EP 147: How Chris Degnan Built Snowflake's Sales Org From Scratch

32:39You have hiring managers selling on their first interview. Hopefully they're talking to someone that is currently employed. unemployed, I'm not super psyched on, on going out and hiring. There's gotta be a really good reason why you're going to go hire an unemployed person. Number two is, all right, so you're, you're selling the hiring manager. The second interview is your buy like, okay, now you're doing the hard interview. Okay, great. Then you're going to have on the, on the, uh, third interview, they're going to meet with your manager. Um, and that manager is going to ask some really hard questions.

33:15And then finally, it's going to be the, the, the second or, or, or the, sorry, the third line manager. So in my case, I interviewed all of the, in the early days of stuff, like all of the sales reps. And I was looking for, you know, all these things. Now, I had a great recruiting partner, um, that, that, that, um, that worked with me and this guy, by the name of Chad Pete. So Chad was incredibly influential, um, on it and he would not like, There are also VPs of sales that say, I want to interview 10 people for this one position. Okay, again, you're going to fail. So Chad would be like, I'm putting one to two people in front of you and you can say no, but these are the people, you've got to basically figure out, are these your people?

33:58And he's making sure, he's qualifying that. We've done the assessments. He's making sure that he's babysitting that process and we're getting through that process in two weeks. And when he would get on the phone with the candidate and they were, they kind of first did him and hog because they're employed. Okay. You know, Johnny, you're going to, we're going to, at the end of two weeks, we're going to make a decision on whether or not you're going to work at Snowflake or not. But it's two weeks. So you have two weeks to go through this process. And at the end of two weeks, you're either going to get an offer or you're going to get declined, but you have to make a decision two weeks.

34:36And if they say, oh, well, I just want to meet them, get to know them. No, you're not in the process. Not until you want actually to come and work at the greatest company. Here's what they're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you've got to have a good pitch and all this other stuff. It's fascinating. I've heard you talk in the past about the board dynamics and maybe at different points in time. And I think you were being partially tongue in cheek, but also entertaining. And I think there's a kernel of truth in this being somewhat distrusting of board members and VCs and the interests that maybe investors have versus executives within the company.

35:20Can you maybe speak a little bit to that dynamic and how you think about as a go-to-market leader, interacting with investors and board members and all of that? So Bob Muglia, to quote him, said it best is, you know, the board is your friend until they're not. And so, you know, do not think of the board as your friend. They are not your friend. They their job is to make sure that the investors, the shareholders are are going to get a return on their investment. That is their job. And and if for ever reason they think that you are not going to give them that return, they will fire you in a heartbeat.

36:12And I've seen that. I've seen that firsthand. I've watched some, you know, again, going through the, you know, suitman transition with Bob. That was that was wild. I mean, it was like, boom, overnight. And and so to me, you know, I learned a really good lesson. You know, as the chief revenue officer, I was not trusting of any of the board members. I would ask them for help. We had some wonderful board members, everyone from John McMahon, Carl Eschenbach. But but man, don't think that I didn't think that they were my friend because, again, they're in there trying to maximize your shareholder value.

36:52And that's what Superman also said to me is like, look, do you think the board is and he was just more just self-aware of it than Bob was, is he just said, do you think they're my friends? He goes, they care less who I am. They want to make sure that they're going to make money. And that's it. And if you do not operate that way, you're mistaken. They are not your friend. And so I think I've just kind of gone into that knowing. And so like, you know, look, when Sequoia invested in stuff like Carl Eschenbach is a world-class guy. He sat on our board and he's now the current CEO of Workday. I was very, you know, Carl came from VMware.

37:27They did six-month quotas. I had never done six-month quotas. And I would kind of do what VCs do to people when they're not really going to invest in the company and say, that sounds good, Carl. And so like when a VC, you know, and I've been in plenty situations, there are a lot of VCs that passed up Southlake for many reasons. And they would say, oh, yeah, that sounds great. We'll get back to you. And that's the VC way of saying I'm not doing anything. We'll get back to you in a week, a month, a year, whatever it is, but not now. And so that would kind of be the thing for me is I would never be like argumentative with a board member, but you, you gotta be careful, uh, because you can't, you can't just, you know, say yes to them and, and not do it.

38:12So I would say, I'll, let me think about it. Um, that would be the thing that I would never say no, but if I said yes to something, I would go out and do it. And, and that would be the thing that I would just encourage people to do is just be aware of like, if they're strongly suggesting something and you don't do it, you're going to probably lose your job. And so, you know, just like when Slutman said, okay, you've got to reorg the sales team in the middle of the year when he just arrived. I'm like, well, can we wait to the end of the year? And he's like, no. I'm like, okay, well, there's, I guess I'm doing that.

