Nicolai Tangen sits down with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, the data platform powering half the world&#x27;s largest companies, to explore what&#x27;s really happening at the frontier of data and AI. They dig into how Snowflake&#x27;s consumption-based pricing sets it apart from traditional software models, why Sridhar now considers AI model companies a bigger competitive threat than anyone else in tech, and how AI agents are transforming everything from data pipelines to software engineering itself. Sridhar also reflects on the lessons learned from founding and failing with Neva, and shares the values of hard work, adaptability, and resilience that have shaped him from Tamil Nadu to the top of the tech industry. Tune in for an insightful conversation! In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don&#x27;t miss our Highlight episodes every Friday. The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B&#x27;s Niklas Figenschau Johansen and Sebastian Langvik-Hansen. Background research was conducted by Simran Sahajpal. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTube Want to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no) Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedIn Follow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedIn Follow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Snowflake CEO: Scaling Data, AI Agents and the New Software Era

In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_A] 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. Then he walked away to start his own company, and 2 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 2 petabytes of data in Snowflake, which is the equivalent of 2 million gigabytes, and we have roughly 3 million queries into the database every day. So big welcome, Sridhar.

[SPEAKER_B] Thank you, Nicolai. Happy to be here. Excited for the conversation.

[SPEAKER_A] First of all, how would you describe Snowflake to somebody who's never heard of it?

[SPEAKER_B] In brief. 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.

[SPEAKER_A] Who are your clients?

[SPEAKER_B] 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. And we operate out of more than 25 countries and have customers in way more than those.

[SPEAKER_A] When the company was founded in 2012, to separate storage from compute was pretty radical, right? Just tell us about it.

[SPEAKER_B] Yeah, the simplest way to internalize that really important concept is to think about how you and I have always bought or used computers. I tell people for the past 50 years, whenever you and I wanted computing or our company, we would go buy a box. And that box would have a fixed amount of storage, a fixed amount of compute, and a fixed amount of memory. And you're generally stuck with that box for, I don't know, 5 years. So if you decided that you wanted more memory, well, too bad, you wait. If you decided that you bought too much compute, too much CPU power, well, that's too bad. You already bought the machine. And so that's the essence of it. By the way, your phone is another box, just a little box. And so, and it was also really hard to move data from one box to another. That was an integration project. Snowflake radicalized things by sitting on top of cloud computing, which effectively are infinitely large databases with amazing amounts of compute that can be shared. Between different customers that operat...

Snowflake CEO: Scaling Data, AI Agents and the New Software Era

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Snowflake CEO: Scaling Data, AI Agents and the New Software Era

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.