Awesome. Okay, thanks everyone. I know people are piling in after the keynote, so got a couple seats up front, but I am sure this will be a standing room session. Excited to kick off the afternoon with Snowflake. We have Brian Robins, the CFO. Brian, we had a great dinner last night, and it is hard to believe it is only been a year or so since you have taken over. A lot has changed at Snowflake. Maybe just give us your top observations from the past year, and how do you think about the opportunity ahead?
Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, thanks for having us here today, and thanks for everyone coming to see us. My two primary goals when I came into the company was really twofold. One, focus on growth and margin expansion. Two, focus on the go-to-market execution. In my career, I have spent most of my time with the CROs of the companies, and have really focused on that go-to-market function. I am happy to say both of those have really played out throughout the year. On the growth and margin expansion, really happy with the guidance that we gave, the quarter that we delivered, even the previous quarter, and we are doing that with increased operating leverage in the model. Excited to see that.
Sridhar and I are very well-aligned there, and the whole executive team is, and so you are starting to see the investments that we made pay off in the go-to-market, and also on the growth side. On the go-to-market side, Jonathan is our new CRO. He is doing an awesome job. He has been with the company for over 10 years. Really highly regarded, and it has been awesome to work with him, because he grew up with Snowflake, basically, and knows the product really well. He is really pushing the discipline and changing the way the sales force is selling into our customers. Historically, when I got at the company, it was really a consultative sales approach, and they would go and sort of talk about what is your problem, how can we help you, and so forth.
Now reps are actually using AI with synthetic data and actually deriving outcomes for the customers. So they are actually showing up with agents and models and so forth that actually help drive that use case and that outcome. Really super happy that those two things have played out and two of my focuses I will continue to focus on.
Okay. Awesome. Certainly the recent results have been very positive surprises to the market. Back-to-back re-accelerations, very rare in software at this scale, 5% + beats, but it is also rare by Snowflake history. Clearly, investors are excited about it. We can see the bend in the growth curve. I am curious, as you look at the business from probably an unlimited amount of metrics based on how much you can cut the data at Snowflake, what are some things that surprised you internally, whether it is verticals, new personas, different types of consumption patterns?
That is one advantage of being a data company. We actually measure everything within the company.
Yeah.
So just to comment on the results, and we will talk about the question, it is awesome to see what the Snowflakes have done and what they have delivered. A lot of hard work has gone into that throughout the entire employee base. Also really appreciative of our customers. Sridhar and I host an All Hands after every earnings call, and it was one of these things like, "Hey, this is great. Let us celebrate today. But after today, we have to worry about tomorrow and this quarter." So there really is a sense of urgency within the company and a culture around customers first, delivery, product innovation, and so forth. On the second part of the question, remind me, it was about?
Just as you look at all the different metrics and cuts of the data, obviously investors
Yeah
we can see this stuff. Anything that you would flag or just stand out to you as you look at
I guess it would be, of course, the metrics are awesome to look at and see what's happening. One, I guess, would be really the durability of the business itself.
What we're seeing with all the AI initiatives that we have, we talk a lot about CoCo, but there's Snowflake CoWork, there's AI Functions, there's model training, there's AI Gateway. It's the adoption of those and what people are doing with those tools to impact their businesses. The way that all of us are working today will dramatically change in the next year, two years, three years. Trying to actually embrace that agentic workforce and what that looks like, and to see that in our customers and see how they're doing it, has just been awesome. I guess the other thing that I'd touch on that's really been amazing is when I got to Snowflake about a year ago, I personally did not use Snowflake that much. I took SQL, I think, in college. It was a required class.
I didn't really have the ability to access the data like I have the ability to access the data now. I spend a lot of my time in Snowflake, primarily CoCo, and can access any of the data. Historically, the way I would work is if I would see data, and one of our traits that everyone here in the room has is we can look at reams and reams of data and find one data point that doesn't make sense. Then typically we would go to someone and say, "Can you give me more data on that?" Now you can just talk to basically your computer through CoCo and basically get into the data and understand what's going on. Then it's integrated with our acquisition that we did with Observe connectivity into Gmail, Calendar, Slack, all the other applications I use.
I use that as a harness to work out of. The fact that I am using it so much, and we have implemented so much Snowflake on Snow, I talk to probably three to five CFOs a week, either existing customers or potential customers, and the sense of urgency around what you can do with your data at different personas has been really amazing.