38:47Right. There's not a, there's no choice. um and and so those are the things that you just have to be very you know software i think you know having a you know high eq is is helpful um in these roles because you've got to read the room and you've got to figure out when when like they say something how much you actually have to do it because then you'll start to realize it sounds like you had a a strong advocate and mentor in John McMahon, who's certainly a legend in selling and in enterprise sales. And obviously, the tree of people that have learned under him speaks for itself. But do you think that's important for a go-to-market leader to have an advocate at the board level, be it ideally someone that's done it before or a legend in their field, but also potentially an investor to someone that you know is in your corner?

39:46Or was that just a unique set of circumstances to have someone like that, given the connection you had and my consumer logic that led to McMahon joining Snowflake's board? I think it's critical. I mean, I think, look, I always tell the founders, you don't want to hide. People always reach out to me and say, I would like, hey, Chris, I'd like you to be the chief revenue officer and say, no, you don't. You don't want me to be the chief revenue officer because I'm not desperate. I was desperate when I took this job. I was desperate to be successful and that matters. But me having McMahon on the board, it was incredibly impactful.

40:27There's zero chance I would have made this journey without him. No chance. And so I owe a lot to John because John very much, like I said, coached Bob through different phases and kind of helped me also help me recruit people. So, you know, when I was out there saying, you know, hey, John McMahon's on my board, it helped me recruit sales leaders. I had John interview people for me. And so like, you know, I would recommend if you want to build a strong enterprise sales team, I would recommend having a guy like John McMahon on the board because I think it's just, it helps on the sales side in terms of recruiting great talent.

41:09It knows that, hey, the people that follow Medic, they know that the godfather of Medic is on your board and they want to learn and you want to come learn from a great sales leader. Like these are all the things that good sellers are looking for. So for me, yeah, I would recommend having that. Now, what I also have come to find out, especially in the role the role i'm in now is that these there's a lot there's there's a ton of arrogance in founders like these young kids that went to you name the ivy league school um they think they know all and i don't want to work with those people in fact i make it a point of not working with those people because they think they're they're these unicorns they built this great company and, and they could do it their own way.

42:01Well, guess what? You could do it to your own, your own way until you can't. Um, and that you can't is you're going to fail because you did something so stupid. You're wasting money. You're doing all these stupid things and, and they're not willing to listen. And so to me, um, I'm looking for humble founders. I'm looking for smart founders. I'm looking for people that elicit feedback and ask for feedback and do stuff. But if you go to someone and say, well, we're unique. And my response is, no, you're not. No, you're not. And I don't like in the enterprise software space, you are not unique. And I'm like, Snowflake was this amazing, magical thing.

42:42But we had a sales process and a sales methodology that got us like getting like our first hundred customers was impossible, was so hard. Imagine selling with no website. Imagine selling with, I couldn't, I stealth mode on my LinkedIn profile. Those are all things that were really hard. And having a good sales methodology behind that was what I think kept us alive. So I think, you know, those are all things that making sure that the founders value sales and putting someone like a McMahon on their board, they should absolutely do I'm curious, you've worked under a number of, I would say, legends in the industry, it's probably safe to say, between Spizer and Slootman and McMahon.

43:35These are some of the iconic names. And I guess I want to unpack a little bit of your biggest learnings or biggest takeaways from some of those people. So I guess question as it relates to John, what do you think has made John such a legendary sales leader in what he was able to do at, you know, BMC and Blade Logic and TTC, but then perhaps even more interestingly, such a legendary sales mentor over the course of the last decade. Yeah. I mean, look, John, what I think people, people think that John John is this like hard ass. And what I would say is John is, but a lot of the guys that actually have worked in a John McMahon sales organization try to be John McMahon.

44:29And John and I have had this conversation. John is, there's only one John McMahon. And you cannot replicate John. You can take and learn from John and try to do that. So a lot of these guys come out. In fact, one of the reasons that I took the job at Snowflake is there was a bunch of sales leaders that wanted me, that actually had worked under John at BMC, that wanted me to work for them. And all of them were a bunch of, and I don't mean to use a bad word, but assholes. They were just arrogant assholes. And I'm like, I'm not going to go. I just didn't, I was turning 40. I didn't want to go work for these people.

45:10I'm like I call it my midlife crisis if you will but number one is John is not an asshole John is very very metrics driven John is is is very much like his he has a way about him of figuring out is this person doing what I'm telling them to do are they following the rules are they doing do I believe what they're saying he has this intuition that is just hands down amazing John is hard. He'll hold you accountable, but he's not an asshole. Now, I'm sure people have been fired by John. I'm sure they're going to say he is. But he's really a very good guy that every time I get off the phone with John, I just talked to him last week.

