He Built $100B at Google, Then Failed. Now He Runs an $80B+ Company | Snowflake, Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy on failure and Snowflake's AI ambition

Sridhar Ramaswamy's career is a series of resets around the bar he set. At Google he helped turn an absurd $100bn revenue plan into reality by grinding mobile monetization up 5% a quarter for five years. At Neeva he aimed only slightly better than Google and failed, which taught him the bar must be 10x. Now at Snowflake he is applying that lesson to AI, with the Neeva team building Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence.

Takeaways

• Neeva failed by aiming below 10x Google. Ramaswamy says they built a search product a little better than Google but not 10 times better. He calls not setting the bar at 10x their biggest mistake, and says Google's distribution deals with every browser were a major obstacle.
• Snowflake's product bar is faster, cheaper, better. Ramaswamy tells PMs and engineers that a product must be at least one of these to succeed, ideally all three. AI changes how value is created, but the core principle of creating value for customers remains.
• Every job has its own definition of excellence. Ramaswamy says the first thing a leader must internalize is that each role has its own requirements. As a first-time public company CEO, he had to learn to deal with the analysts who cover Snowflake financially.
• Neeva's team now builds Snowflake's AI products. The engineers who built Neeva's AI mode are the ones building Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence. Ramaswamy says Neeva failed, but the seeds from that failure are making Snowflake an AI company.
• Great products at competitive prices are the best defense. Ramaswamy says high quality products priced very competitively are the ultimate defensibility. He argues the core principle of creating value holds, whether for consumers or enterprise customers, even as AI disrupts how that value is created.
• Founders need belief and a compelling user reason. Ramaswamy says the belief a founder needs is a little bit of a religious feeling. Beyond believing they can do something better, founders must make sure there is a compelling reason for users to want the product.

How Google's $100bn plan survived mobile

1. Around 2007-2008, Eric Schmidt asked Ramaswamy and a few others to write a plan for $100bn in revenue. Everyone thought the idea was absurd.
2. A few years later desktop growth flatlined, people stopped buying new PCs, and Google's query growth stopped.
3. Mobile search monetized at a fraction of desktop search, so mobile was the only place Google had growth.
4. They worked five years to bring mobile monetization on par with desktop, improving query monetization by about 5% every quarter.