00:00:00 · Sridhar Ramaswamy, Aditya Agarwal
[00:00:00] S0: 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 life cycle. 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. [00:00:22] S1: 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, you know, ideas worth tackling, quests worth kind of like, you know, embarking on. One of the reasons why your trajectory is so impressive, Sridhar, is that you've kind of brought yourself back to minus one in your career a few times. You were already having a successful kind of, I would say, trajectory in enterprise software when you kind of joined Google. And then you went back to being an IC at Google. And then we'll get into it. But I'm curious, the question here is how have you picked what to work on? You have a good track record of picking good things. So, what are some rubrics that you think about that are things worth tackling?
00:01:30 · Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:01:30] S0: 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 is good. But you also have to internalize that it's pretty brutal to start over from nothing. This started pretty early. I tried to get into IITs, which are one of the elite institutions in India. I failed miserably the first time. And much to my dad's disgust, decided to spend the next year just studying for the exam. He's like, you're stupid. You should just go to college. But that was a worthwhile bet to take. And then similarly, I concluded sadly after ten years that research was not something that I was very good at. And I reset that and said, okay, I'll try and be a software engineer. But I had enough of a software engineering background. So I think finding these moments in time to make these changes is important. But most of all, having a sense for what creates value in the space that you're playing in, ideally combined with what are strengths that you bring to the table while you're making this change. That's the balance that I would strive. As an example of a change that in retrospect, I think was a bad change. I think going from Google running a very large team, very large business to starting a company, looking in retrospect wasn't exactly a great change Because many of the things that made me an effective exec at Google, being able to run a pretty complicated business or a big team, building teams, motivating teams, setting product strategy, most of it didn't count for anything once I started Neeva. It's a consumer company, it's all about product market fit, and that's a very chance occurrence. I felt very helpless when I was at Neeva. And that was more of an example of a change where there was just too much risk packed into it. While on the other hand, the change from Neeva to Snowflake are honestly being an SVP of Snowflake to being the CEO. These were challenges. These were much easier changes to make because I brought in a set of capabilities that were super helpful even though it was still a new position.
00:03:57 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:03:57] S1: So is there there two things to take away? I mean, there are many things to take away from what you said, but here are two that I'll highlight. So, the first one is, you clearly like putting yourselves into a position where you might fail, right? Where you're kind of like, okay, I didn't get into IIT. Or succeed. Or succeed. So, yes, yes, yes, yes. High upside, potential upside, right? Do you feel like you need to feel that thrill of potential? I think that deep I mean, certainly, I as a founder, I also like doing stupid adventure sports. And I do wonder if deep down there is a desire to kind of like, I want to put myself onto that edge of my capability to see what I can achieve. I love challenges. I think you find out more about yourself. [00:04:43] S0: I think failures are actually more interesting where I tell people, I tell myself, you aren't your failures. You aren't your successes either. And so that aspect of striving, that's not for everyone, but I think it's very human and really important.
00:04:43 · Sridhar Ramaswamy, Aditya Agarwal
[00:04:43] S0: I think failures are actually more interesting where I tell people, I tell myself, you aren't your failures. You aren't your successes either. And so that aspect of striving, that's not for everyone, but I think it's very human and really important. [00:05:01] S1: Before we move on to Neeva, I'm curious, you spent a long time at Google through what an incredible kind of run, not just at Google but kind of working on products that I think most of us probably use on a daily basis, search and ads, right? Both of those being kind of like discrete products. What do you think the founders in this room could learn from what you learned at Google about today's time and age? Like building in the age of AI today, are there things that you took away from your time at Google either in terms of company culture, how to build, what to build, how to prioritize that are particularly relevant today?
00:05:40 · Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:05:40] S0: I mean, all of you, I think intuitively understand this. The true superpower of great founders, this could be an Elon, definitely Larry and Sergei, is their incredible reductive ability. Is that ability to remove all superficial detail and get to the heart of problems and to arrive at it with relentless discourse. No conversation with Larry and Sergey about any topic was ever easy. They argued endlessly. IITs were the same way. We argued endlessly about every single thing, important or unimportant. But out of all of that was that desire to push for like what are the things that truly Matter. Matter in a particular situation. The other side of Larry Sergey and Eric who was the CEO for much of my time at Google was they did this while still being really good human beings. I told people repeatedly that the three of them have never yelled at me, even though I've given them an endless number of opportunities. I would just go there and argue with them about everything. And we would just go at it for hours and hours. They took these as intellectual challenges. I've never seen them be disrespectful to anyone. I've never seen them scream at anyone. I think to both be good human beings, relentless competitors, make no mistake. We put lots of companies out of business. But it was still fair competition. And they were really good to the people around them. To me that combination of relentless drive combined with the humanity, that us is like defining both for those three and for Google as a company. And some of this you only realize and learn after you have left and you're able to look at yourself there or look at a company with an outside in view, I think is a truly remarkable place.
00:08:03 · Aditya Agarwal, Sridhar Ramaswamy
[00:08:03] S1: Yeah. I really like that phrasing of having extreme reductive power because it's interesting when you listen to interviews with Elon. A lot of the common refrain people have is like, oh, he just keeps on fucking talking about the laws of physics. But ultimately, the reason I think he does that a lot is because he has reduced kind of the problem down to like where is like the actual... Like, what are the things that matter? Where are the places I can change something versus not? And I think that simplified almost Zen like view at the end of it is a result of a lot of kind of like reductive like power over the intervening kind of like years. Yeah. [00:08:44] S0: I mean, for the things that he deals with, those are the immovables. I'm sure if you got Elon to do physics research, he'd be arguing about string theory and what's the immovable of physics. It's just it's a way of thinking.