What does it take to build something that lasts? Snowflake CEO and former Google SVP of Ads Sridhar Ramaswamy joins South Park Commons General Partner Aditya Agarwal to share his answer. Ramaswamy traces his journey from Google to founding Neeva, an ad-free search startup that shut down before the generative AI boom, to leading Snowflake through the AI era. He shares what defines great founders, what doomed Neeva, and why most software will lose its moat. Ramaswamy and Agarwal also explore the future of AI, what remains valuable in an age of AI-generated software, and the search belief Ramaswamy got wrong. Sridhar Ramaswamy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramaswamy/ Aditya Agarwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityaagarwal3/ South Park Commons: https://www.linkedin.com/company/southparkcommons/ Apply to SPC: https://www.southparkcommons.com/apply (00:00:52) - Choosing When to Take a Career Risk (00:05:01) - Lessons From Google’s Founders (00:09:52) - What Went Wrong at Neeva (00:13:39) - The Future of AI Models (00:22:59) - Snowflake’s Enduring Value in the AI Era (00:29:24) - How to Keep Up With AI (00:32:24) - Rapid Fire: Books, Search &amp; Google

The Secret Superpower of Great Founders | Sridhar Ramaswamy (Snowflake CEO)

Minus One

No conversation with Larry and Sergey about any topic was ever easy. We argued endlessly about every single thing. We think very much in terms of what is the deployment lifecycle, what does value creation mean, what does Snowflake bring to the table that anyone else cannot. I think every company needs to look really hard at what their enduring value is. You clearly like putting yourselves into a position where you might fail or succeed.

Or succeed. Sorry, yes, yes, yes, yes. At SPC, we really focus on the minus one to zero part of the journey. And what that really means is our mission is to basically work with really talented people and to give them some time and space to go figure out ideas worth tackling, quests worth embarking on.

One of the reasons why your trajectory is so impressive, Shida, is that you've kind of brought yourself back to minus one in your career a few times. You know, you were already having a successful kind of, I would say, trajectory in enterprise software when you kind of joined Google. And then you kind of went back to being an IC at Google. And then, you know, we'll get into it. But I'm curious. The question here is, how have you picked what to work on?

Like you have a good track record of picking good things. So, like, what are some rubrics that you think about, like, that I think is worth tackling? Yeah, I have a bit more of a nuanced thinking, at least, about how and when to drive change. Please. I think change, first of all, is good. Resetting is good. But you also have to internalize that it's pretty brutal to start over from nothing.

The Secret Superpower of Great Founders | Sridhar Ramaswamy (Snowflake CEO)

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

The Secret Superpower of Great Founders | Sridhar Ramaswamy (Snowflake CEO)

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.