Quitting Oracle to biggest software IPO ever: The Snowflake story

The French co-founders of Snowflake – a United States company that made one of the most significant software splashes on the New York Stock Exchange – believe technology is at an inflection point again with artificial intelligence.

“You can feel it,” Thierry Cruanes told Markets with Madison.

“This is an inflection point where there is complete uncertainty.”

Co-founder Benoit Dageville compared the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) with the cloud revolution that led them to build Snowflake.

“We knew that we could reinvent this in the cloud and reinvent big data.”

Snowflake’s enterprise software began as a data warehousing solution, allowing companies to store and analyse large volumes of data.

The friends, who met working together at Oracle, quit their day jobs to start Snowflake in 2012.

“We went to my apartment, we bought this whiteboard from Amazon ... My wife was, was not very happy with the whiteboard in the living room, but that’s okay.

“And then we spent our days working around this whiteboard and kind of rethinking ... And then we got very excited, of course, with the solution.”

Snowflake co-founders Thierry Cruanes (left) and Benoit Dageville discuss how they built a US$70b company from a whiteboard with Markets with Madison.

In 2020, their company listed on the New York Stock Exchange at a US$70 billion ($122b) valuation – the largest software initial public offering (IPO) at the time.

Reflecting on that day, Cruanes said they had a “sinking feeling”.

“Because it was a reflection of the expectation that everybody else had on us.”

Dageville added: “I would have rather Snowflake started with a lower valuation.”

“But at the same time, it was a very fun day.”

Speaking of their friendship amid entrepreneurship, Cruanes said, “this interaction created Snowflake, but it created us too”.

Dageville said their self-described bromance was the one reason they almost did not start Snowflake, out of fear it could destroy it.

“I thought, of course if we do that together, at some point we are going to start to argue.

“And I thought, it’s not worth [it].”

“But we decided to do it and I would say, [Snowflake] has 100 times improved our friendship.”

Both of them were still involved in the company today, leading product teams and the company’s broader strategic vision.

“Everyone is scared when we’re coding too much, but we love coding too,” Dageville said.

Watch the pair discuss their story from quitting Oracle to building a US$70b company in today’s episode of Markets with Madison above.

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Madison Malone (nee Reidy) is host and executive producer of the NZ Herald’s investment show Markets with Madison. She joined the Herald in 2022 after working in investment, and has covered business and economics for television and radio broadcasters.