Startup Showcase: Snowflake

How big is your company and what are your technology demands?

Snowflake has experienced a 300 percent sales and customer growth and roughly doubled its workforce in 2017. As of October 2017, the company has 280 employees worldwide. We currently have 20 people working for us in the European market, and this will be set to rise as we begin our next stage of expansion into the Nordics.

Since our founding, global cloud services leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been our infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) partner. Snowflake runs over 30 million queries each day, encompassing many, many petabytes of data.

Our service demands a lot from our cloud provider Amazon, which has done a great job meeting our needs. That said, we know that some customers have chosen other cloud vendors and they need a solution native to their platform of choice. So, we are working to support other cloud platforms in 2018.

Working with partners is very important to us. We also work closely across the data ecosystem to support all of the products and services our customers require, including a broad set of BI tools and ETL products. We also work with global technology partners and systems integrators (SIs) to enable and expand the Snowflake solution.

Where do you see your company in five years?

Perhaps most interesting is how Snowflake continues to alter the relational database market, which has stagnated for the past 30 years. Snowflake is the only relational data warehouse built from the ground-up for the cloud. This offers customers the scalability, concurrency and support for modern data such as JSON, as well as game changing capabilities such as data sharing. Traditional data warehouse solutions adapted for the cloud can’t match these capabilities.

The Snowflake team is helping customers realise the benefits of the cloud. Research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) found that UK cloud adoption rates are at 88 per cent with 67 per cent looking to increase their cloud adoption over the next year. If this figure is truly an indication of cloud growth, it’s scary to think what this figure will be in the next five years and how organisations will look more towards cloud-based solutions.

Over the next five years, innovations in technologies such as IoT, mobile and social media will continue to drive the concept of big data, and machine learning may serve as one such technology to help expand our analytics offering.

How can the UK government help startups in the UK and will Brexit have any impact?

The UK government does considerable work in helping start-ups hit the ground running through  loans, mentoring and having dedicated government bodies such as Innovate UK to help this process. Yet, for many aspiring entrepreneurs, the understanding of such initiatives can be enhanced by improving the awareness through the education system.

If you look at the case of Facebook, it was created by a group of university students. While this is an example of success, this is far from the reality for most. Having a wider understanding of the support network at an early stage can boost the chances of success for startups in the UK, especially in the face of Brexit.

The UK is a vital tech hub, but the complexity and mystery surrounding Brexit will be a significant challenge for start-ups launching in the UK. Uncertainty may lead to poor tactical decision making, lost or delayed market opportunities and funding, and in many cases unplanned spending. Another key aspect to consider is the wide pool of European talent, especially those with specialist expertise. Will organisations be faced with legal repercussions or added costs in keeping these employees? Will there be more challenges in issuing specialist visas? There’s still a number of grey areas that must be addressed over the course of the next few months.

Which tech company do you admire and why?

I am constantly in awe by what the technology industry is accomplishing and I try to learn from every example I find. To me, the most important things are the values you create and the lasting relationships that come from that.

Ultimately, it comes down to the customer and how you build a long-term relationship to helps your customer succeed. In this regard, my model is Amazon and what Jeff Bezos has created. They put the customer first. Just look at how they’ve succeeded. Snowflake is a values-based company and our first value is that we “Put the Customer First”. That’s the most important lesson I’ve ever learned.

Quiz: What do you know about Big Data?