Snowflake Inc. Piper Sandler 5th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference

All right. We'll go ahead and get rolling. I am Rob Owens. I head our technology research practice at Piper, and I also cover infrastructure and cybersecurity stocks. I am very happy to welcome our first company this morning, Snowflake. With us from the company, we cannot forget Katherine McCracken, who is sitting in the front row, and CFO, Brian Robins.

Brian, welcome. Thank you for having us here today, Rob.

Thank you for coming. Maybe just start with a little bit of perspective. A year ago, you had signed on as the Snowflake CFO, but came here in the capacity of GitLab on a kind of going out, I think it was your last week, effectively.

It has been a hell of a year.

Oh, it's been a fun year.

Catpocalypse, you name it, everything else. Maybe a little perspective about year one at Snowflake for you, looking back.

Yeah. I guess I would start with what my priorities were, and what I've done for a long time, and really the focus on go-to-market execution, revenue growth and just operating efficiency in the model. One of the reasons why I joined Snowflake, sort of what do you want to do when you grow up type story, I wanted to be at a company that was really at the center of AI. I read or heard somewhere, you have to have a data strategy, you have an AI strategy, and you look to see what Snowflake was doing and all the customers that were putting their data into Snowflake. That, coupled with the fact that Snowflake had just recently had a CEO change, and Sridhar was just really, really well-known in the industry for product innovation, product velocity, and so forth.

For me, those elements were extremely compelling and interesting. It's been a year and we've had great operating leverage in the model. We committed to being GAAP profitable in Q4 of next year. In addition to that, we've also re-accelerated growth. We just had a tremendous print this last quarter, and doing it in a number of different areas, doing it in the core business, as well as in a number of AI products that we're releasing.

Speaking of what you want to do when you grow up, you are obviously not new to this. You have worked at a scaled enterprise before as CFO, and in Verisign, high growth in GitLab, both public companies. Maybe speak to walking into Snowflake day one, and what it was like there, some of the puts and takes, and differences versus prior companies, because it had scale and growth.

Yeah, absolutely. My first 90-day priorities at Snowflake was, one, spend a lot of time with the team. The outgoing CFO was transitioning out for a period of time, so I wanted to make sure that I could spend time with all my directs and folks that report to them and so forth. Spending time with the team was super important. I also wanted to get out and talk to a lot of customers. I think being a CFO when I was a financial analyst out of grad school and sitting in a cube, I said, "Man, if I ever make it to the CFO office, I really want to be out in the field talking to customers," as I think that really helps you on resource allocation and where to allocate dollars around the business.

I sort of made a career working closely with the CRO, so had met with a lot of customers to understand why they are using Snowflake. But most importantly, I would ask them, "Where can we improve? What could we do to be better? And how are we differentiating?" Then third, was meet with investors. Obviously, we are here due to our customers and our investors, and really wanted to understand what was on investors' top of mind, what things were going well, what was not going well, and if there is anything that I could influence and change in my first 90 to 180 days.

You mentioned you wanted to be at a company that was at the center of AI.

Clearly, I think with new leadership, Snowflake's affected a lot of change from a product strategy standpoint, and has become that AI leader. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, when you reported, it was one of the strongest quarters we saw across our entire coverage universe. Maybe talk about those elements of the business that are going right right now.

Yeah. We're super fortunate to have built this database technology about 10 years ago that is super scalable and cost-effective for our customers. So you had to have a really good foundation to do that. That, coupled with just the amazing leadership that we have across the entire company, Sridhar, CK, Vivek, Denise Persson's been our CMO for, Yash, for about 8 or 9 years. So we've had really, a lot of the people at the company have been there for a while with really deep leadership. We had the ability to infuse AI into what we already had. What was the most impressive thing about what's happened is, I probably talk to 3 to 5 CFOs or CEOs a week now, either existing customers or potential customers, and talk about how I've changed the way I work and how AI's really impacted myself.