A cloud data-warehousing founder explains how to build something people can't live without. Start with cloud-native early adopters, watch what they use obsessively, then let those patterns drive pricing and engineering. The team initially chased legacy enterprises on private clouds before pivoting to customers already in the public cloud.
Chapters
We want to build a product that people cannot live without. And so that was really my goal is like, get people to try it. And then they got addicted to it. And then we could start figuring out pricing, and then we could figure out how to build out scale to go to market. Early on, I had delusions of grandeur of like, hey, I would go out to, like, a large enterprise that was stuck in the 1990s who would say, hey, when will Snowflake deploy in our cloud, in our private cloud? And the founders would say, never. Okay, so there was two options there. It was either continue to badger the founders, which I knew would. I would lose, and I would get fired, or go find, you know, the right customers that only were in the cloud because those were the ones I didn't want to sell the religion of the cloud. I wanted to sell why I had a better product than anyone else in the market for cloud data warehousing. It was really our earliest customers that led us to this direction. And that's. And that was the beauty of me joining as early as I did it.