Sridhar Ramaswamy on Research, Google Ads, Neeva's Failure, and Leading Snowflake
EO Korea
Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO of Snowflake, which he describes as "the AI data cloud." In this interview, Ramaswamy traces a path from a PhD in the US to software engineering, to running ads and commerce at Google, to founding the search startup Neeva, and finally to leading Snowflake. The recurring themes are what makes work meaningful, what good leadership requires, and how to live with failure. Ramaswamy considers Neeva a failure, while arguing that people are "more than our failures" and that the company's collapse still produced much of what Snowflake is now building.
From an Unloved PhD to a Passion for Code
Ramaswamy introduces himself as a husband and the parent of two sons who are both computer scientists, and says "data and computing runs in the family." Ramaswamy grew up mainly in South India and came to the US for a PhD without thinking about an industry career or what job might follow.
Ramaswamy describes the PhD as a disorienting shift. Coming from what Ramaswamy calls a "very technically focused, hyper-competitive, but very structured environment," it was unsettling to ask a professor what to work on and be told to work on "something interesting." For a 22-year-old who did not yet understand research, that answer was, in Ramaswamy's word, terrifying. Research meant learning existing fields, forming "brave" hypotheses about where a field could go, and then pursuing them.
Looking back, Ramaswamy says the research went fine, but it was never a passion. That observation became Ramaswamy's advice to others: work on "something that makes time stand still," the kind of activity you are happy to keep spending more time on. After about ten years of research, Ramaswamy decided to reinvent himself as a software engineer. Ramaswamy says writing code is still a passion and talks about loving "the act of creation" and producing "something from nothing."
Ramaswamy links success at Google to that combination: liking software and building systems, and also caring about business impact. In Ramaswamy's view, no team on the planet was better for this than search ads, where technology turned into strong products and "enormous amounts of money," which gave someone like Ramaswamy room to grow. Ramaswamy describes the career as partly being in the right place at the right time and partly finding work that truly resonated. Ramaswamy also credits mentors, including Google's founders and Bill Campbell, known as "the coach," who coached some of the greatest leaders the world has known, in Ramaswamy's words.
Every Job Has Its Own Definition of Excellence
Ramaswamy says the first thing to accept is that every job has its own requirements. Some things you already know, and some you have to learn. As a first-time public company CEO, for example, Ramaswamy had never worked with the financial analysts who cover Snowflake. Getting to know them, building relationships, and understanding how to work with them all had to be learned, and Ramaswamy says it was learned happily.
The broader advice is to figure out what excellence means in any given role. If you don't know, that's fine: find people who do, ask them for feedback about what it takes, and use that to aim for the level of the best people in that job.
An Accidental, Hands-On Leader
Ramaswamy calls the move to Snowflake "a bit of an accident." The original agreement was to join the company and stay for six months. Ramaswamy describes himself as a "reluctant leader" who never planned a career in leadership, but came to see leadership as having a large impact on the organization.
Ramaswamy argues that too many people see leadership as just managing people. A leader is also a "cultural icon" who sets the tone for what the company values. For Ramaswamy, that means leaders need to embody the spirit of the company's products. Ramaswamy takes pride in being a hands-on leader who knows the details and cares deeply about the craft. Ramaswamy calls software engineering a craft that produces something tangible for customers: at Google, those were advertisers and end users; at Snowflake, they are enterprise customers. Obsessing over product quality is part of what Ramaswamy means by "feeling the mission" of a company.
Great Products as the Best Defense
The first principle Ramaswamy lists is that "great products are the best defense," especially now, with so much changing. That means understanding what is great today and what will be great tomorrow, and building toward both. Ramaswamy calls high-quality products at very competitive prices "the ultimate defensibility."
Right next to that, Ramaswamy puts caring for customers when things go wrong. Customers remember who was there for them in bad times, Ramaswamy says, and these are among the things that create iconic companies.
