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Snowflake: The Righteous Blood Sucker
- dshipper 5y agoSnowflake is a software Dracula. It latches onto its customers and drains their bank accounts dry, but their victims are happy throughout the process. They are a world-class company at “net revenue retention”—a crucial metric for SaaS businesses that describes the tendency for customers to increase their spend over time.
- sails 5y ago> Snowflake keeps their NDR high by—counterintuitively!—being hard to implement. Disagree somewhat here. Snowflake is relatively easy to implement, and with ELT tools like Fivetran, migrating is not completely impossible (change target). The hard part would be in changing SQL dialect to whatever your new target is, say Big Query, this assuming you are using a modern transformation tool like dbt. The reason not to migrate is that the tool is worth the money spent, for now. Possibly it will become too expensive and migrations more common in the future. See Segment as an example of a massively simple "better" tool, that turned the screws and forced customers to abandon.
- hodgesrm 5y agoThe NDR vs Market Cap graph looks like an illustration for how not to visualize data. There's a blob of points plus outliers Twilio and Snowflake with a rising line drawn through them. Leaving out SNOW and Twilio the line would be close to flat, indicating no relationship. It seems pretty obvious that different root causes are influencing market valuations across these companies.