Yeah. No, that is great to hear. I know you have talked about vast majority of the finance org on CoCo and just all the efficiency that is gained. One of the questions we often get from investors, and I know you have only been at Snowflake a year, so this might be a little unfair of a question, but if we go back to past cycles where we did see larger beats and growth rates were elevated, there was this wave of optimization. I know that is probably a very recent memory for a lot of folks that are still at Snowflake.
Right.
What gives you the confidence that this acceleration is durable, and we are not going to face this huge wave of optimization like we saw maybe five years ago as the digital natives kind of lost some momentum?
Yeah. It is a good question. You can ask any question. I got my colleague Katherine here, and anything I get in trouble with, she will help me out. But when I look at the data and sort of understand the past and sort of what is going forward, we are well past the experimental phase with CoCo and AI. Really seeing the power of what this does within our customer base gives me the confidence in forecasting it, but guidance. When you have sort of a new tool and a lot of people adopt it and use it, that is great, but what you really have to ensure is that you are driving positive business outcomes, and there is an ROI on that. One of the things with a consumption model is you get to charge every day what gets consumed.
But if you're consuming for the wrong things or they aren't seeing ROI, that's bad for the business. That's not sustainable. One of the things that we actually have, I don't know, is my mic on? It's like one of the things that we have that is awesome is we have a skill within CoCo to do cost optimization, and it's one of the top 10 skills that's used.
We actually encourage and want our customers to do optimization. We encourage and want our customers to use CoCo, but we don't want them to do it in an unhealthy way. Part of the sales execution and excellence that I talked about with JB and the sales team is really developing those use cases and selling those outcomes. I think that's critically important for stability in the business, and that helps us put that into guidance with durability and understanding.
Yeah. Maybe we can stick on guidance for a bit, because I know there's a lot of factors that your favorite, right? A lot of factors, a lot of time, effort, heart that goes into that, right? But how do you approach it? You're seeing kind of unprecedented levels of adoption, new use cases every day.
Yep
New products launch, right? The innovation velocity. In simplest terms as possible, what are you assuming in the guide now that maybe you didn't three months ago, whether it's new products, level of consumption, just to kind of help frame how you're guiding the things?
Yeah. Before we jump into that.
Sure
Let's talk a little bit just about guidance itself. I just want to make sure there's no change in guidance philosophy. We do it the same way. When we look at guidance, we look at the core, which we have a ton of information on. We actually forecast that literally every night. There's an awesome team back at Snowflake. The team's been there roughly about eight years. They're a bunch of data scientists, and they forecast by customer and by product line literally every night. The pipelines run for four hours. At 5:00 A.M. every morning, I get an extremely detailed forecast of what's happening within the business. With the core, we have tons of data. We've done that for a while. Our degree of accuracy is very high there.
With AI and some of the new products, we don't have as much observed data, so we're going off of what we know at the time. That same team, as well as another team, builds detailed product launch models for us. We have all the products over the course of Snowflake. We have all the curves and the trajectory of what those products have done. We then apply the pattern recognition behaviors to those.
Based on what we're observing. With CoCo only being out two quarters, the first quarter that we did it, we didn't include it because we didn't have any observed behavior. Now we're able to. The next quarter we were able to, but we don't want to put in the initial small numbers, but really, really high growth percentages. We took a haircut to that. Now that we're two quarters in, we have more data. We feel like we have a better accuracy in forecasting it. We then have a whole bunch of new products that obviously are new, so we don't have a lot of observed data, so we don't put a lot behind those right now.
Yeah. On those new products, what are the top two or three new products that are now out there that you're most excited about or customers are seeing initial traction with?
Absolutely. CoCo's sibling is called CoWork. CoWork has over 5,000 accounts. CoWork is what I'll call data with rails around it. It's certified by the data scientists. When you go into CoWork and ask questions, there's no hallucination. The data's correct. You can actually roll that out to a lot of people, so love that. The AI Functions we're seeing, AI Gateway's super early. But one of the things that we're seeing with our customer base is their commitment to some of the large foundational models because new models are coming out on a pretty frequent basis. They want to be able to have model choice.
One of the things that we're able to do is people make a Snowflake commitment for CoCo and consumption and be able to use the right model for the right question or the right activity, the right query, to basically optimize the cost they're paying for that.
You don't want to use the most advanced, most technical, most expensive model for a very basic question. You'll use maybe an open source model or a model that costs much less.