Hiring People Who Are Driven and Malleable
The second principle is that bringing people in and helping them grow and thrive is a leader's most important job. Ramaswamy looks for people who are "driven and malleable." Driven, because in a fast-changing time you want people who go the extra mile to learn how to do things better. Malleable, meaning adaptable, because "something that you were very good at yesterday might be better done by an AI model today." You can't hold onto an old skill; you have to keep learning, both personally and professionally. Leaders should find hungry people, give them opportunities, support them when things go badly, and celebrate with them when things go well.
Ramaswamy also stresses sharing credit: "Credit is never diluted by sharing." Good leaders share in the good news from their teams, but stand in front when things go badly and say it was their responsibility and they could have done better. Ramaswamy sees this mix of nurturing and protecting a team as essential.
That doesn't mean a low bar. Ramaswamy calls himself "routinely a very demanding boss" who expects a lot from the team and from himself. What makes this work, Ramaswamy says, is that everyone understands the demands aim to make Snowflake and the team better, which lets a leader be both effective and genuine.
The last principle Ramaswamy names is openness and transparency. Ramaswamy says he communicates directly, gives feedback directly, and takes it directly. Ramaswamy never resents being told how to do better, sees it as a gift, and believes that kind of open environment helps things get done quickly and helps people improve quickly.
The $100 Billion Plan and the Mobile Crisis
Ramaswamy recalls that around 2007–2008, then-CEO Eric Schmidt had Ramaswamy and a few others write a plan for $100 billion in revenue. They found it "the funniest thing ever," because one company making $100 billion seemed absurd. Ramaswamy admits it was mostly a planning exercise that they worked on without really believing it.
The real challenge came a few years later. Desktop growth flatlined as people stopped buying new PCs, and Google's query growth stopped with it. Mobile was taking off, but, as Ramaswamy puts it, the "terrifying thing" for Google's business was that mobile made almost no money. The only growth was in mobile search, which monetized at a fraction of desktop search. Ramaswamy says the team worked for five years to bring mobile monetization up to desktop levels, and calls this the key to Google thriving through 2014 and 2015 and, "honestly," through to today.
From the outside, Ramaswamy says, it can look like a smooth journey, but it was "an ocean full of big turbulence." A goal as bold as $100 billion couldn't be turned directly into action. Instead, the team kept at it through a system that tried, for example, to improve query monetization by 5% every quarter, which Ramaswamy describes as part of what drove Google's overall revenue growth.
Big achievements also raise questions, Ramaswamy says. Reaching milestones like $100 billion and becoming Google's SVP of ads and commerce eventually led Ramaswamy to want to do something different. It created both pressure and freedom to leave.
Neeva and the Missing 10x
Ramaswamy's startup, Neeva, was built on what Ramaswamy calls an "audacious thesis": that a search engine could be better while also being free. In hindsight, Ramaswamy says the biggest mistake was not setting the bar at a product ten times better than Google Search. Ramaswamy points to Google's huge distribution advantage, noting that it pays every browser and every distribution point. To get people to switch, Neeva needed a 10x product.
Ramaswamy says Neeva wasn't really ready to build that 10x product until AI came along. What they built was "a little bit better than Google, but not really 10x better," and Ramaswamy says that gap was much of the distribution problem and much of why the company failed. Ramaswamy also says plainly that the company was less successful than Ramaswamy's time at Google, and that this is okay, because resilience and the ability to handle failure matter even more than simply succeeding.
On founding in general, Ramaswamy says: "Every startup is an act of believing. It's also an act of madness because you think you can do something that other people have never done before." That belief, Ramaswamy says, is "a little bit of a religious feeling."
ChatGPT as Google's Successor, and "Faster, Cheaper, Better"
Ramaswamy says he sees ChatGPT as Google's successor when it comes to information, because it can solve problems with a nuance that Google Search will never have. As an example, Ramaswamy's coffee grinder stopped working. Ramaswamy took a picture, put it into ChatGPT, and asked what was wrong. The answer was that the top probably wasn't screwed on tightly. After tightening it, the machine worked again. "That is the modern search experience," Ramaswamy says.
From this, Ramaswamy draws a message for founders: believe you can do something better, but make sure users have a compelling reason to use your product. At Snowflake, Ramaswamy tells PMs and engineers that the bar is "faster, cheaper, better." A product must be at least one of these to truly succeed, and ideally all three.
Ramaswamy believes the core principle hasn't changed: it's about creating value, for consumers or enterprise customers. What new technologies do is disrupt how that value is created. So Ramaswamy considers it very important for companies to bring whatever the best current models offer into their products and into how they think about creating value.
Snowflake in Ten Years
If Snowflake became an iconic company like Google or AWS within ten years, Ramaswamy says he "could not be happier," and hopes to be around to see it. Ramaswamy calls that the team's collective aspiration: to be a company that truly makes a difference for enterprises. Ramaswamy states Snowflake's mission as using "the power of data and AI to help every enterprise realize its full potential," and hopes that in ten years the company will be well on its way to doing this for most companies on the planet.
What Came Out of Failure
Ramaswamy doesn't downplay failure. "Failure's hard," Ramaswamy says, comparing it to a deep gash or scratch: you can deal with it, but it still hurts. Dealing with it, Ramaswamy argues, makes us try harder and appreciate success more.
Ramaswamy says Neeva failed, but its failure held the seeds needed to make Snowflake "an amazing company in AI." The team that built search at Neeva built search at Snowflake. The team that built Neeva's AI model is now building Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence, which Ramaswamy calls the successors and the future of where Snowflake is going.
Ramaswamy's closing point is about how to hold both success and failure. Every failure has important lessons, but you also have to accept failure, accept that you are human, and internalize that you are more than your failures. Ramaswamy says he tells other people, his children, and himself that "we are more than our successes and we simultaneously are also more than our failures." In Ramaswamy's view, a strong sense of who you are lets you act with purpose and makes you cherish your successes even more, because you understand they are "something amazing and unusual."
First of all, failure's hard. It's a little bit like deep gash or scratch that you get. You can deal with it. It is still hard. I'll tell you something. Every startup is an act of believing. It's also an act of madness because you think you can do something that other people have never done before. You need to have that kind of a belief. It's a little bit of a religious feeling.
When we started Neeva, we wanted to build a product that was 10x better than Google. It's just that that is a very, very high bar. The product that we built was a little bit better than Google, but not really 10x better. And so my biggest message to founders is all of you need to believe that you can do something better.
Every failure has important lessons, but it is important to accept failures, accept that you are human, but also accept and internalize that you're more than your failures. I tell people, I tell my children, I tell myself that we are more than our successes and we simultaneously are also more than our failures. Having that strong conviction in who you are as a person, I think just makes you believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done. And honestly, you cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual.
Hi there. My name is Sridhar Ramaswamy. I am the CEO of Snowflake, the AI data cloud. I'm also proud husband and father of two sons that are both computer scientists. So data and computing runs in the family.
I have worked in technology and computing all of my career. I grew up in India, primarily South India. Sometimes people ask me about what my career arc was like, you know, how I navigated my early times. To be honest, when I first came to the US, I didn't even think about working in the industry or what kind of job I would get. I came to get a PhD and for somebody that grew up in India, a very technically focused, hyper-competitive, but very structured environment, doing a PhD is very strange because most of the time when you go ask a professor what you should work on, they will typically tell you you should work on something interesting, which is terrifying for a 22-year-old that does not really know research to figure out what to do. But that itself is a journey where you have to understand existing areas, come up with brave hypothesis for where that area could go, and then do research.
To be honest, what I didn't realize at the time was I was okay doing research, but I was never passionate about doing research. When people ask me today what they should work on, I typically tell them you should work on something that makes time stand still. There are things that all of us do that we're happy to spend more and more time doing it. And after 10 years of doing research, I actually decided that I wanted to reinvent myself and become a software engineer. Software engineering, writing code, is still my passion. I love the act of creation. I love the act of producing something from nothing.
And my success at Google came because I liked software, I liked creating systems, but I also liked creating business impact. And there was no better team on the planet than the search ads team where technology translated into great product and enormous amounts of money for somebody like me to grow. And so, my career has been a happy combination of yes, being at the right place at the right time, but also finding things that were truly resonant to me. And along the way, you know, like with everyone else, I've had amazing mentors, obviously the founders of Google, but also people like Bill Campbell, who is known as the coach in these areas. He's been coach to among the greatest leaders the world has ever known.
The first and most important thing that you have to internalize is that every job has its own set of requirements. There are many things that you might know. There are things that you have to learn. As the first-time public company CEO, for example, I had not really dealt with analysts that cover Snowflake from a financial perspective. Getting to know them, establishing relationships with them, and understanding what it takes to work with them is something that I had to learn. I happily learned it. My biggest piece of advice would be every job has its definition of excellence. So, try and figure out what that is. If you don't know, that's okay. Find other people that know. Get feedback from them about what it takes to be excellent. That way, you can aspire to be as good as the best in how somebody does their job.
My Snowflake story, honestly, is a bit of an accident. My original agreement with the company was that I would come, join, and stay for 6 months. I'm a reluctant leader. I didn't start my career thinking that I would be a leader, but I saw it as hugely impactful to the organization that you are a part of. Too many people think of leadership as purely that of people management. You're also a cultural icon that sets the tone for what is valued in the company. And in my mind, that means that leaders need to truly imbue the spirit of what the company's products are about.
I pride myself on being a very hands-on leader that knows the details, that cares deeply, deeply about the craft of what we do. I think of software engineering as a craft, as something that is a tangible product that makes a difference to our customers. In Google, it was advertisers and end users. Over at Snowflake, it's our enterprise customers. And so, being obsessive about things like product quality, making sure that it's the highest quality that is there. I think that's an important quality that a leader needs to have, which is feel the mission of your company. Great products are the best defense, especially today, when there is so much changing. It means that you really have to focus and understand what is great today and what is great tomorrow and keep building towards that. I think that high-quality products that are also priced very competitively are the ultimate defensibility. Taking care of your customers, being there for them when things are not going well, is also equally important because customers will remember that you were there for them when things were not going well. These are some of the things that I think create iconic companies. That is the number one.
Number two, as a leader, you need to understand that bringing people in, helping them grow, and helping them thrive is your most important job. I look for people that are driven and malleable. Why do I say that? It's because in a time that is changing as rapidly as it is right now, we want people that will go the extra mile to learn how to do things better, will strive to achieve more. I also feel you need to be very malleable, meaning you need to be adaptable because something that you were very good at yesterday might be better done by an AI model today. You cannot hang on to that. You have to keep learning new things both in your personal life as well as your professional life. And as a leader, you need to find people like this that are hungry, that want to get things done, and nurture them. Give them opportunity. Be there for them when things are not going well, and be very supportive when things are going well. You need to make sure that you learn how to share credit. Credit is never diluted by sharing. And good leaders always share in the happy news when good things come out of their teams. But they always stand in front when things are not going well and say, you know, this is my responsibility. These things didn't go well because I could have done better.
That kind of giving, both nurturing your team, but protecting your team, is very important. This is not to say that you cannot have a very high bar for who should work in your team. I am routinely a very demanding boss. I expect a lot out of my team. I expect a lot out of myself, but everybody who works with me understands that it is always in the spirit of making us, Snowflake the company, us as a team, better. That helps you be an effective leader, and one that is also very genuine.
Finally, my life principle is also that I'm an open and transparent leader. I communicate very directly. I give feedback very directly. I take feedback very directly. If people tell me that I can do something better, I never grudge that feedback. I think of that as something as a gift that they are giving me that can help me be better at it. And that kind of an open environment can be very conducive to things getting done very quickly, and us being able to get better very quickly as well.
Eric Schmidt, our CEO at the time, made me and a few other folks write a hundred billion dollar revenue plan. This is like 2007-8. We all thought that this was the funniest thing ever because the idea that one company could make a hundred billion dollars just sounded so preposterous. To be honest with you, the hundred billion dollar plan was a little bit of a planning exercise and we worked on it even though we didn't really believe in it.
