Thinking about SNOW

I just listened to the 3 results presentations of Snowflake in order to get a fresher understanding of the business going into results later today.

After Q1 2022 results I was worried about the apparent marginal slowdown of total customer growth and RPO. Saul at the time rightly pointed out the RPO was seasonal, but that still left the apparent customer growth slowdown.

I was trying to understand the direction of the growth of the business, and after listening to the calls again, I believe that I was focusing on the wrong metrics.

A theme going through all of the results presentations has been the verticalisation of the sales forces as well as a focus on larger customers over the last year and a half, both within the existing base and in targeting new customers.

The CFO said in Q3 that they have been adding a lot of effort to focus on their top 250 customers and the CEO stated a number of times how the focus on larger customers have been progressing well.

What that means, at least to me, is that the total number of customer wins would perhaps slow down, and that metrics tracking larger customer should accelerate.

And that’s exactly what happened.

The qoq growth rate of total customers over the last 5 Q’s, from Q1 2021 first to Q1 2022 last was (Q1 2021 and Q1 2022 bolded, for comparison purposes):

14% 15% 14% 16% 9%

And for customers spending >$1m the qoq growth rate for the same time series was:

17% 17% 16% 18% 35%

Looking at the first series made me come to the wrong conclusion: marginally slowing customer growth (9% this year vs 14% last year), while looking at the second is probably the correct way to look at it: successful execution of a focus on larger customers, and accelerating growth in large customer growth (35%!! this year vs 17% last year).

On that same theme, they onboarded 193 new S&M employees (1450-1257) in Q1 of 2022 which is more than they added in the whole of FY 2021 (calendar 2020): 175 (1257-1082). Getting new sales and marketing people productive takes time. And these new professionals will only really start meaningfully contributing this Q and next.

The second thing that I did not focus on enough was around international growth. In 2020 year, the CFO noted Japan specifically and that because the business was still still sub-scale there, the GM% of that geo was still negative. In the most recent conf call the growth numbers for both EMEA and APAC were fantastic. Slootman said in his Q1 prepared remarks “both EMEA and APJ have breakout bookings quarters. EMEA grew more than 200% and Asia Pacific grew more than 300% year-over-year.” - pointing to further acceleration and potential gross margin improvement.

So rather than marginally slowing growth a picture of accelerating international and large customer growth emerges.

There are three key analyst Q&A’s that brought this home for me from the Q1 2022 Q&A:

Q:
The 27 customers getting to that $1 million-plus level this quarter, that’s a real eye-popping number. I think that’s more than you did in the first three quarters all of last year. Anything in particular getting that motion going faster? And on the other side of the equation, is that a number we could expect to see on a go-forward basis? Or is that kind of too high of an expectation to have for the remainder of the year?

A (CFO):
Well, I’m not going to guide to $1 million customers. All I will say is there’s a number of – as there was going into this quarter, we had a number of customers on the cusp of going to $1 million, and we continue to see a number, and I think it’s going to be very strong growth. But what I want to remind people is, when we land a customer, it takes many times, six to nine months, I think it’s closer to nine months before a customer actually starts to consume at their contract rate. And so a lot of this is the impact of really focusing on larger customers over the last year-and-a-half that we’re starting to see that pay off.
But what I will say is, of that 104 customers, only, I think, about 25% of those are actually majors and then the balance is enterprise customers. So think about Fortune 500, only about 25% are Fortune 500. The others are across-the-board end customers. And my point there is even small companies can be big consumers of Snowflake. And there’s a lot of them, as I said, that are just on that cusp. So we expect that to continue.

Q:
Frank, I’d love to hear about what’s causing the breakout and growth in international regions? I know you guys had some leadership changes. I’m sure you’re feeding more headcount there. So how much is kind of your own efforts versus other factors like market awareness or growing cloud acceptance or anything else you’d call out?
A (CEO):
No, it’s exactly what you just said. I mean we just needed to properly operationalize ourselves in these geographies. As you know, it’s market by market. We have to have the correct leadership in place. We have made a lot of leadership changes in these regions that we’re very pleased with. When you have a great product like Snowflake, I mean, the impact of that is going to come fast and furiously. So I’m personally going to invest a bunch of time in Europe, given my own background, because I think the opportunity is tremendous. So we’re excited that we actually see these regions coming online and contributing and we expect that to continue. We’re very happy with the latest changes we made in Asia Pacific as well. We have very high expectations of Japan, obviously, ANZ and there’s other markets where we’re going to be starting to open up as well.