45:57Every time I get off of him, he still says, call me anytime, Chris. Call me anytime. So he has this way about him that he's a hard ass, but he has some empathy in him. And he's very much, you know, someone that that will listen and then act and versus act, you know, and then deal with the consequences later. So, you know, I respect the heck out of John. And he's like that. And Slutman is the same way. Slutman's like, hey, man, people would say, what's the Frank Slutman's playbook? And Frank's like, I don't have a playbook. It's it's situational. And I think that's, you know, all these great leaders that I've had to, you know, I've got an opportunity to work with.

46:41They have these intuitions that are just amazing. And they can, it's situational leadership. It's not like this is how you do it there. This is like you have to be open to saying like, well, I did it this way over here. But it makes sense that you're doing it this way. Like, Sutman had such a bad experience at ServiceNow launching Japan. and he looked to me in the, because I was a sponsor for Snowflake Japan, he looked me in the depths of my soul, basically saying, I had this consultant in saying, we should do it. He goes, he almost like said, go away to the consultant and said, Chris, are you going to make this successful?

47:20And I was like, I had, it was a scary moment and I had to look, you know, Frank in the eyes and say, Frank, I got this. And I was all in. Like that, I had to spend so much time launching Japan and it was it was a lot of work but great you know it turned out really really great for something so so I think those are the these guys are just have these unbelievable intuitions and and it seems it seems like one of the meta points in that is a level of um perhaps self-awareness to not try to recreate um what uh like be John McMahon it sounds like you you were able to internalize a lot of different aspects of what made him successful without directly trying to emulate him.

48:05Is that, is that a trait that you purposefully hire for, or is that a circumstance of your own personality? You know, it's probably even, you know, goes back to like, you know, you know, you were raised by your parents and there are things that your parents did well there are things that your parents didn't do well um and it's one of those things of like okay i want to take the good and and try to make that part of how i bring up my my kids um and and that's that's no different than um but i don't want to i don't want i want to take the bad out like i don't you know like hey back in the day when i was growing up you know you you get spanked right like i guess what that's not allowed nowadays, right?

48:52So there's different things that you just have to make sure that, okay, I'm gonna learn from that. And so I think, you know, I worked for the same guy at EMC for eight years. I learned so much from him, but there were a lot that I didn't like about how he treated people and stuff like that. But man, I learned a lot from him. So to me, I'm so thankful for the guy that I worked for because he taught me so much, some of the fundamentals of sales. and I think it's just important to any leader that you take that good, you make it your own and you not be an asshole about it. I think those are the things that you can still have empathy, you can still be a real human but hold people accountable and I think you learn from both your successes and failures.

49:38You touched on some element of this with regard to Frank Sloopman but I'm curious like what's something that's maybe super human about frank and it's just like not replicable um but something that you admire and then i'm curious what is something that you were able to internalize or you would recommend other people um just do that you kind of learn from him well you know frank frank wrote a book and and you know people are like did you read the book i'm like no because i lived it um and and um you know frank frank would say things like he he has this like just innate ability to actually read people his ability to to read people is just second to none um and and he's so he could you know i'm a i'm a bad liar um and so he would know if i was bullshitting him he would be like okay hey degnan's not is i i i can read him so well that i know whether or not you know the forecast is going well whatever it is and i i have a little bit of you know high anxiety about things so he he kind of liked that a little bit um but but he would kind of then coach me down of saying like, dude, it's okay that you and I are worried about things, but you can't let everyone else know.

51:10You can't let the rest of the sales org know that you're super concerned about something. And so you would learn those things. It's like, okay, you need to exude confidence. Frank is a general. You look at Frank, you hear from Frank. Once you get on Frank's side, you want to run through walls for someone like that. And I've never seen any, any leader like that. Frank has this crazy ability to lead. Um, and, and his leadership style is, is very much, uh, hard. And so he'd say things like when there's doubt, there's no doubt. Um, and, and, and he, you know, and he'd say like, you know, like when I'd want to go launch a, uh you know a new you know uh sales group uh like a overlay group or something like that he would say okay you know silly stupid things he'd say like eat like an elephant poop like an ant you know and and and so stuff like that like okay what does that actually mean so it's basically like you're gonna go out and you're gonna you know uh uh eat as much as you you can but with a very small amount of people.

52:19And, and, and so I think he just would, would very much like, you know, say, Hey, go find someone who, who you can actually get the most leverage out of, but don't, don't go out and, and hire a, you know, a ton of people until you know that this group is going to be super successful, then we'll scale it. But, but he's like, I'm not scaling it until, you know, we're going to, until we start to see, you know, the metrics come out of it. So there were a lot of things that I'd learned from him in the process. And again, it's his book, You Lived It. So he, in every one-on-one, you know, he would grill me and I, he would grill me on all sorts of stuff, but I respected him.