Right. Makes sense. One of the other questions we get, just in terms of some of the recent performance, is this sort of distinction between AI-driven and the core, right? I think it gets a little confusing because AI can benefit the core. As you new use cases, you need more data, but can you just sort of talk about those two dynamics, and how do you see the growth of the core business trending, just given these new use cases that are coming on top of it?
Yeah, absolutely. When we put our revenue together, I know a number of companies do attribution to saying AI revenue's this, and maybe they're selling a bundle and for accounting purposes, they have to break it out. Ours is down to the SKU level, and so we have a series of products that are AI related. So when we talk about AI and the performance, it's based on those SKUs. The core is the core business, that data warehousing, storage, analytics, ingestion, what you know as Snowflake as a whole. So one of the things that we're seeing that is extremely encouraging and really goes to the durability of the business is we're seeing that when people adopt our AI products, primarily CoCo, because we have the most data around CoCo, they're actually consuming more of the core.
Yeah.
So it may be more personas, so you're reaching more people within a business. So typically pre the CoCo and all the AI functions, you would basically interact with Snowflake through your data team, who would actually write the SQL queries. Now anybody within the business can get access, and we don't charge for it.
Right.
You just get it, being a Snowflake customer, and then the charge is the consumption that you actually draw in using the product. So we see more personas and then we're seeing migrations go faster, so we're seeing more data come in relative migrations. So there's a whole bunch of different things that AI is doing that's driving strength and acceleration in the core.
Yeah. Got it. And presumably with the acceleration implied in the guide, you are seeing those trends continue on a go-forward basis.
Yeah.
Yep. Another topic that you led off with in terms of your priorities was margins, right?
How do you think about sort of trade-offs with higher AI revenue, right? Gross margins were lowered a bit last quarter in terms of the full-year target. Just give us a sense of how you think about that going forward as Snowflake becomes a greater AI business.
Absolutely. I guess the first thing I will say is we are in such an awesome market today. There is so much opportunity and it is changing so rapidly, and there is just so much opportunity out there, and the TAM, because of these things that we are doing, is expanding very rapidly. With that, Sridhar is very committed to revenue growth and meeting our customers where they are at, giving them tools, helping them get value out of their data through AI and other methods. The number one thing from a company perspective is we want to capture that market share. Growth is extremely important. You see in our guidance for the full-year, we raised it from 31% year-over-year growth to 36% year-over-year growth. That is a pretty significant step up off of a prior quarter where we had another big increase.
But we have done that with increasing operating leverage in the business. What we are very committed to is increasing operating leverage in the business. For those of you who were not at Investor Day, we committed to being GAAP profitable in the fourth quarter of next year, slightly over a year out. We are seeing a really big We put a plan around stock-based compensation. You are seeing a really big decline there. You are seeing us hold gross margins with the increased revenue that you see. We got 74% non-GAAP product gross margins, and you are seeing the strong cash flow generation. We are doing that with less people around the enterprise.
One of the things I talked about on earnings, if you look at year-to-date hiring for first and second quarter this year versus last year, we added roughly 330 people this year. Last year, we added about 950 people. Of the 330 this year that we added, 180-ish of those, more or less, came from the Observe acquisition. The amount of people that we are adding with the acceleration of revenue, I think is really a testament of how times are changing.
Yeah.
On gross margin specifically, the company has done a really good job over the years of basically getting leverage and scale with our providers, once we sort of reach a certain threshold. As we launch all these new AI products, AI products naturally have a lower gross margin than our core business. The good news is it does drive our core business, so that is helping out. But we feel that there are things that we can do over time to maintain a strong gross margin.
Yeah. You talked about on the operating margin line, and particularly the people side of the business, having to hire significantly less despite this growth acceleration, and certainly was evident to us at Investor Day just how much internally Snowflake has kind of been transformed on this AI organization, certainly across product velocity. Your finance organization as well. What are some of the biggest efficiencies that you have seen through that transformation, and do you feel like this is the new normal of very minimal headcount growth, even if growth were to continue to accelerate from here?
Yeah, efficiencies are happening all over the business. If you start at the top of the P&L on revenue, we are seeing efficiencies in the sales organization. We actually have a model called Raven, and people can go in and speak to Raven really about anything. For instance, if I got the user list of who is here attending in this, I could easily download it into Raven and say how much ARR is sitting in the room for financial services as a big vertical for us. It would tell me basically by customer, what everybody is spending and who is not customers. The power to do that is, I could never do that, right? Basically, I would have to get the list. I have to send it to an FP&A analyst. It would take a while. They would go do all this stuff.