Q:
I mean numbers look great across the board. The one outlier was the Fortune 500, which looked like kind of a slower net add in Q1. Anything you could kind of speak to this number, maybe seasonality or thoughts around what to expect going forward.
A (CFO):
Well, these large accounts are very, very long sales cycles, and you are going to see lumpiness in the additions. Obviously, Q4 was a strong quarter. And as one would expect, that’s just landing a customer. That doesn’t mean it contributed to revenue. As I said, most of those Fortune 500, we landed in Q4. We’ve seen virtually no revenue from them yet today. I can’t stress that enough. And given Q4 is the end of a commission year for people and accelerators, reps do everything natural to close everything in the end of that commission year. So I fully expect we’ll continue to close Fortune 500 the balance of the year. And it’s all based upon when the customer is ready to begin that journey.

For me that paints a very positive picture, which I thought may be useful to the board. I’ll be looking through this lens at the results later today: continued success with larger customer growth, and continued success internationally.

Hope that’s helpful.

-WSM

146 Likes

For me that paints a very positive picture, which I thought may be useful to the board. I’ll be looking through this lens at the results later today: continued success with larger customer growth, and continued success internationally.

Great post, WSM. Can I ask specifically what numbers you’ll be looking for / hoping for? I think it’s likely the strong $1m+ customer trend will continue, but isn’t that kind of implicit with a 160%+ NRR? Both of these things are great, but…they’re kind of two ways to express the same driving force. In other words, it’s the increased spend, not a flood of new customers, that’s driving revenue hypergrowth. That dynamic isn’t my favorite. That said, I can’t expect them to forever be able to increase the % of customers they add – that’s just not how numbers work. So I foresee customer adds, and revenue along with them, likely decelerating over time – I just want to make sure this is happening SLOWLY. So what forward-looking information do we have? Mostly, guidance. We expect them to beat and raise every quarter, so here’s what numbers I’ll be looking for / hoping for.

Fiscal 2022 PRODUCT REVENUE Guidance History
180 days ago (when they reported Q4 of last year): 1.020b
90 days ago (when they reproted Q1 of this year): 1.035b

In the gradual revenue slow down scenario, we would see another unexciting FY guidance raise – say to 1.060b or so. They want to be able to raise it again next quarter (say to 1.095b) and then beat that in Q4. Given their average beat, that would lead to PRODUCT REVENUE of:

Q1 actual: 214m (which was up 20% sequentially)
Q2 with usual beat: 255m (+19% sequentially)
Q3 with slight sequential slowdown: 301m (+18% sequentially)
Q4 with slight sequential slowdown: 352m (+17% sequentially)

So the actual total PRODUCT REVENUE would be 1.122b for fiscal 2022. Remember: these are fantastic numbers, but for Snowflake (since it is unique and so much is expected, and has such a high market cap already), this scenario would be at least a bit disappointing.

So what would signal something more exciting? We won’t see Upstart-like raises from Snowflake, but if they raised it to something like 1.080b this quarter (instead of 1.060b), then we might see the stock move up. More than 1.080b would really make my ears perk up.

That’s just an example – I’d love to hear what numbers would encourage you that a new exciting trend is happening.

To clarify: even if the “disappointing” scenario plays out, I’m not saying Snowflake is rubbish. I’m just saying in the ultra short term, the market may be expecting more than just a “shrug” (slight deceleration). So, however the market reacts, let’s keep perspective: when you’re decelerating from 100%+ growth to 95%+ growth, it’s still very impressive.

Bear

60 Likes

If I may add my few cents here, one of the key reasons why I’m excited about SNOW and invest in their stock is the network effect which is driving new users to the platform. The main argument is that once a data provider gets on Snowflake platform, customers that use this data provider will be driven to use Snowflake as well. Accessing and using third party data on SNOW is far simpler and easier than using traditional methods. From my experience I believe this to be the case.

If this network effect is real, we should see them adding new customers at a strong pace. We already know that their number of customers over 1mm will grow. On the last call they mentioned that many of their customers were on the cusp of reaching 1mm threshold. I would expect this number to grow significantly for quarters to come. Once a part of a company gets “hooked” on Snowflake, it should drive adaption across the rest of the enterprise.

13 Likes

Bear: Can I ask specifically what numbers you’ll be looking for / hoping for?

Hey Bear - I’m going to take a stab at it and focus on the top line - total revenue growth only and leave taking a stab at the raise to you.

