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

You Are More Than Your Failures

00:00First of all, failure is hard. It's a little bit like deep gash or [music] 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.

00:19[music] You need to have that kind of a belief. It's a little bit of a religious feeling. [music] When we started Neva, we wanted to build a product that was 10x better than Google. is 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.

00:36And 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.

00:53I tell people, I tell my 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 [music] believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done.

01:13And honestly, you cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual. Hi there, my name is Sridar Ramas Swami. 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.

01:36So, uh data and computing runs in the family.

Find Work That Makes Time Stand Still

01:51I have worked in technology and computing all of my career. I grew up in India [music] 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 [music] industry or what kind of job I would get.

02:14I uh came to get a PhD and for somebody that grew up in India, a very technically [music] focused, hyper competitive but very structured environment, doing a PhD [music] 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.

02:40But that itself is a journey where you have to [music] understand existing areas, come up with brave hypothesis for where that area could go and then do research. [music] 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.

03:00When 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 where we are happy to spend more and more time doing it. And after 10 years of doing

Reinventing Himself as a Software Engineer

03:15research, I actually decided that I wanted to reinvent [music] myself and become a software engineer. Software engineering, writing code is still my [music] passion. I love the act of creation. I love the act of producing something [music] from nothing.

03:28And my success at Google came because I liked software. I liked creating systems, [music] but I also liked creating business impact. And there was no better team on the planet than the [music] search ads team where technology translated into great product and enormous amounts of money for somebody like me to grow.

03:47And so my career has been a happy combination of yes being at the right place at the right time, but also finding [music] things that were truly resonant to me. And along the way, you know, like with everyone else, I've had amazing mentors, obviously [music] the founders of Google, but also people like uh Bill Campbell, who is known as the coach in these areas.

04:10He's been coached [music] to among the greatest leaders the world has ever known. The first and most important [music] thing that you have to internalize is that every job has its own set of requirements. There are many things that you might know.

04:25There 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.

04:41I 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.

04:57That way, you can aspire to be as good as the best in how somebody does their job.

3 Leadership Principles for the AI Era

05:07My snowflake story honestly is a bit of an accident. My original agreement with the company was that I would come join and stay for 6 months. I'm a reluctant leader. I didn't start my career thinking that I would be a [music] leader, but I saw it as hugely impactful to the organization that you are a part of.

05:25Too 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.

05:43I pride myself on being a very hands-on leader that knows the details, that cares about deeply [music] 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.

06:01In Google, it was advertisers and end users. Over at Snowflake, it's our enterprise customers. And so being

Why Great Leaders Stay Close to the Product

06:09obsessive 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 [music] the mission of your company is great products or the best defense especially today when there is so much changing.

06:26It 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.

06:54These 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 [music] your most important job.

07:10I look for people that are driven and malleable. Why do I say that? That'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.

07:25I also feel you need to be very malleable meaning you need to be adaptable because something that you are 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.

07:43And as a leader you

Hiring People Who Can Adapt

07:45need 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.

08:01Credit 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 [music] things didn't go well because I could have done better.

08:18That 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.

08:36I expect a lot out of myself. But everybody who works with me understands [music] that it is always in the spirit of making us Snowflake the company us as a team [music] better. that helps you be an effective leader and one that is also very genuine.

08:54Finally, 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.

09:07I think of that as something as a gift that they are giving me that can help me be better at it. And that kind of an open environment can be very conducive to [music] things getting done very quickly. and us being able to get better very quickly as well.

From Google’s $100B Plan to Founder Failure

09:26Eric Schmidt, our CEO at the time, made me and a few other folks write a hundred billion revenue plan. This is like 20078. We all thought that this was the funniest [music] thing ever because the idea that one company could make $und00 billion just sounded so preposterous.

09:40To be honest with you, the hundred billion dollar plan was a little bit of a planning exercise [music] 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 flatlined.

09:58People stopped buying new PCs [music] 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.

10:21So we worked 5 years to bring mobile monetization on par with desktop search and that was the key [music] to Google thriving through 2014, 2015 and honestly through to today. When you look

When Mobile Almost Broke Google’s Business

10:36at it from the outside, it can look like a smooth journey, but it was an ocean full of big turbulence. Something like a hundred billion dollar plan was so audacious that you could not immediately translate it. On the other hand, we kept working at it.

10:50We had a good system would try to improve query monetization for example by 5% [music] every quarter. That was part of what drove the overall increase [music] in Google revenue. On

Why He Left Google to Build Neeva

11:04the other hand, big achievements can also raise questions in your head. In many ways, us hitting things like a hundred billion, being the SVP of ads and commerce at Google eventually led me to say that I should do something [music] differently.

11:19It gave me both the pressure but also the freedom to go do something else. I went and started a company and we [music] came up with this audacious thesis that a search engine that was free could in fact be a better search engine. Looking back, I would say

Why Neeva Failed and What I Learned

11:35that the biggest mistake that we made in conceiving Neva 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.

11:52[music] And we had to have realized that if we wanted people to adopt Neva, we needed a 10X product. [music] 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.

12:09And look, my company just was not as successful as might 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.

12:27It'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 Neva, we wanted to build a product that was 10x better than Google.

12:43It's just that that is a very very high bar. [music] 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 [music] distribution. In many ways, I consider Chad GPT to be the successor to Google in terms of information.

13:04I go to Chat GPT 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 chat GPT and said, "Hey, this is not working.

13:22what'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 [music] starts working. That is the modern search experience. And so my

How to Keep Building After Failure

13:35biggest 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.

13:54Your 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.

14:13[music] I think making sure that their products are leveraging whatever is coming out today with the best models into their [music] product into how they think about creating value is going to be really really important. 10 [music] years from now if Snowflake were to become an iconic company like a Google or an AWS I could not be happier.

14:38I'm hope I hope I'm 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 [music] its full potential.

14:57And uh in 10 years, I hope we are well on our way to [music] doing this for most companies on the planet.

You Are More Than Your Successes, Too

15:08First of all, failure is hard. It's a little bit like, you know, like a deep gash or [music] scratch that you get. You can deal with it. It is still hard. But I think dealing with it [music] makes us try harder. It makes us appreciate success a whole lot more.

15:25Yes, NEA failed, but out of that failure [music] came all the seeds that were there that are necessary [music] to make Snowflake an amazing company in AI. The team that built search at Neva built [music] search at Snowflake. The team that built our AI mode in NEA [music] is the one that's building Cortex and Snowflake intelligence which are the successors and uh the future [music] of where Snowflake is going.

15:50Every failure has important lessons [music] but it is important to accept failures. Accept that you're human but also accept and internalize [music] that you're more than your failures. I tell people, I tell my my children, I tell myself that we are more than our successes and we simultaneously are [music] also more than our failures.

16:15Having that strong conviction in who you are as a person, I think just [music] makes you believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done. And honestly, [music] you cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual.