In this episode, Stefan Williams, Head of Corporate Development and Snowflake Ventures at Snowflake, shares the ins and outs of Snowflake Ventures and a guide to managing an investment portfolio. Then Uri May, Co-Founder and CEO of Hunters, talks about what it’s like having Snowflake Ventures as an investor, how their product works hand in hand with Snowflake, and much more.
In this episode, Stefan Williams, Head of Corporate Development and Snowflake Ventures at Snowflake, shares the ins and outs of Snowflake Ventures and a guide to managing an investment portfolio. Then Uri May, Co-Founder and CEO of Hunters, talks about what it’s like having Snowflake Ventures as an investor, how their product works hand in hand with Snowflake, and much more.
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Steve: [00:00:00] Welcome Stephan and Ori. It's great to have you here. And I, you know, we very seldom have two people on, so it's kind of fun and different. I think it would be great if you would, you'd both begin by explaining a little bit about who you are and what your role is in the company.
So Stephan, would you start.
Stefan: Great. Yeah. Hi Stephen. Thanks for having us on the podcast. Um, so yeah, my name's Stephen Williams. I run the corporate development team here at snowflake, which includes both, um, M and a and snowflake ventures. I've been at the company now for coming up two years, and I have a background in corporate development and ventures at service now and Genesis, uh, and prior kind of in technology, investment banking.
Um, My role and responsibility is really thinking through how to, um, how to think through acquisitions. Like to what extent can we accelerate and augment our existing efforts through, through acquiring teams and [00:01:00] technology. Um, and then also through the lens of snowflake benches, where I'm sure we'll get into it in a bit, Steve, on how we can think through investing in businesses to, um, augment our ecosystem and drive value for.
Steve: Alright. Alright, great answer. So Ori, what's your background?
Uri: Yeah, thanks. So my name is Zoe may I'm co-founder and CEO of hunters, cyber security startup out of Televisa. Um, and we've been walking for snowflake basically from day one in the beginning. We walk with them. As, um, as a security vendor or helping the security team.
And, um, then we started building the partnership and that led to the investment and we're going to talk all about it, but I'm super excited to be here and thank you for
Steve: having.
So snowflake has spent nearly a decade establishing the data cloud as a major strategic [00:02:00] platform for any business seeking to be. Data-driven. Now through snowflake ventures, you're supporting an ecosystem of companies that help customers better manage and analyze data. So Stephan, I want, I want talk to you in depth here.
Why did the company initially set up snowflake ventures?
Stefan: Yeah. Great. Great question, Steve. So, um, snowflake ventures was really set up to incentivize our partners to strategically align with snowflake in a way that it goes above and beyond a regular pond ship. I know that to better serve and our joint customers and, and hopefully prospective customers.
Um, and this can take many forms, but, but in general to kind of resonate with me at least. One is this concept of being powered by snowflake, but planters all leveraging snowflake as a key component of their backend infrastructure. Um, and the other is just around a, a [00:03:00] better integrated experience or more computational push down to, to, to snowflake and keeping data where it resides within, within the data cloud platform.
And so, um, we've set up this, this program internally to do again. Put some wind behind the sails upon us that are really leaning into the data cloud, uh, and invest in their business to really go and help them achieve, achieve some of those goals.
Um, and again, very, very aligned to the strategic side of the house where we're trying to. Help our partners drive mutual value for our customers.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I know that a lot of tech companies, you know, established tech companies have venture programs. Um, you know, it seems to me that. [00:04:00] Snowflake started earlier or, you know, I mean, usually you think of like big well-established companies doing it. So I I'd like to get a sense of like, you know, why did, why did snowflake do this now?
And is there anything different about the way you're approaching it than, than typical? Or did you model it on some other big corporate venture program?
Stefan: Yeah. Um, so slightly, like we're, we're a platform and I think that that. My very first started kind of the thought process of, of, of, of a venture platform or playbook.
Um, we did speak to a bunch of the corporate VC arms in NFI enterprise software and, and really there's, there's a spectrum as to how kind of corporate VCs can operate. You've got kind of some that act like more traditional VCs deploying large amount of capital and very ROI focused. And I guess companies or VCs that fit into that bucket of.