53:05I respected how he went about things. He was not a jerk about it, but he was hard. Um, and he held me accountable. Um, and so I, I just, you know, I think that's important for everyone is accountability matters. Um, and I think that's, uh, something that Frank was really good at. Yeah. Interesting. Now, what about Mike, uh, uh, spies are like what, what, what, what, something that you learned from him and what, what do you think makes him great at what he does? Mike is a, a dreamer, um, and an incredible recruiter probably the best recruiter i've ever met um he convinced me to take the job when i probably you know in hindsight like when i walked in day one i was like where what the hell did i get myself into but um i think um mike mike thinks so big uh he would be like you know when when you know we were early days of snowflake he'd be like we're going to create a hundred billion dollar market cap company and everyone in the room would be like whatever dude like no chance.

54:04And sure enough, we have hit over a hundred billion dollars in market cap at some point. And I think sort of like, you know, trending in that direction again. And I think, you know, the way that I look at Mike is he has this really great ability to understand technology and then apply it to the business world and understand how big of a market it is. um he only wants to chase massive markets um and i think and and he can recruit world-class people he people when you get in front of mike you're walking out there so excited about what you know what he he just told you and and you know sometimes it's fake it till you make it and and mike does a little bit of that of getting you excited about something that may not be 100 real but you make it real and that was really what what what was the magic of snowfoot do you think there's advantages to actually being in stealth for an extended period of time, having lived it with Snowflake?

55:08It certainly made it hard on me. So the reason that Mike wanted Snowflake to stay in stealth was because we were going after, architecturally, we did something very different than anyone had ever done. And it was hard. And, you know, as we interviewed Bob Muglia, Bob came from years of working at Microsoft. And, you know, what Bob has said is there's probably like, you know, 10 to 20 people in the world that can build a database from scratch. Now, some of those people sat inside of IBM on Microsoft. And we luckily had three of those people that were working at Snowflake in our three founders. And they said, it's really, really hard to invent.

56:01Like most of the databases, like Amazon had launched, had bought some source code of a legacy database and launched it. And there was an actual, another data warehouse startup, I forget the name of it, that when Amazon launched Redshift, they completely steamrolled the company. And the reason they steamrolled the company, there was no competitive moat. They had taken an open source, I think it was open source Postgres, and just threw it out there and said, okay, we're going to make this a data warehouse. And that just didn't work. um and and so um you need to have this competitive mode so mike was and that's something i've learned by the way when i when i talk to like seed companies um that is the thing that i i want to look at the most is like what is your competitive mode technically i don't care if you have a great business idea it doesn't matter um but you need to have a great world-class technologists uh that are building those competitive modes luckily snowflake had really, you know, Benoit and Siri, who were the original co-founders that had built Oracle, had some core principle, built parts of the Oracle database, and then some core principles that they had, were so married to.

57:23And they were like, this is what we're going to build for Snowflake. And it turns out that those principles matter. And so Mike knew that. But that's why he wanted us to stay stealthy, because he didn't want he wanted to have an 18 to 20 month technology head start in front of people. So that's why he did it. It made it hard on me. But but it also kept the competition at bay in terms of knowing what we were doing. and that's that's was and people didn't even believe us or what we had done because building as I said earlier building a database from scratch is hard so as we started to get out there you actually had to show people all this stuff and and the and so the the competition the cloud providers they they didn't know what we were doing and even if they did they didn't believe we could do it and and that's why it was it was helpful that that's not always the case that that that stealth matters.

58:26But again, you know, to Spicer's credit, if you want to build a big company, you have to have a deep competitive moat. And then you have to get market share before your competition gets proud. And that was really his whole theory is, okay, get building a world-class product and then get market share. And that's, that's ultimately what drove the success of Snowflake. Snowflake, we were fortunate to be involved along the way. And as it sits here today, I'm sitting at a$71 billion business. Stock is right around$212 billion. So a nice little run over the last bit under Sridhar's leadership and a lot of the work that you put in place over the course of the last couple of years.

59:13I don't know the right characterization or how you would articulate this or how it has been articulated. But there was a point in time that Snowflake was materially ahead and scaling way faster than Databricks was, who I think has become one of the principal competitors out there or another business that's doing exceptionally well. And a lot of this initial AI movement, Databricks was able to do a good job capitalizing on. I'm curious, having lived that experience as an executive and one of the key people at Snowflake, what did you learn from that experience? And what would you recommend about, I don't know, paranoia for competitors or things that you would advise for companies going forward?

