Profile CEO Snow

Good profile on Slootman and his management style.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/02/01/the-outsi…

Jille
Long snow, very small position

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Yeah, Frank Slootman is the real deal. I worked under him for a short time at Data Domain, and he’s both fair and tough and doesn’t run employees like slaves. For a while, I regretted not being that interested in working at ServiceNow since it was just a help-desk product at the time, although I did get a ping from a friend there. It was interesting to read that it was Slootman’s idea to change the company from a help-desk to a general purpose suite of tools.

I ended up making decent money on NOW, and my career ended up going in a completely different direction, which has been very rewarding both in terms of the “fun at work” factor, as well as financially.

But, I would invest in any company Slootman is running. My investment in SNOW is small right now, though.

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Here is an informative article on Databricks data lake vs Snowflake data warehouse. I do not profess to understand all the technology. Sounds like they both have their advantages and are likely to be competing.

https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/the-modern-data-clou…

Amazon, Alphabet, and Salesforce are an investor in Databricks which is likely to IPO this year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/01/amazon-alphabet-salesforce-b…

Databricks seems to be open source. The market has valued OS companies like Elastic lesser. It is unclear how much of Databricks is OS and whether large vendors like AWS can simply fork it as they have done to Elastic.

https://digitizingpolaris.com/databricks-stays-true-to-its-o…

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Here is an informative article on Databricks data lake vs Snowflake data warehouse.

Well, that author has drunk the Databricks Koolaid. The “Data Lakehouse” isn’t a standard term, it was invented by Databricks as a merging of “Data Lake” and “Data Warehouse.” Pay attention to the comment from Stephen Pace, who is a Snowflake sales engineer.

Databricks seems to be open source.

First, please see this post: https://discussion.fool.com/friends-or-frienemies-snowflake-data… where, among other things, it’s made clear that Databricks rewrote the Java open-source Spark in C++.

Their rewrite is not open-source and performs way better than Spark. But, for analytics a Data Scientist still has to write Spark jobs (which themselves are software programs written Java, Scala, or Python), which isn’t the easiest thing to do. Databricks requires it; Snowflake doesn’t.

This is a complex world, even for techies, so it’s going to be really hard for non-techies to understand the differences. But, remember that the best tech doesn’t always win. So, I recommend using a Saul approach to look at the company’s business and how it’s growing rather than trying to decipher technical differences between the two companies, which are both complementary and competitive.

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