at it. We had a good system. We tried to improve query monetization, for example, by 5% every quarter. That was part of what drove the overall increase in Google revenue.

9. 11:04 – 11:33

   Why He Left Google to Build Neeva

   1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy11:04

      On the other hand, big achievements can also raise questions in your head. In many ways, us hitting things like $100 billion, being the SVP of ads and commerce at Google, eventually led me to say that I should do something differently. It gave me both the pressure but also the freedom to go do something else. I went and started a company, and we came up with this audacious thesis that a search engine that was free could in fact be a better search

10. 11:33 – 13:34

    Why Neeva Failed and What I Learned

    1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy11:33

       engine. Looking back, I would say that the biggest mistake that we made in conceiving Neeva was not setting the bar for that product to be 10X that of how Google Search was. Google has incredible distribution. It pays money to every browser. It pays money to every distribution point. And we had to have realized that if we wanted people to adopt Neeva, we needed a 10x product. And until AI came along, we were not really ready for creating that 10x product, and that's a lot of the reason why it did not succeed as a company. And look, my company just was not as successful as my tr- stay at Google. That's okay. I actually think that resilience, being able to deal with failure, is even more important than just succeeding. I'll tell you something, every startup is an act of believing. It's also an act of madness because you think you can do something that other people have never done before. You need to have that kind of a belief. It's a little bit of a religious feeling. When we started Neeva, we wanted to build a product that was 10x better than Google. It's just that that is a very, very high bar. The product that we built was a little bit better than Google, but not really 10x better, and that was a lot of the issue that we had in distribution. In many ways, I consider ChatGPT to be the successor to Google in terms of information. I go to ChatGPT often because it can solve problems for me with a nuance that a Google search is never going to have. I sometimes take, you know, just pictures. My coffee grinder stopped working. I just took a picture of the grinder, put it in, you know, in ChatGPT and said, "Hey, this is not working. What's the problem?" And it told me probably that the top was not screwed on tight. I go and tighten the top, and lo and behold, the coffee machine starts working. That is the modern search experience.

11. 13:34 – 15:08

    How to Keep Building After Failure

    1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy13:34

       And so my biggest message to founders is all of you need to believe that you can do something better, but you need to make sure that there is a compelling reason for users to want to use your product. At Snowflake, for example, I tell our PMs, our engineers, that the bar is faster, cheaper, better. Your product has to be one of these for it to truly succeed. Ideally, all of it. I think core principles remain the same, that it's about creating value, whether it's for consumers or for enterprise customers. I think what these technologies all do is they disrupt how value is created. I think making sure that their products are leveraging whatever is coming out today with the best models into their product, into how they think about creating value, is going to be really, really important. Ten years from now, if Snowflake were to become an iconic company like a Google or an AWS, I could not be happier. I am ho- I hope I am around for that time to actually see it. That's the collective aspiration that we are driving towards. We want to be a company that truly makes a difference to all of the enterprises that are out there. Snowflake's mission is to use the power of data and AI to help every enterprise realize its full potential, and, uh, in 10 years, I hope we are well on our way to doing this for most companies on the planet.

12. 15:08 – 16:54

    You Are More Than Your Successes, Too

    1. SRSridhar Ramaswamy15:08

       First of all, failure is hard. It's a little bit like, you know, like a deep gash or scratch that you get. You can deal with it, it is still hard. But I think dealing with it makes us try harder. It makes us appreciate success a whole lot more. Yes, Neeva failed, but out of that failure came all the seeds that were there that are necessary to make Snowflake an amazing company in AI. The team that built Search at Neeva built Search at Snowflake. The team that built our AI mode in Neeva is the one that's building Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence, which are the successors and, uh, the future of where Snowflake is going. Every failure has important lessons, but it is important to accept failures, accept that you're human, but also accept and internalize that you're more than your failures. I tell people, I tell my s- my children, I tell myself that we are more than our successes, and we simultaneously are also more than our failures. Having that strong conviction in who you are as a person, I think just makes you believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done. And honestly, you cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual. [outro music]

Episode duration: 17:03