1:00:07I mean, I certainly have a lot of passion around this subject. You know, look, we were, you know, years ahead in terms of market share with Databricks. And there was a point where we actually were partnering with them for a short bit. But, you know, ultimately, Snowflake, we optimized Snowflake to go public. and that meant, you know, creating leverage in the sales team and also the engineering team, just the whole company. So you're creating a more profitable company. And, you know, Databricks even to this day is private. They're not profitable. Like examples are like they just bought a company called Neon where they paid over a billion dollars for Neon and Snowflake had offered.

1:01:02we just bought, Soflake just bought a company, it's public information called Crunchy Data for$250 million. Well, we had a deal to buy Neon as well at a similar price point and Databricks doesn't care about profitability or dilution to their shareholders. So they just go out and buy and buy and buy and buy. There actually is some goodness that comes out of what Databricks is doing because they don't care about those things. They can go build these massive engineering teams. So Snowflake's about a billion dollars ahead, rough and tough, about a billion dollars ahead in revenue. Maybe the gap is closed a little bit.

1:01:40But their sales team is two times the size of the sales team of Snowflake. Their engineering team is two times the size of the team of Snowflake. Snowflake's a public company. Snowflake has to operate and generate free cash flow and show they're doing all these things to run a successful business. business. Databricks has to do none of that. And there seems to be a, you know, a very much a willingness for people to continue to invest at really crazy valuations of a non-public company that has no intentions of going public anytime soon. And I think what the miss on Snowflake's behalf was that, you know, our North Star was to be this cloud data warehouse.

1:02:25We hit that North start, the number one cloud data warehouse. We won. We won. And we should have kept going. And we should have put our foot on the gas and we should have run right over Databricks. And we should have launched a notebook, a data science notebook. So if I diagnosed, and I did diagnose where Databricks is getting into our best customers, where they were getting into the data science team and we weren't getting access to those people. And those data scientists were then building a bunch of, you know, workflows or ETL jobs with Spark. Geez, if we had only done that, if we only built a notebook, if we only had hosted Spark, but there were some core principles the engineering team didn't want to do, if we'd done those things, data mix would have been dead, dead.

1:03:17We would have killed them. And we gave them air. And we gave them air because we didn't build out some of those functionality and we waited too long. Now we have those capabilities, but Databricks has a huge head start. But we had a bigger sales team, bigger customer base, more loyal customer base, less complex product. We could have killed them and we gave them air. And it's really unfortunate, I think, that we did because that was a huge miss. And that was on like, hey, look, this is always, you know, looking in the rearview mirror is always easy to say like, hey, you know, we didn't know it at the time.

1:04:01But, geez, there were some decisions we should have made earlier around some stuff that we missed and we gave them life when we could have just crushed them. I I'm curious, like those were there. That's the diagnosis, um, at the, the, the tactical level of like how it sort of played out, I guess at a zoomed out strategic level is, is the lesson just stay paranoid about all your competitors always, and think through the low probability scenarios that might play out? Or how do you, if you're a founder listening to this and trying to think about how to maximize that for themselves, what lesson did you take away that might be a little bit more zoomed out?

1:04:48Listen to your customers. I mean, if you listen to your customers and understand, like never be in a situation where you're telling a customer, this is how it has to be. Be in a situation where you have to listen to your customer and you take their feedback and you act on that feedback. So the customers were telling us, okay, this is why we're bringing in data rigs. Okay, why? Well, our data scientists need a world-class data science tool set. Okay, great. They have a world-class notebook. We could have bought, we should have bought a company. There's a great company called Hex. We should have bought Hex.

1:05:27And we didn't because it wasn't core to a soap. Like, so, so to me, it's don't be arrogant enough to think that your customers, you know, know better than you. They do know better than you because they're buying, they're speaking with their wallets and, and you, you have to listen to them. And if you give these companies air, then it is what it is. And that's what we did. And so I think, you know, to any founder out there is like, be curious and, and be humble and take feedback. because if you don't do that, there is going to be someone. I don't care who you are. This is going back to like, you know, meeting some of these, these founders of companies is like, they think they're unique until they're not.

1:06:10And this is like, you know, like I said with Bob Muglia, the board is your friends until they're not. Like, you just have to be self-aware. You have to listen. And if you do not listen and you do not read the tea leaves of, why is something happening? Then you're missing out. And I think it's hard because as you're building a company, there are things that can distract you. Like for Snowflake, I clearly remember we went into this meeting at one of the major investment banks early on. And they'd say this was when private cloud was a big thing. And they were like, hey, you know, we've been trying to build what you guys have built.

1:06:47When are you going to run in the private cloud? And our founder, Benoit, was like kind of master Yoda. and he said, he said, you know, hey, you'll go to the public cloud ever before we go to the private cloud. And sure enough, that investment bank was our first real big investment bank customer and still a big Snowflake customer to this day. So, so I think, you know, the reality of it is, is like, there are some bets that you have to make that, that like, okay, core principles, like, hey, I'm not going to build on the private cloud or I'm not going to build in the data center, whatever those things are.

