What I learned from my time at Snowflake
Over two years ago, I wrote about my experience interviewing for data engineering roles in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the end of my job search, I opted to join Snowflake, and had a front row seat to some of the most exciting developments in data. That feels like a lifetime ago, and the industry has moved at breakneck pace since then. After a transformational two years, I’ve made the decision to move on to a new adventure, but the lessons I’ve learned will stay with me for life. Here’s a small sample of things I observed along the way.
If You B̶u̶i̶l̶d̶ ̶ Sell It, They Will Come
Prior to joining Snowflake, I had almost no experience with anything sales related. Thankfully, I had the good fortune to work with some of the best reps in the business, who patiently explained every aspect of the job to me.
The first and most obvious difference to get used to: The Almighty Number. In sales, there is so much out of your control, but at the end of the day, you are judged by a concrete and very simple number: “How much did you sell?” Contrast this with engineering where there is so much within your control, and yet, performance is largely judged on qualitative criteria. Some folks would scoff at a sales rep who had a blowout year and write it off as good luck, but somehow, the “lucky” reps always found a way to extend their hot streak.
Every deal is a huge team effort. As a sales engineer, I was responsible for a small (and arguably the most straightforward) portion. Before I was ever engaged in an opportunity, a huge amount of work had already been done. The Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and Account Executives (AEs) spend countless hours chasing down leads and knocking on doors, hoping for a potential buyer to crack open their door. Only after an actual opportunity materialized would I get to swoop in and play the hero. My main job in any sales campaign was to prove that Snowflake could deliver value to a customer’s business, and do it much better than the competition. To most prospects, this was an irrefutable fact that hardly needed my help to demonstrate. From there, the Account Executive was left to do the hard part — wrangling a seemingly endless list of stakeholders and gatekeepers to take a deal to the finish line. Good AEs were masterful players of company politics, and oftentimes understood the power structures of our customers better than the customers themselves.
A huge source of inspiration for me came from an unexpected place — the SDR team. SDR is a job that everyone should experience. They’re the grunts of the sales world, responsible for generating leads for the sales reps. It’s brutal, high-pressure work that requires enduring constant rejection (and oftentimes unreasonable abuse) from prospects who just want to be left alone. Management’s relentless focus on numbers (number of cold calls, number of qualified leads) can very easily fool someone into thinking that the job is nothing but brute force. Perseverance is necessary, but hardly sufficient to be a successful SDR. The best among those I encountered were the ones who showed a desire to truly understand the data ecosystem, and they didn’t hesitate to ask questions for fear of sounding dumb. They showed tremendous grit, intellectual curiosity, and strategic thinking. Working with some of these folks, I felt as if I were watching the next generation of leaders grow before my eyes.
Embrace the Competition
Snowflake occupies a unique position in the marketplace — it is 100% reliant on its fiercest competitors for its very existence. Snowflake only runs on the public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), and yet, the public cloud vendors are the only companies with the technology and resources to effectively compete with them.
I had never experienced real competition before. Even though Snowflake had (and still has) a massive product advantage, the cloud vendors enjoy a huge distribution advantage. My time at Strava conditioned me to think that the best product always wins, but working at Snowflake quickly dispelled that notion. Despite having to endure a handful of painful losses, I came to realize that the pressures of competition brought out the best in me. Previous jobs felt like a game of pickup basketball with good friends, messing around in a low-stakes atmosphere. Snowflake was in The Big Show. The Championship Game. The endless cliché proverbs and metaphors are cheesy and overwrought, but there’s so much truth in them. Steel sharpens steel. Pressure makes diamonds.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Snowflake built an amazing product precisely because it sits at the center of a competitive crucible. Every structural advantage in the marketplace tilted in favor of its incumbent competitors. If the company wanted to survive, it had no choice but to be exceptional. In my time there, I learned to break past the fear of competition and embrace it as the necessary fuel for reaching the next level.
The Importance of Computing History
Understanding the past is key to both understanding the present, as well as shaping the future. Snowflake is a special company, inheriting from a long intellectual lineage of relational database management systems. Key players from every generation of database technology walk through its halls, and I am so grateful to have had the chance to learn from them.
Ideas from the past are reborn as technology evolves. At Snowflake, I witnessed one of the great evolutions of database technology. Due to the rich semantics of the relational data model, building an infinitely scalable analytical SQL database was thought to be impossible for much of the past two decades. Snowflake proved otherwise, and we’re now standing on the precipice of a new generation of software, powered by The Modern Data Stack.
What does this mean for the future? That’s a much longer topic that I’ll save for another post. Stay tuned.