The likes of Intel capital and [00:05:00] 12 and even Salesforce ventures. Um, but on the other end of that spectrum, you've really got kind of companies, which is Westlake public fits, which really think about deploying, not really about the, the deployment and ROI aspect, although that is important, but the strategic relevance and the strategic component.
And so our philosophy. Is centered around making investments that are highly strategic in nature. You know, we, we don't have a dedicated fund, which, which some of the others do. We invest directly off of the company's balance sheet, um, as, and when it makes sense versus being kind of constrained by any fund, uh, size of optics there, um, And for some part investments and many of them, in fact, we've actually gone above and beyond just an investment in, and really formalized an agreement from a commercial perspective, whereby we're now tying into better product integrations and go to market alignment.
And some of those have actually been very fruitful and effective as well. Um, and so we, we see investing as a way to really. Augment and accelerate. And this economy that is being kind of [00:06:00] built on top of snowflake to really drive value and use cases to, to our customers that we otherwise wouldn't be able to go and achieve.
And so, um, it was, it was a key part of kind of getting us up and up and off the ground. When, when we thought about it, Yeah.
Steve: Now I have a sense that like a lot of other things that snowflake, this has gotten going really fast, even accelerated. How many investments have you made so far and what are the criteria you use for choosing your part?
Stefan: In true snowflake fashion. It definitely has been a bit of a rocket ship. Um, we've, uh, we don't, we don't publicly disclose the actual numbers, but I, you know, I think we've, we've done over a dozen investments now, uh, in the first year and we've deployed probably over a hundred million of capital in the first year of operation.
Um, and so, you know, I think asking me at the beginning, would we have got to where we've got in a year? I w I would have certainly said no, but I think that. The, the traction and the ecosystem that is, that is coming to be, that that is built around snowflake is [00:07:00] so fruitful that there are just so many opportunities to really lean in and drive those better outcomes for, for mutual customers.
Um, in terms of criteria, I think there's kind of a couple of things to, uh, layers, I guess, to think about the high level stuff. Some of the things I was alluding to earlier around the fact that in true corporate VC, um, we, we don't lead what we, we try not to lead rounds. We piggyback off an institutional round of capital.
Um, we, we kind of try to invest in the bracket of series a, through to pre IPO. Um, the seed stage investing. We try to leave as part of our startup competition that I'm happy to talk about in a bit and, uh, and deploy anything from one to 20 million. But I think, um, the, the other layer to that is really, we often get asked, you know, we've just signed a term sheet, um, would love snowflake venture to invest.
Are you interested? And we're just not set up to simply gonna deploy capital and make, [00:08:00] make these investments. We're not a VC. We're not trying to be a VC per se. It's really around thinking through what the strategic rationale is and as to why we should invest in, and it can't just be. Well, w we're upon it today that let you know that that's great and we've got a great partner program in place.
And if that's the case, then we'd love to kind of make that connection. But all of our investments go through this kind of internal, uh, investment committee process. And so there does need to be this good strategic, sorry, a good strategic rationale and reason to make an investment that does go above and beyond a regular plan.
And so these really relationships don't happen overnight. And I often say that if you are interested in snowflake ventures, uh, leaning in and being, being a place upon or potential investor, then let's have that conversation sooner than later. Let's not wait until, uh, the round is imminent. Um, the, the, the other thing maybe just to touch upon Steve is that we are a platform where we've got to be very mindful of it.
And so we're not looking [00:09:00] to be kingmakers or overly pick winners in the space rather than. But we want to elevate the conversation, um, on how we can further align our products. So that joint customers stand to benefit. And this actually also means that we, you know, we don't invest exclusively. Um, we've made multiple investments in, in, in similar spaces.
Um, And as you can imagine, we'll make an investment in, in one company and often get one or two or three, come back to us and say, well, what, what, why then them not me. Right. Well, why, why have you picked them? Not me. Um, and, and if we have a solid rationale around that, that is grounded in. Uh, product level integration or experience that does go above and beyond this regular partnership concept, then we've elevated the bar.
