Your Startup Failed. Now What? | Snowflake CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy
In a Nutshell
Sridhar Ramaswamy explains that startup failure, like his search engine Neva, is painful but essential for growth—provided you accept it without letting it define you. The key lesson is that founders must set an audacious bar for their product (10x better, not incremental) and focus relentlessly on creating faster, cheaper, or better value to overcome distribution challenges from incumbents. Resilience combined with hands-on leadership, continuous learning, and hiring adaptable people turns failure's lessons into future success, as seen in how Neva's team now powers Snowflake's AI capabilities.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Failure is hard. It's a little bit like a deep gash or scratch that you get. You can deal with it. It is still hard. 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 Neva, we wanted to build a product that was 10x better than Google. That is a very high bar. The product that we built was a little bit better than Google but not really 10x better.
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.
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 makes you believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done. You cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual.
Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO of Snowflake, the AI data cloud. He is a proud husband and father of two sons that are both computer scientists. Data and computing runs in the family. He has worked in technology and computing all of his career. He grew up in India, primarily South India.
When he first came to the US, he came to get a PhD. For somebody that grew up in India in 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.
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. He was okay doing research, but he was never passionate about doing research.
When people ask what they should work on, he typically tells them you should work on something that makes time stand still. There are things that all of us do where we are happy to spend more and more time doing it.
After 10 years of doing research, he decided that he wanted to reinvent himself and become a software engineer. Software engineering, writing code is still his passion. He loves the act of creation. He loves the act of producing something from nothing.
His success at Google came because he liked software, liked creating systems, but also liked creating business impact. There was no better team on the planet than the search ads team where technology translated into great product and enormous amounts of money.
His career has been a happy combination of being at the right place at the right time, but also finding things that were truly resonant to him. He had amazing mentors, including the founders of Google, and people like Bill Campbell, who is known as the coach and has coached among the greatest leaders the world has ever known.
The first and most important thing 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 a first-time public company CEO, he 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 he had to learn.
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.
His Snowflake story is a bit of an accident. His original agreement with the company was that he would come join and stay for 6 months. He is a reluctant leader. He didn't start his career thinking that he would be a leader, but he 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. Leaders need to truly imbue the spirit of what the company's products are about.
He prides himself on being a very hands-on leader that knows the details, that cares deeply about the craft of what they do. He thinks of software engineering as a craft, as something that is a tangible product that makes a difference to customers.
At Google, it was advertisers and end users. At Snowflake, it's enterprise customers. Being obsessive about things like product quality, making sure that it's the highest quality that is there, is an important quality that a leader needs to have.
Leaders need to feel the mission of the company is great products. The best defense especially today when there is so much changing is to focus and understand what is great today and what is great tomorrow and keep building towards 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 are there for them when things were not going well.
As a leader, you need to understand that bringing people in, helping them grow, and helping them thrive is your most important job. He looks for people that are driven and malleable.
In a time that is changing as rapidly as it is right now, companies want people that will go the extra mile to learn how to do things better and will strive to achieve more. You need to be very malleable meaning you need to be adaptable because something that you are 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. As a leader you need to find people 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 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. He is routinely a very demanding boss. He expects a lot out of his team. He expects a lot out of himself. But everybody who works with him understands that it is always in the spirit of making Snowflake the company and the team better.
He is an open and transparent leader. He communicates very directly. He gives feedback very directly. He takes feedback very directly. If people tell him that he can do something better, he never grudge that feedback. He thinks of that as a gift that they are giving him that can help him be better at it. That kind of an open environment can be very conducive to things getting done very quickly and being able to get better very quickly as well.
Eric Schmidt, CEO at the time, made him and a few other folks write a hundred billion revenue plan. This is like 2007-8. They all thought that this was the funniest thing ever because the idea that one company could make $100 billion just sounded so preposterous.
The hundred billion dollar plan was a little bit of a planning exercise and they worked on it even though they didn't really believe in it. The real challenge came just a few years later when desktop growth completely flatlined. People stopped buying new PCs and so that meant that query growth at Google stopped.
This is when mobile started taking off. The terrifying thing for Google the business was that mobile just did not make any money. The only place they had growth was in mobile search and yet mobile search monetized at a fraction of desktop search. They worked 5 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, they kept working at it. They had a good system that would try to improve query monetization for example by 5% every quarter. That was part of what drove the overall increase in Google revenue.
Big achievements can also raise questions in your head. In many ways, hitting things like a hundred billion, being the SVP of ads and commerce at Google eventually led him to say that he should do something differently. It gave him both the pressure but also the freedom to go do something else.
He went and started a company and they came up with this audacious thesis that a search engine that was free could in fact be a better search engine. Looking back, the biggest mistake that they made in conceiving Neva 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. They had to have realized that if they wanted people to adopt Neva, they needed a 10x product. Until AI came along, they were not really ready for creating that 10x product. That was a lot of the reason why it did not succeed as a company.
His company just was not as successful as his stay at Google. That's okay. Resilience, being able to deal with failure, is even more important than just succeeding.
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.
When they started Neva, they wanted to build a product that was 10x better than Google. It's just that that is a very high bar. The product that they built was a little bit better than Google, but not really 10x better. That was a lot of the issue that they had in distribution.
He considers ChatGPT to be the successor to Google in terms of information. He goes to ChatGPT often because it can solve problems with a nuance that a Google search is never going to have.
He sometimes takes pictures. His coffee grinder stopped working. He just took a picture of the grinder, put it in ChatGPT and said, "Hey, this is not working, what's the problem?" And it told him probably that the top was not screwed on tight. He went and tightened the top and the coffee machine started working. That is the modern search experience.
The biggest message to founders is that 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, he tells PMs and 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.
Core principles remain the same, that it's about creating value, whether it's for consumers or for enterprise customers. These technologies all disrupt how value is created. Making sure that products are leveraging whatever is coming out today with the best models into their product and into how they think about creating value is going to be really important.
Ten years from now if Snowflake were to become an iconic company like a Google or an AWS he could not be happier. He hopes he is around for that time to actually see it. That's the collective aspiration that they are driving towards. They 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. In 10 years, he hopes they are well on their way to doing this for most companies on the planet.
Failure is hard. It's a little bit like a deep gash or scratch that you get. You can deal with it. It is still hard. But dealing with it makes us try harder. It makes us appreciate success a whole lot more.
Yes, Neva 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 Neva built search at Snowflake. The team that built their AI mode in Neva 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.
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 makes you believe in life and makes you act with purpose as you get things done. You cherish your successes even more because you understand that it is something amazing and unusual.
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