With these models, you can actually connect all this different data, structured, unstructured, and literally get it at your fingertips. Going back to the CFOs that I talked to and the CEOs that Sridhar talks to, that is why they are so passionate about like, "I need to get this yesterday and get it in my hands." From the sales side, we are seeing it on prospecting, how they are putting deals together, and so forth. We have not hired as much in sales and seen the productivity per rep go up dramatically this year. That is within the sales organization. I know folks like yourself would go and scrape the internet for open racks and try to see how much people are hiring, and that would be an indication of growth. Unfortunately, you can no longer do that.
On the R&D side, with relatively flat declining headcount, we are getting increased productivity on lines of code produced at an astonishing rate. One of the things that we are doing to get GAAP profitable was, a big component of that was stock-based compensation. What we are doing is we are hiring a different type of person, that can actually be an engineer versus what we would historically hire. So historically, you would have to hire someone with 8 -1 0 years of experience, really senior, maybe had a management role in the past. Now you can hire someone one to two years out of college who really is AI-pilled, that has vibe coding, can use CoCo and so forth. We are seeing a dramatic difference in the two of them.
On the productivity. If you go into the finance organization, we have probably 150 different use cases. I say probably because they are developing them every day, so it is more than that, on how we are using Snowflake on Snow, on doing automation. It is sales and marketing, the same thing. HR, we have an HR skill that can give you the health of your organization and can tell you everything you want to know about your organization and people to check on, people stats on how much they are using AI tools, like a whole bunch of different stuff. The point of all this is, we are seeing efficiencies and you can tell by headcount, but I really think we are just getting started.
I think the efficiencies, I think of the curve of adoption and proving out the efficiencies, we're in the early beginning stages of that. I talk a lot about AI being a human transformation more than a technology transformation. Really getting individuals to understand what the art of the possible is really important. I meet every week, one-on-one with my direct and someone from my data science team, a senior data analyst manager, to talk about what they're doing to become AI native and how they're changing their organization. It's literally every week a one-on-one just on AI and their function, internal audit, investor relations, accounting, FP&A, tax, deal desk, because it's that important. It's amazing to see the light bulbs go off when you talk about the art of possible.
You have to give them this North Star of what they need to shoot for, on what they can get to from the art of possible. We're building a lot today. We're seeing efficiencies, but I don't think we're seeing as much efficiency that you'll see over time once we get some of this stuff fully deployed.
Yeah. Wow, that sounds really exciting and certainly a new lead generation opportunity for you if you're meeting with CFOs every day and showing them what can be accomplished. I guess, as you think about, you mentioned the North Star, and how important that is. At a high level, where do you and Sridhar view the potential of this business? There's certainly been targets that have been put out there years ago. Growth is on the upswing, but how do you characterize that North Star goal to your group of Snowflake, your Snowflake employees, every day to keep them motivated?
The market is, like I said, rapidly changing. One of the thing, I love many things about Snowflake, but one of the things I love is we are spending millions and millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, re-educating and retraining our employee base on what it is like to work in an AI environment, and we're really driving that. I mentor a number of people, and they'll come to me and talk to me about careers and maybe taking a CFO role and so forth. If you're in the job market today, it has to be one of the most terrifying things. Because there's a lot of companies that just won't be here in two, three, four years. What I tell them, the most important thing is to get with a company that's AI forward.
They want to make sure you're AI-pilled, and they're going to invest a lot of money in you. I've been doing this for about 30 years, and the way I used to work won't work going forward. It just won't work. I'm really bought into it and really spent a lot of time on it because I think it's critically important. From a Snowflake perspective, people are extremely excited because all the customer stories that they're hearing, the impact they're making around the world. When AstraZeneca comes and talks, and they've done case studies and press releases with us and so forth, and they'll come talk at Summit or whatever, and they're like, "You, Snowflake, are saving people's lives.
We've been able to do X, Y, and Z because we've implemented Snowflake and are far along on that." They're getting drugs out to trial faster, they're doing it more economically, and it's just awesome to see those results. That's in life sciences. Then you go to the supply chain, you see the same thing. You go to government and pub sec, and you see the same thing. Super exciting. Within my organization, there's five or six people who talk to customers on a regular basis, and that happens around the company. Then people bring those stories back, and they talk about that. Obviously the earnings that we're posting is really awesome.
But for Sridhar and I, we want to basically create a set of tools and the ability to access your data to be able to drive your business more efficiently so you know more about your business.