They guided for 92-97% yoy last Q and did 110% in both total and product revenue growth. They’ve guided for 90% this quarter and I’m hoping for >100% yoy again.

So to put a number on it: I’m hoping for $275m TOTAL revenue, up 107% yoy / 20% qoq, based on the two things I discuss above:

  1. size of historical customer adds as well as
  2. accelerating international growth, which is clearly much higher than the US business.

I think that would not be disappointing, even given the current valuation.

**Bear:**I think it’s likely the strong $1m+ customer trend will continue, but isn’t that kind of implicit with a 160%+ NRR? Both of these things are great, but…they’re kind of two ways to express the same driving force. In other words, it’s the increased spend, not a flood of new customers, that’s driving revenue hypergrowth.

Not completely. The reason for that is that NRR does not tell us anything about the absolute growth of the revenue, just the relative growth.

So a hypothetical small customer starting up contributing $100 revenue in y1 and ending contributing $168 in y2 has a 168% NRR, same as a $1m customer in y1 contributing $1.68m in y2. NRR is the same but revenue impact is hugely different.

Because it takes 6-9 months, and closer to 9 months before a newly landed customer contributes to revenue it is hugely important in the current quarter what size customers were acquired 6-9 months ago.

And Snowflake has not split customers acquired for us like that, except by saying in Q1 that they’ve been at it focusing on ever larger customers for a year and a half and that it’s really now starting to come together. And the Fortune 500 adds - which was very strong last year is also only half of the story as that is less than 25% of the customers spending more than $1m with them.

The CFO also said that the sales cycles for those large customers are long - 6 months? Which, if you add the months comes roughly to 6 months sales cycle plus 9 months before starting to contribute to revenue for the very large customers, so almost a year and a half. And they started targeting very large customers a year and a half ago last quarter. Which means the focus on larger customers will only have started coming through in the revenue numbers in the last quarter or so, and if you focus on larger customers, you should see customers spending a large amount with you increasing at some point faster than the overall customer growth.

And that is exactly the number which spiked last quarter - the $1m+ ttm (this is important - its not annualised - its ttm) revenue customers.

So if one was to assume that the composition of the customers acquired but not yet contributing revenue for 9 months after acquisition like the CFO cannot stress enough in the last year or two has shifted to bigger, perhaps much bigger ones, and the NRR stays the same as the CFO has also stated then revenue contribution from those customers could be much larger when they start to contribute.

So paraphrasing what you said, I would rather argue:

In other words, it’s the increased spend of a smaller number of much larger customers acquired in the last year and a half, not a flood of new smaller customers, that’s driving revenue hypergrowth.

Or at least that’s my take. If I were a betting man…

Let’s see a bit later :slight_smile:

-WSM

26 Likes

WSM-

There are some real nuggets in your post. Good stuff.

On that same theme, they onboarded 193 new S&M employees (1450-1257) in Q1 of 2022 which is more than they added in the whole of FY 2021 (calendar 2020): 175 (1257-1082). Getting new sales and marketing people productive takes time. And these new professionals will only really start meaningfully contributing this Q and next.

I would say that the above is not an apples-to-apples comparison of what SNOW was doing before compared to what they are doing now. SNOW is now focusing on about a dozen specific verticals. They do specific sales and marketing for each vertical. They have been doing this only recently, I think. It seems to be working very well and management stated that they will continue to invest in target verticals in a tailored way. This means that when they tailor then need specific conferences and user meetings for each vertical. They also need to tailor the product as the requirements for each vertical will need specifics (e.g. banking, healthcare, and advertising will each need things that the others don’t). They also need sales people who know the verticals; they are more specialized. For instance, a sales rep selling to the healthcare vertical needs to have experience and expertise in that vertical (in addition to general selling skills). So rather than having one large salesforce that sells to any customer, SNOW now needs a dozen salesforce. It’s not as efficient so they needed to hire a bunch of new people in Q1.

As long as this approach is highly effective, I’m happy that SNOW is investing in it.

GR

25 Likes

Many here will remember in late 2019 when ZS had the same problem. It’s sales staff was under manned and perhaps poorly led. Revenue suffered. The company brought in a new head of marketing and sales. A quarter later, everything looked different. Many here exited just as the company was announcing it’s decision to to take action. I held on because of the ZS solution, which I think is a no-brainer. I am going to give snow some more breathing room.

Gordon

9 Likes