Transcription
Strategy without execution means nothing. I routinely have squabbles with teams about whether something is ambitious or not. You got to play the game of averages. If you try enough ambitious things, a bunch of them work out.
How are you thinking about how companies change as AI rolls out everywhere? This is a big, tough question. Welcome to "This is Working," where leaders share their strategies for success and the lessons that shape them.
Shita Ramaswami is the CEO of Snowflake, the massive cloud data upstart. Street ARS had an extraordinary career, from Google, where he led some of the world's biggest businesses, to entrepreneurship. Now, just under a year in his role at Snowflake, Streetart is leading the change of one of the fastest-growing companies in tech. He joins me now from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Every leader we've been talking to has been asking the same question: What are the skills that are required to really make it in the AI age? The biggest surprise has been the most common answer, which is EQ—this idea of emotional intelligence. I think it's always been important. Progress gets made when a great group of people come together for a common cause and work towards it. But we're also human beings. We have bad days, we have good days, we have misunderstandings.
Being able to see that, understand that—I don't think AI age or no AI age changes any of that. It's an essential skill to succeeding both in your personal life and absolutely in your professional life.
You're approaching your one-year anniversary as CEO. Anything that has surprised you along the way? Things you expected to experience as CEO and you didn't, or things that you have learned as being CEO?
One thing about how I approach jobs is I embrace all of it. There's always unknowns; there's always things that are more difficult than you thought. But I think it's really important to embrace the totality of your job. I envisioned thinking that I would spend a lot of time figuring out product strategy—what to emphasize, what to do more of. Yes, there's been that, but I've also spent a lot of time on the road, which I kind of expected, probably every other week.
I've also spent a lot of time with our go-to-market teams, really understanding that because I quickly realized that if you're a successful company but you want to take new products to market, that's like an entirely new muscle. It's been fun. I'm like a little kid going into a toy store, and so I've loved the learning. It's hugely informative as well because you learn both about the company and about what customers are saying.
You spent 15 years at Google. You left there and created a startup, and now you're at Snowflake. Can you just talk a little bit about what it's like to go from being at a company that feels like it is just absolutely turning on its own to one where you do have to do much more grinding?
Well, Google had a lot of grinding. Okay, it's hard to see that from outside. But we went through a whole lot of gut-wrenching changes, like the 2008 recession. The thing that I'm very proud of, I'm still proud of, was the search ads team. The ads team as a whole was one that took its job of delivering relevant ads incredibly seriously. They're driven to excellence every single day.
It's part of what I ask people at Snowflake now—that excellence is a way of living. It's not like some milestone that you get to. In a competitive market, you always have to drive yourself to excel. Look, growth rates of 30-40% are astronomical when you're making billions of dollars. To be able to do that over 10 to 15 years at a time takes a superhuman amount of work. Those are the things that I carry from place to place in terms of being strategic but also relentless at execution day in and day out.
Talk a little bit, if you would, about what it was like in those moments where the business felt like it was teetering. How do you, as a leader, get people to rally or even realize that there is a change that they need to get in front of?
Yeah, I mean, one of the nice things about the ads business was that it was well-calibrated. I used to joke to my team that we couldn't fool each other because the almighty dollar was well-calibrated. If your growth is dropping, everyone sees it. There's no hiding this. You could also see slowdowns. You could see, for example, where mobile was at or where new products like shopping that we did were at.
There was very much this culture of figuring out what was going to be urgent and then bringing on a set of people that would absolutely focus on that. But again, I look back to the intensity of those days. We knew we were part of something special. That's the message that I give to the team at Snowflake. Data is at the center of the world right now. Everybody knows there's no AI without data—without the right data, without high-quality data, without governed data.
I tell my team at Snowflake that this is the chance to create an iconic company like Google or AWS, and that's the opportunity that they need to embrace. While at Google, I wrote, with some colleagues, a $100 billion plan for Eric Schmidt in 2007. We all thought it was a joke because what company made $100 billion? It actually happened in 2018, the last year I spent at Google.
But experiences like that give you both the credibility and the tools that you need to drive yourself, you know, drive a team on an ongoing basis. I want to pause in there for a second because I think for a lot of people, this idea of writing—you know, we will go through our corporate lives and maybe make plans around what we expect to do next year, incremental growth that we want to see.
And you're talking about putting a huge number on paper and making a commitment to that. A, is that something that you ask teams to do? And B, what kind of training or experience or push do you have to do to get teams to make those kinds of leaps? Because it's not easy.
It's not easy. We should separate out the inspirational from the execution. At Snowflake, I can talk about wanting to be an iconic company and how there is incredible opportunity because the data platform, in my opinion, is going to be a $500 billion market 10 years from now. That's the opportunity that we need to seize.
However, even if you had a strategy for how you go about doing it, strategy without execution means nothing. When you joined Snowflake, it must have been sort of early into this question of how Snowflake was going to change with AI. What did you put into place to make sure that this company was leading in the AI revolution?
