HIGHLIGHTS: Sridhar Ramaswamy - CEO of Snowflake

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:00)
Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays.
Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today I'm joined by Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO of Snowflake. Snowflake is basically the data platform that many of the world's biggest companies run on. So when your bank approves a loan, or when a hospital pulls together patient data, Snowflake is often the engine underneath. Sridhar spent 15 years at Google, where he built the advertising business from 1.5 billion to over 100 billion dollars. Then he walked away to start his own company, and two years later, he became the CEO of Snowflake.
Now, here at NBIM, we are investors in Snowflake, and we are also big users of the products. We have two petabytes of data in Snowflake, which is the equivalent of two million gigabytes. And we have roughly three million queries into the database every day. So big welcome, Sridhar.

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (1:02)
Thank you, Nicolai. Happy to be here, excited for the conversation.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:05)
First of all, how would you describe Snowflake to somebody who's never heard of it, in brief?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (1:10)
We are, yeah, we are a data platform.
We are like a cloud computing platform, like an AWS, but with a strong focus on data. We help you do everything from bringing data from various different systems, analyze it, get insights from it, and then take it to the systems where you take action. So we are an analytic data platform.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:32)
Who are your clients?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (1:35)
Gosh, half the global 2000 companies that are addressable, that is non-China companies, are our customers. Hundreds and hundreds of customers in financial services, healthcare, advertising, industries, the list goes on and on.
We operate out of more than 25 countries and have customers in way more than those.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:03)
Continuing on AI, in what ways are you benefiting from this revolution?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (2:11)
I take a reductive approach when it comes to AI and a software company like Snowflake.
At our core, we do two things. We create and run great software. This is what my engineering team does. We sell and help customers like you implement our software. A lot of our energy is focused very much on how do we make this go faster. On the sales side, our sellers now have tools that give them instant access to information. It's a sales agent that sits in their phone. Our solution engineers can do a custom demo for Nicolai in 30 minutes. That has data that will look like it came from your bank. Their ability to use these tools drive outcomes for you is incredible. Then on the software engineering side, coding is being revolutionized. I just came from a meeting where we are talking about how we need to get more people into spec-driven coding development, which is you write an English language spec for what it is that you want to produce, and then you automate the entire rest of the process of writing the first version of the code and testing it and deploying it and so on.
Software engineering is nothing like what it was two years ago. How to get every engineer in your team to act like that, to internalize these great possibilities is the biggest challenge that we have, but we have the superstars, people that are 50, 100 times more productive than the average software engineer.

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:37)
How will agents change the way you work?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (3:43)
This is a big question, and the word agents themselves itself is a little bit misunderstood. The way you should think about agents is it is a model and a piece of code that has access to different kinds of tools underneath and it knows how to call them smartly. For example, if you ask it a question and say, write a little program for me, it knows how to create a file, write some code into it, and then call something locally to execute that piece of code. But exactly the same thing can be used if you say, I want to know how my portfolio is doing, it knows how to call the portfolio tool, analyze it, and give you back the result.
Agents are changing work at every level, even though you tend to hear most about things like coding agents, but the general concept is very powerful. These coding agents are effectively abstraction agents. So even somebody that never wants to write a line of code is going to benefit enormously from having their basic functionality, access to all of your documents, access to the structured data that is in Snowflake. If I give you, for example, Snowflake Intelligence access to all of it, practically any question that you would want to ask of the data, the agent can come up with a plan and help you execute. That's why there's so much excitement about things like the work concept, Cloud Cowork or Snowwork, because they're changing how people think about work. Everything is programmable and also everything is interconnected. If you want to send an email based on an analysis you did, you don't have to cut and paste. You can just tell your agent, please send this email to Stefan and out goes the email.