It is November 2013, and Chris Degnan is sitting across from Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/c/cases/degnan-product-market-fit-snowflake
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/c/cases/degnan-product-market-fit-snowflake
Snowflake was the first time that AWS and clouds in general were challenged about whether they would own the full stack or not, and whether cross cloud companies like Snowflake would win instead. This article from five years ago was very influential at the time, arguing that AWS made money more easily from Snowflake than trying to compete.
This hasn’t really finished playing out yet I don’t think.
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I remember reading this article when it was released!
I was actually very surprised that Snowflake could get as far as it did using this strategy — I thought the hyperscalers would just completely dominate (which I’m sure was the mainstream view circa 2019-2020). You’re right, this is still playing out (one thing we left out of the case was that Snowflake’s valuation has come down quite considerably, partly due to ZIRP ending and multiples compressing) … but I’ve been very impressed with how things have unfolded. I didn’t even see it as a possibility at the time!
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I’ve called this theory “the cloud unbundling”. I wrote about it here a while ago, but I am now not sure I agree with this thesis as strongly. Unbundling the Cloud — Intermittent writing
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Also a good companion to this article Listen: Snowflake’s former CRO on scaling from $0 to $3.5B (and surviving 4 CEOs)
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