And I always say to other companies that come to not come knocking is if you want to elevate the bar and really leaning into the data cloud and really drive value for mutual customers as well, let's have that conversation. And so an example of this is some of [00:10:00] our earlier investments with, within the ML space with data robot and data.
Right. Um, so now that kind of, I guess, interesting data point as to how we think about. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. You talk about the data cloud. People talk about the modern data stack, which I think are pretty much the same things. Um, you know, still relatively immature. When you think about big long trends in computing, are there areas, uh, within.
The data cloud or the modern data stack where you think there, there needs to be some, you know, some maturing, some hardening or some new features that are really going to make this thing much more powerful, whether it be for small companies or large wins, and is part of what you're doing with, with snowflake ventures, kind of helping to fill in those, those gaps or strengthen those areas where there might be weaknesses or immaturities today.
Stefan: Yeah, that's a great, uh, great question. Um, [00:11:00] the way I look at it is, is that snowflake is the data infrastructure layer. We know what we're good at, and we built a world-class data platform, but we don't have the domain knowledge to go and solve a certain use cases and lines of business. And so whether that be kind of a horizontal application, um, an example, again, it insecurity right?
There's 30 spaces. We don't know how to sell to the security analyst or the CSO or the CRO or the CFO, is that the different functional leaders that we, we just don't know how to sell to. And also, if you think about that on the vertical kind of guardrails as well with, with whether it be in supply chain or manufacturing or retail or healthcare, and so.
What we've we've we, we have an ecosystem that, that can stand on the shoulders of snowflake in, in, in what we built for the data cloud, um, such that they're able to really drive [00:12:00] applications and use cases and drive the value of data to the front lines and the people that are making decisions. And so, you know, it's hopefully benches.
We're always looking to play. Um, and help extend the tentacles of snowflake into these lines of businesses or new data personas that we otherwise would not be able to get. Um, and, uh, you know, the potluck ponders are a great way to enable our customers to truly embark on, on an enterprise wide data-driven strategy that that really kind of gets to all, all levels of the business.
Um, it's our investment strategy is really trying to proliferate that.
Steve: Yeah, I understand how a platform works like that. And I think, you know, one of the great strengths of snowflake was it, it was a platform from the very beginning and saw itself that way and created itself that way. The, but I, I just want to probe a little bit further on this area.
I mean, what about some of these new capabilities that need to [00:13:00] the need to come along to really fulfill the long-term vision of the data cloud? Are, are some of those things that, that you're investing in through snowflake ventures?
Stefan: Yeah, definitely. Um, you know, if you take, if you take kind of a data science workload, um, when.
And snowflake continuously is innovating and enabling more and more of those workloads to reside in snowflake and not having to have our customers create copies of data to go and fulfill the data science, uh, objectives. And so then we have invested in, they're gonna refer to that data, right? KU and data robot that that really is enabling and incentivizing them to, to, to, to not.
Create silos within joint customers, but to lean on the infrastructure that snowflake is providing a, to, to increasingly have those workloads reside within snowflake. So, um, definitely see that as a, as a, as a path for us.
Steve: Yeah. You mentioned those, those two companies, you know, I I've noticed that a number of the [00:14:00] startups you've invested in have analytics applications for, you know, maybe specifically for data scientist or other types of data users, really powerful apps.
How do you see the analytics market developing and how is snowflake helping it?
Stefan: Yeah. I mean, so I would say I'll give you my best spin at it. Steve. I'm sure a product manager would do a better job paper. I think, you know, technology advancements have changed the way that companies are thinking about data.
Uh, you've got data teams now with data analysts, data engineers, data scientists are trying to think mostly work together to push insights, to decision makers, um, and through, you know, offerings like snow park, which is a really exciting new feature in snowflake. But trying to extend data programmability to the language of choice for some of these providers, uh, what way you're able to do a lot of the functions now without having to extract or make copies of your data.[00:15:00]
And so you recently come out with, oh, you've seen some, some announcements at our last summit around Java and scholar. And these are just some really exciting new ways to kind of drive value, uh, for, for, for, for workplace operating within snowflake.