1:07:18Those are some core principles that you kind of have to agree on. But there are other things that you have to be willing to give up and sacrifice. And sometimes you miss on those bets. I'm curious, one of the things that was implied in your diagnosis of Databricks and how they were able to execute in a great way with regard to some of the bets that they've been able to make was some implied advantages or maybe explicit advantages in being in the private markets and not having the same quarterly cadence and public rhythm of needing investors to be on board to the same extent that happens in the public markets.

1:08:09Um, one, can you, can you unpack that a little bit? And do you, do you think that the, uh, the implication of that is that companies actually should stay private longer, uh, when they're taking some of these more ambitious bets or where do you fall on that, um, side of the spectrum? Look, there are a lot of things I don't think Databricks is doing well. Um, so, so I can't say like, and, and, and again, if I'm a shareholder, if I'm an employee, Like even like these are things that you just kind of don't understand, especially when you're like a. Like maybe a frontline person, maybe you're a sales rep or a frontline engineer or something like that.

1:08:53Sometimes you don't think about these things, but like at the same market cap that Databricks is trading in the private market. This is prior to this Neon acquisition there. They were trading at about roughly 90, 90 dollars a share at the same price point. snowflake um was trading at about 130 dollars a share because they they're more dilutive they they they don't have any cash to buy companies so they buy it with equity um so so so they dilute and and so they're the ceo he he he thinks he's doing the right thing maybe he is but i've talked to a lot of vcs and say show me a company that's ever been private for this long and and and been successful in the long run.

1:09:37So again, at some point, the investors are going to force his hand to go public at some point because they want liquidity, right? Now, in this world, there is a decent-sized private market for a bunch of companies. A bunch of Elon Musk companies are private companies, but they have a liquidity. OpenAI has liquidity. So I don't know if it's right or wrong, but again, And if you are going after huge markets, AI is a huge market. So Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI, they're going after these, like, I don't know the size of their market. It's ginormous. There's some niceness of being private because you do not have to worry about things around profitability or path to profitability.

1:10:28As long as investors will give you money. And I think Databricks is in that boat. is they continue to almost imply they're going to get the profitability, but they're not. And they're continuing to lose money. So to their credit, they can go buy companies. They can go buy, they can go spend 3X more than what Snowflake will buy on a company. They've done it multiple times. They bought a company called Tabular. So like how to deal to buy Tabular. Like there's a bunch of stuff that they can do that Snowflake couldn't do. So there is some validity in what they're doing. Whether or not that's right, time will tell.

1:11:01I don't know. This is not an area where I'm going to be an expert. In going from the private to the public markets, what changed for you most in terms of how you ran the day-to-day of the business? And ultimately, do you think it made Snowflake a better business than it was in the private markets? Or is that kind of a narrative that you think VCs maybe put out there to try to get liquidity? Well, it's not just for the VCs, it's for the employees. I mean, look, you know, you work at, I don't know what the average tenure of an employee is, you know, look, you know, an average tenure for head of sales is probably 18 months.

1:11:47You know, for me to do it for 11 and a half years is probably there's not a lot of longevity historically in heads of sales. So, you know, I think it's most important for the employees to have liquidity because there's so much of your wealth that can be built in this one company. And if you can only sell 10 % of your stock, you know, and that's typically what happens in a privately traded company, it's hard, especially if you want to go do another job at another company because you're kind of handcuffed with these companies. I think so to me, it's not just for the VCs. To me, it's it's it's also for the employees.

1:12:29And, you know, can can you create wealth for these employees, especially when you're you know, if you've been there from the beginning? I mean, I can only imagine some of these employees have been at Databricks for a long time. They've been able to sell some. But in theory, I could sell all of my stock in self-worth if I wanted to. and they can't because there are some handcuffs put on you when you're traded as a private company. So to me, having liquidity is really important, I think, for employee retention, employee morale and stuff like that. I think that's probably the most important thing.

1:13:08Now, in terms of operating the company day to day, yeah, I mean, look, we have quarterly earnings. We have things that we have to make sure that we focus on. And there's a bunch of things around profitability. Wall Street cares about free cash flow. So we had to make sure there are things that we've had to do to make sure that we hit those free cash flow targets and making sure that we operate in a lean fashion, which, again, can be good for the company and the shareholders. You're generating shareholder value. I think this is to Sridhar's credit, he's re-accelerating growth at a publicly traded company and running a lean machine.

