Berkshire investment in snowflake

[Raylight]

@luxmain

I noticed this, might be of interest. The rate of dilution seems quite high.

This has been discussed over the years. Here’s one thread about it:

Snowflake Q2'23 earnings beat and raise

But they had $381m in stock comp over the same period? Seems excessive, no? Dreamer, The topic of SNOW’s stock based comp has already been beaten to death, seems like every quarter it gets brought up because prior posts or company documents are just never read by some people. There is NOTHING new about the guided SBC for the current fiscal year since BEFORE ipo in 2020, three years ago. Management has continued to reiterate 1% dilution each year moving forward, after this FY. This guidance …

Basically, it was known from before the IPO that the diluted share count would hit 360 million. You can think of it as a drawn out one time IPO event.

Regarding 320 million vs 363 million, it’s explained in their press release:

We may have non-GAAP net income attributable to Snowflake Inc. for the first quarter of fiscal 2024. As a result, we are presenting the weighted-average shares used in computing net income per share attributable to Snowflake Inc. common stockholders - diluted in the non-GAAP column of the table above, giving effect to all potentially dilutive securities (stock options, restricted stock units, and employee stock purchase rights under our 2020 Employee Stock Purchase Plan). These potentially dilutive securities would be excluded from the weighted-average shares used in computing net loss per share attributable to Snowflake Inc. common stockholders - diluted if we have non-GAAP net loss attributable to Snowflake Inc.

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@luxmain

Indeed the buyback (around 14m shares based on the current price) would seem to be inadequate to offset even a fraction of the new shares in the process of being printed to pay staff.

I hope the above sheds some light on how to think about current and future dilution. The CFO elaborated on the buyback on the earnings call:

We have $5.1 billion in cash on our balance sheet. We’ve had $5 billion since the time we went public. We’ve made a number of strategic acquisition and M&A deals. So, we feel we have more than enough capital in the business to fuel our growth through both the small tuck-in M&As as well as invest in headcount, but you can only add so many people at a time and get them productive in an engineering organization.

And I’m not hearing our engineering leaders claim they need more people. And it’s not growth at all costs this company. Yes, we are a growth company, but it’s efficient growth as well too, and we’ll continue to do that. And we expect we’re going to generate close to $2 billion over the next two years. And given the $5.1 billion we have, we think it’d be great to manage dilution through that. And we still have the opportunity if we find great candidates to hire faster if we so choose.