One of the biggest changes is how do we get to be a more iterative company? And that doesn't mean releasing half-baked products. That means paying extra attention to what are the components that we need to build right now, release, get feedback on, and make sure that they are rock solid before we build the next one. It's a much more iterative approach.
People that have worked in AI and machine learning get this. Again, teams respond. How did you get them to respond? What was the process like to make that kind of a culture change?
This was before I became CEO. We literally made a commitment spreadsheet. We said, here are like 20 items that we have planned out, and here are dates for each of them, and we will deliver them on time. Soon after I became CEO, I said, wait, our sales team was literally afraid to sell AI. Why? It's not an area that they knew.
So we had to go through a process of, okay, let's demystify AI for you. How do we now get a set of people that are trained in the AI products that are part of Snowflake? I call it a war room, but you can think of this as a cross-functional meeting that had engineers, product managers, marketing people, and salespeople. We said we're going to meet every week, we're going to identify a set of customers that we want to pitch these to, and we're going to learn.
I would do pitches; Bish, our head of product, would do pitches. We kind of almost went into this as a little startup, saying we need to earn our credibility. I also gave my team very clear priorities. I said, build great products, make sure that the world knows you have great products, go in with some big logos. You need the likes of Zans and AT&T to say we use Snowflake AI and we love it.
I said then drive volume. We have thousands of customers that are now using AI, and then I said revenue will follow.
That is so cool. So you bring everyone along, you teach them, you have everyone set big goals in all of these areas, and then you've just done that. What's that saying about, you know, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time? And that's exactly what it sounds like you're doing here.
Exactly, but that's what it takes. Because early on, you have to take a lot. There is, like, in this world of AI, nobody knows what the perfect product is going to be, so you have to adapt. On the other hand, it's like these are thrilling times. We can, you and I, do things with AI that we would not even have dreamed of two years ago. I mean, just think about that.
Yeah, for a lot of your customers, AI could be a scary thing. There are questions of data, data access, data security. What's that process like to get enterprises comfortable and really using the capabilities of what you're pitching them?
So there's an amount of organic excitement about it. But when I go to customers, I make sure I tell them first, you know, listen, you will never use your data to train any shared model. We will never even use the content of your prompts to train anything that is shared. Your data is yours, and that is an absolute guarantee. That's always been true for Snowflake, also true for Snowflake plus AI.
So, for example, with our AI products, we also guarantee that data will never even leave what we define as a Snowflake security boundary. It's a technical concept. It basically means we don't let the data get beyond the machines and storage that we control.
Then the second thing that I tell them is all of the governance rules. People have done a lot of hard work to put data into Snowflake. Part of it is setting up who can access what data. You don't want every employee in the company to access revenue data every day.
So I tell our customers everything that you have done in governance works seamlessly out of the box. But people also understand it is a lot more pleasant to interact with a chatbot that will give you truthful answers than to look through a page of eight search results, clicking on something, and then finding what it is that you're looking for.
People again understand it's much nicer to ask questions and get a table back for what you are looking for. Our magic is making all of that stuff easy.
How are you thinking about how companies change as AI rolls out everywhere in terms of roles, responsibilities, and career paths? This is a big, tough question.
While it is one thing to get data into the hands of everybody, you know, this data literacy is actually a hard concept. This is the reason why we also do programs like "A Million Minds" and a platform because we want to educate people on how to use data tools or even how to make sense of data.
One of my all-time favorite colleagues is a guy called Mike Meyer. He is one of the best statisticians I've ever worked with, and he always places such an emphasis on what can data tell you and what can data not tell you.
Certainly, one scary part of AI is what does this mean for jobs? What does this mean for growth? To be honest, I don't think any of us know the answer to that question. But there is also a definite sense that a lot more things can be made easier with AI than was even possible before, and those are strict value creation activities.
So I think, you know, a bunch of those kinds of aha moments are routinely happening because some clever person is able to put two and two together and say, like, "Ooh, that's a nice new way of thinking about things." I think we are still evolving with respect to what's the impact on the workplace. What does this mean for jobs? There's lots to come.
So that leads to the final question, which is about career advice. What's the best career advice you give right now to people who are starting a career and they want to work for a long time?
Embrace your job. Try to be really good at it. I talk to people—this is like, you know, an unhappy employee never got a promotion. Not every job that we pick is the right one for us. I did research for 10 years, and I was like, "That's not it." Ten years is a long time, but I switched. I did, and I'm very happy that I switched.
But to me, embracing what you're doing is really very important. You know, this is the thing that you're doing for, what, eight, ten hours a day? All of my success in my life has come from people giving me jobs that I didn't think I deserved or qualified for. There's always people like that because there's often growth in areas.
The more you take responsibility and the more you're broad about what defines team and success, the more likely it is that somebody is going to say, "You know, this is the person I want leading the next rung of the organization."