1:13:50I think he's a world-class operator. He's doing a great job. But it's a lot harder. His job is a lot harder than Ali is at Databricks because he doesn't have those things that he has to think about. So you've had a great partnership with your longtime counterpart at the CMO role within Snowflake, so much so that I think you guys are working on or writing a book together about that relationship. And I don't want to give away the totality of the insights in the book, and people should read it when it comes out. But I'm curious, what is the kernel that has made that relationship so successful? And what would you pass along to other companies that are trying to make those sometimes competing responsibilities or roles work well together?

1:14:49Yeah. So, so, you know, I talked about this all the time with, with the companies that I advise and, and, and I learned this from, from again, Frank Slootman, when I, when I asked him, when stuff like went public, we became tech famous stuff like did. And a lot of the executive team became tech famous. And so I got a lot of requests to be on whether it's advisor or board or whatever and and i went i had to get frank's approval and uh and i went to frank and he said you know look um it'll be a really good thing for you to do because you'll see how messed up he didn't use messed up i just won't i won't say what the other word he said you can say i think we have the explicit tag on uh on our spotify and apple account so i think we're comfortable here you'll see how fucked up other companies are um and and so uh and and and i laughed um And, and so then I, you know, my, one of my first advisory roles, I was like, holy cow, the CEO almost relished the friction between sales and marketing and would create this awful, you know, competitive situation between sales and marketing.

1:16:01and you know uh when when we were growing i was doing my own demand generation i was like the demand generation machine for snowflake and that was and and john mcmahon was like dude you're gonna get fired if you don't fix this um and so that's when we went out and hired denise and she's a demand generation focused cmo and the first thing that she did because i was arguing with the the previous regime around what a, what an MQL was, what, you know, what an SQL was like, how many of the MQLs should I see all this other stuff? And she said, I'm going to stop right now. The day one, um, you are, um, my customer.

1:16:42Um, and, and we're going to talk about meetings and we're going to talk about qualified meetings and that's all we're going to talk about. Um, and, and then she would go and sit down and I, I, I ran the SDR team. she would go sit down with the SDRs. Then she'd go and meet with the sales team and say, okay, tell me about the leads you're getting from the SDRs. And then she created her whole demand generation program around making sure that we got qualified meetings. And to me, that was like, she treated me as customer number one. She treated our sales team as her customer. And she trained her entire team to treat us as the customer.

1:17:22And so to me, revenue matters the most. I mean, I don't care whatever anyone says in an enterprise software company. I don't care if it's AI, whatever it is, you revenue matters. And, and so she knew that. And she said, I got to get you in front of customers and prospects and generate pipeline for you. And, and, and that was the start of this wonderful partnership that Denise's, Denise and I have had. So yeah, we are writing a book about our journey because like you, there are so many founders that don't have never managed the sales and marketing team. I think there's friction and they should say, well, this marketing team is going to generate this many leads.

1:18:03You guys aren't touching those leads. That's a constant. And she would always be like, no, we're, we're not having that conversation. Her and I would have it privately around. Okay. What's working. What's not. And each one of us would take action and even like take action on people. So if there were people that were cancers to either organization, we would make changes based on feedback that we would get from each other. So we just built this really close relationship on working together. And I think that's incredibly important is having a good, a great go-to-market organization involves both sales and marketing.

1:18:35Sales can't do it alone without marketing. And I think that was the really important thing that kept Selflight's engine going. And Denise is the best in demand generation and one of the top, if not the top, chief marketing officers in the software space. And so I was super lucky to get to work with her and her team. And she built a world-class team underneath her. When does the book actually come out? Coming out this fall, Let It Snow. I think that's the name of it. So I think we're going to go with that. And, uh, and it, and it is, it's, it's kind of a biographical, you know, you know, story of Snowflake, but told in, in their, in how we built the, the go-to-market machine of stuff like, um, so we're excited about, about it.

1:19:19Yeah. Uh, well, I will encourage, uh, people to, uh, to check it out when it comes out. Snowflake has been a prolific source of, um, of, uh, books that thus far, I guess with Frank's book as well. And so I, uh, yeah, excited to read it. Um, So I guess maybe we can wrap with a few rapid fire questions. And I guess the first one, do you think sales led and product led sort of the PLG motion, do you think those things can truly coexist within a business or does one of those ultimately win out in the fullness of time? I look, I think, I think it would be, it would have been great if we had, you know, a PLG motion first, like, hey, that would have been great.

1:20:07If we had a bunch of leads that were coming in, that people were using the product first, we, we, we were, you know, there was complexity to our sales. We're selling a database. And and so we needed a very much a hands on approach to doing it. And so we focused on scaling out the the the go to market engine and and built the whole whole team around doing proof of concepts and stuff like that. It worked out well for us. If you can have PLG at the same time. So what we did is we focused initially on 100 % guarded on who could touch the product, when they could touch it, all this other stuff, to then driving a self-service motion, so more of a PLG motion.