But the real challenge came just a few years later when desktop growth completely flatlined. People stopped buying new PCs and so that meant that our query growth at Google stopped. This is when mobile started taking off. But the terrifying thing for Google the business was that mobile just did not make any money. So the only place we had growth was in mobile search and yet mobile search monetized at a fraction of desktop search. So we worked five years to bring mobile monetization on par with desktop search and that was the key to Google thriving through 2014, 2015 and honestly through to today.
When you look at it from the outside it can look like a smooth journey but it was an ocean full of big turbulence. Something like a hundred billion dollar plan was so audacious that you could not immediately translate it. On the other hand we kept working at it. We had a good system would try to improve query monetization for example by 5% every quarter. That was part of what drove the overall increase in Google revenue.
On the other hand big achievements can also raise questions in your head. In many ways us hitting things like a hundred billion dollars, being the SVP of ads and commerce at Google eventually led me to say that I should do something differently. It gave me both the pressure but also the freedom to go do something else.
I went and started a company and we came up with this audacious thesis that a search engine that was free could in fact be a better search engine. Looking back, I would say that the biggest mistake that we made in conceiving Neeva was not setting the bar for that product to be 10x that of how Google Search was. Google has incredible distribution. It pays money to every browser. It pays money to every distribution point. And we had to have realized that if we wanted people to adopt Neeva, we needed a 10x product. And until AI came along, we were not really ready for creating that 10x product. And that's a lot of the reason why it did not succeed as a company.
And look, my company just was not as successful as my stay at Google. That's okay. I actually think that resilience, being able to deal with failure, is even more important than just succeeding. I'll tell you something. Every startup is an act of believing. It's also an act of madness because you think you can do something that other people have never done before. You need to have that kind of a belief. It's a little bit of a religious feeling.
When we started Neeva, we wanted to build a product that was 10x better than Google. It's just that that is a very, very high bar. The product that we built was a little bit better than Google, but not really 10x better. And that was a lot of the issue that we had in distribution.
In many ways, I considered ChatGPT to be the successor to Google in terms of information. I go to ChatGPT often because it can solve problems for me with a nuance that a Google Search is never going to have. I sometimes take, you know, just pictures. My coffee grinder stopped working. I just took a picture of the grinder, put it, you know, in ChatGPT and said, "Hey, this is not working. What's the problem?" And it told me probably that the top was not screwed on tight. I go and tighten the top and lo and behold, the coffee machine starts working. That is the modern search experience.
And so my biggest message to founders is all of you need to believe that you can do something better. But you need to make sure that there is a compelling reason for users to want to use your product. At Snowflake for example, I tell our PMs, our engineers that the bar is faster, cheaper, better. Your product has to be one of these for it to truly succeed. Ideally, all of it.
I think core principles remain the same that it's about creating value, whether it's for consumers or for enterprise customers. I think what these technologies all do is they disrupt how value is created. I think making sure that their products are leveraging whatever is coming out today with the best models into their product, into how they think about creating value, is going to be really, really important.
10 years from now, if Snowflake were to become an iconic company like a Google or an AWS, I could not be happier. I hope I'm around for that time to actually see it. That's the collective aspiration that we are driving towards. We want to be a company that truly makes a difference to all of the enterprises that are out there. Snowflake's mission is to use the power of data and AI to help every enterprise realize its full potential and in 10 years, I hope we are well on our way to doing this for most companies on the planet.
First of all, failure's hard. It's a little bit like, you know, like a deep gash or scratch that you get. You can deal with it. It is still hard. But I think dealing with it makes us try harder. It makes us appreciate success a whole lot more. Yes, Neeva failed, but out of that failure came all the seeds that were there that are necessary to make Snowflake an amazing company in AI. The team that built search at Neeva built search at Snowflake. The team that built our AI model in Neeva is the one that's building Cortex and Snowflake Intelligence, which are the successors and the future of where Snowflake is going.
Every failure has important lessons, but it is important to accept failures, accept that you're human, but also accept and internalize that you're more than your failures. I tell people, I tell my children, I tell myself that we are more than our successes and we, simultaneously, are also more than our failures. Having that strong conviction in who you are as a person, I think just makes you believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done. And honestly, you cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual.
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