We're at the center of AI and doing just an awesome job at that. The key for us to continue to be successful is product velocity. What you did yesterday doesn't matter for tomorrow, and so we need to develop the next CoCo, the next CoCo, get deeper penetration within the accounts, and also sales execution.
Yeah. That makes sense. Brian, as a CFO, you probably are involved with the renewals of a lot of third-party software contracts at Snowflake.
Yeah
Certainly there's been a lot of concern in the market around traditional SaaS businesses, and we've seen them make moves to look more like databases in some ways with UI layers going to AI labs and everything. How do you see this playing out, both from what you're doing with your third-party software contracts, putting more stuff into Snowflake, and then the opportunity for you to be more of an operational database in some of those use cases for your customers?
Yeah, great question. Let me unpack that. Procurement sits under me as well, and so I get to see all the deals that come through the pipeline. Because things are changing so rapidly, I am very hesitant to do three year deals.
Yeah.
I won't save money, but I won't get locked into a long-term commitment, and so I'll basically sign one year deals. Not saying I won't sign three year deals. There's some software that is critical to what we're doing that will be there, and you can tell it will be there in two to three years, or we've talked to them about their roadmap. They're AI-pilled. They're changing the way they're working. We will do some three year deals, but the standard is a one year deal, where that's changed a little because historically you want to commit as much as you can for as long as you can to get the biggest discount you can. Because things are changing so rapidly, in my mind, I just have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. We're actually doing lower deals.
From a data coming into Snowflake and then other companies trying to be a database or be a database site, the thing about Snowflake that is incredible is we are an open system. We have the Iceberg Tables where we are encouraging you to You can query your data from anywhere, anyhow, or whatever. We have to create great products like CoCo to incentivize you to use us.
Right.
One of the things around that we talk a lot about internally is it is customers first. If you do not make a great experience for your customer, we talk about it is really easier to migrate into Snowflake because of all these tools. It is just as easy to migrate out of Snowflake. Let us say the reverse of it, too, right? We have to create those great customer experiences to keep them within Snowflake and to give them the ROI of doing that. Since we are not an HR application, we are not a CRM, we do not run all these various components, a lot of people want to put all their data in Snowflake, so then they can use tools to actually be able to understand more about their business.
I am very encouraged with how things are going and what we are seeing from a business momentum perspective with people putting data into Snowflake.
Yeah. One of the questions we often get just on the competitive landscape is what do we make of the frontier labs, right? Obviously you have a co-opetition dynamic with the hyperscalers that you are used to, both partners and competitors. How do you see the frontier labs? Are they in a similar boat as the hyperscalers, or do you view them differently?
Yeah. I have talked a lot today about the changing business environment. We have great partnerships with the hyperscalers. We also compete with them in some way as well. I talk to the CFO of AWS, John, on a very frequent basis. I talk to the folks at Microsoft and the folks at GCP on a regular basis as well. We have a very good relationship there. They are using us as well to sell more workloads. In some cases, they are giving border relief to their team to do that and so forth. We have a good working relationship there. Same thing with the large foundational models. We just did our Summit that we recently had. We had the Co-Founder of Anthropic up on stage with Sridhar talking about the partnership, and how we are working together.
We work very closely with OpenAI. Christian talked a little bit about SpaceX and Grok. We are working with all them. I think you said it right. There is a very healthy, stable partnership. There is also some form of competition as well.
Yeah. And maybe in the closing minute or two here, Brian, if you're sitting back up on this stage, which you're certainly welcome back next year, and growth rates have meaningfully accelerated once again beyond where anyone's thinking of, what would you say are the two or three main reasons why that happened, and anything else you just want to leave the audience with before we wrap up?
I think Katherine and I aren't doing our jobs if we aren't communicating to you on a regular basis about the business and the driving factors of where we're going. There shouldn't be any surprises. I think it really is the durability of the business as it relates to AI. The ability to do migrations quicker, to get more personas, to basically get deeper within these accounts and to really show them what can happen. I don't view from now to next year, giving a forecast in these markets is just absolutely crazy, so we're trying to execute every single quarter. But I think you'll see more of the same. We're developing a lot of AI products and features really with the goal of driving consumption and for getting people to put more data within Snowflake.
That is really the goal of the company in this AI era that we are in.
Well, Brian, really appreciate you coming to the Citi conference. Thanks everyone for packing the room. It is a great discussion.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks so much.