1:20:52That came later, and Denise then focused the marketing team's effort on driving people to the self-service portal so that people could sign up. Um, you know, look, there's nothing that like more awesome than getting highly qualified leads that are in the pipeline. Eventually, even if you're a PLG led organization, you need an outbound motion. You need, you know, uh, to, to, to continue to scale your, your, your org. So I think they absolutely should coexist. If you, if you're, if you're having a ton of success right off the bat with PLG, lean into that, but eventually start in your mind. And like, think of the likes of Anthropic.

1:21:36Anthropic's, you know, building out their go-to-market machine now, but they were very much a PLG-led organization. They have a huge consumer business, but they are focused on selling into the enterprise now. And so I think there's a ton of that that matters. And, you know, I'm not going to say anyone is better than the other, but, you know, invest, get market share as fast as you can, but you're going to need the other one eventually, whether that's the PLG or whether that's enterprise software. If you aspire to sell into the large enterprise, you're going to need those motions. What's one tactic or adage or something in enterprise sales that sounds smart, but you actually believe is totally incorrect or maybe just very overrated?

1:22:28the products sell themselves i mean you know people people think that you know it was easy selling stuff like i i you know even you know when i would do new hire trainings at snowflake even like the last new hire training i did i i i told the people in the room there are people in this room that will fail um because they're they're you like their basic fundamentals that you have to do to be successful in a sales job. So the core fundamentals were for me, we had a great product. You have to go tell that story eight times a week. So eight face-to-face meetings a week is like, you got to do it. And by the way, it's grunt work.

1:23:13It's to pick up the phone and cold call people and ask them to meet with you. They don't want to meet with you, right? And force your way into an opportunity. Those are the things that people think are easy because, And that was a huge misperception of Snowflake. People would come into Snowflake thinking, look at how great that company is. I remember talking, there's plenty of sales leaders that we've hired that have said that to me. On the outside looking in, it looked really, really easy. But in the reality is like every day we're knife fighting. And so I was looking for where I couldn't hire people from a Salesforce and have them be really successful at Snowflake because Salesforce is like 98 % market share.

1:23:54They don't know how to open up new logos. They know how to like, you know, manufacture, you know, deals around pricing structures and relicensing things and stuffing other products into the deal. They do not know how to create demand. They do not know how to sell through an actual campaign. And so to me, that's where the big difference is, is actually figuring out, like, does a person, does a salesperson have the ability to generate their own demand and close deals? Because to me, like, that's the misperception that this journey itself, like, was this super easy journey. It was never easy. I guess as we hop, I'm curious, what's the biggest red flag that you see when talking to a founder or an early sales team that makes you think they just don't have the understanding of what it's actually going to take?

1:25:03again it's it's it's arrogance i i i just there's this founder i've met a couple times of a a company that's doing quite well um but doesn't believe in traditional sales um and and i'm thinking to myself like okay um like you know better than you know i don't know how many years of enterprise uh selling there is i i don't i don't think you do um and i think it goes back to being arrogant um if you think you're you're your shit don't stink uh you're wrong and um i think again like it comes back to the my favorite founders to work with are people that want feedback and act on that feedback and are humble enough to admit that they're wrong and act quickly um and if you do not do that i don't want to work with you um because i think that's like the reality of it is, is like, you know, you can, you can, because you have a great product, it can get you to a place, but that place will come to an end and it's better to get ahead of it.

1:26:08Um, and make sure you have a great product and a great go to market organization together. And that's when you really can crush it. Um, I guess, uh, one final one as we, as we wrap, um, And what has you most excited today as you start to move into more board roles and advisor roles for business? What's the thing that gets you most excited? Finding the next Chris Degnan. I mean, I was a frontline sales manager at EMC. I was a second line manager for a hot minute. and there were a lot of people that developed me from Bob to Frank to John McMahon to Carl Eschenbach, even Shridhar. And so to me, I want to develop the next generation of sales leaders.

1:27:03And to me, that's the most exciting part that I get. People always say, hey, Chris, you wanna be a CEO? Absolutely not. I do not wanna be a CEO. I wanna help build great go-to-market organizations And I want to help develop the next great sales leaders. Like to me, that's what gets me up out of it. Well, Chris, thanks for doing this. This is great. I have a ton of respect and admiration for how you've led throughout the Snowflake journey. And as an investor, a long-time investor, I guess, at Redpoint and a personal investor as well, I'm super appreciative of all the hard work you've done. And so excited to see what these next chapters look like for you.

1:27:41Awesome. Well, Logan, it was great talking to you. Yeah. Thank you for your time. And thanks for having me on your podcast. Awesome. Thanks, Chris.