Um, and as a browser, sorry, as a result, you have. Data silos being centralized more and more into, into, into snowflake presses, that data platform. And this is only being proliferates and helped by the powered by snowflake applications and community that that are now aligning and driving the value to different lines of business.
Um, the other thing I would say is that,
Steve: well, actually, before we leave that, I just want to make sure, you know, we have a, a range of people listened to the podcast, some technical, some more business. Now explain the snow park thing a little bit more. I mean, basically before a data scientists would actually.[00:16:00]
Pull the data, even out of snowflake operated on their, on their desktop or their laptop or whatever, and then put it back in, but now they don't have to go through that kind of exercise anymore. Correct.
Stefan: Exactly. And so by, by, by enabling data scientists to pull data out of snowflake and kind of doing the whole, uh, build deploy model, maintain, uh, kind of the whole ML pipeline outside of sniffing.
You're creating a copy of data. That has to be governed and, and, and, uh, needs to hear with certain compliance rules and regulations. And as you scale, and as you have more and more data scientists doing that, that's a very hard problem to manage. Right. And so snow Park's really enabling. Persona the data scientists and the data and the ML engineer to really operate within the parameters of snowflake in the language that they used to developing in pockets.
, where they're able to do a lot of the machine learning work, but now within snowflake, without having to create a copy of that data. Um, but they're also. At hearing and have better programs now to, to manage the compliance needs and they're doing it without compromising the scale of performance.
So it's, it's a really a win-win for, for customers, which is ultimately why we've kind of pushing the programmability side of, of slope park.
Steve: Good. It, thanks for explaining that. Now, do you remember where you were going before? I had interrupted
Stefan: you? Yeah, there's a couple of that. I think additional points just as it relates to the trends may be.
Yeah. The other thing I think is interesting is data itself is becoming an asset. And I think companies and partners are starting to think about new incremental revenue streams that that data can generate. And what's really cool with, with snowflake and the data marketplace and the ability to share and collaborate with data seamlessly from within smoke flake, [00:18:00] it's opening up just.
Endless opportunities for customers and partners to think about potentially new revenue streams. Um, we actually just did an announcement in a few weeks ago in a company called Abu, uh, in the ad tech space and advertising space and it's around data, clean them. Um, and it's all empowered within the, within the kind of falls of snowflake where two customers can now collaborate on data in a way that they would not have been able to before, where they're able to retain the analytical integrity.
Um, and kind of their specific privacy needs around the data, but also kind of collaborate and share on, on data and get analytical value from that, uh, by using the haboob kind of powered by snowflake application, some really interesting use cases around, around data and data as an asset that we see as is particularly interesting.
And then I guess the last point I'll mention is just. That the extensibility, whether [00:19:00] data be structured semi-structured or unstructured. Now with the latest developments we have around unstructured data, whether whether that data is generated via batch or continuously stream from devices, whether it's rural, uh, refined cleanse, or even deduped I think about at snowflake is really to provide our customers and partners with this single plant.
It simplifies the process of storing and extracting value from data across the entire data estate, again, without compromising this governance or performance. And if we can, we believe we've kind of got to a place where, where this is a reality, and we're super excited about what we see our customers and partners.
Steve: Yeah, that's really good. Now up at the top, I, I push you to talk about money and about the investment ankle on this, but I know that snowflake helps companies that are in its investment portfolio in a lot of other ways. So if you could go into detail on that, that would be great.
Stefan: I think, [00:20:00] you know, at a high level there there's, there's, every investment is different, but at a high level, there is access to executives, uh, and product teams. And there's a dialogue that can happen. Um, there's, there's go to market alignment and connection with certain customers and partners within the snowflake community.
And ultimately, I think it provides credibility within the community itself. So those are the things I think you probably end up having conversations and having the right people to talk to, um, when, when there's kind of issues and, and, and topics to talk about the thing that I find most useful. And I hope that everybody would agree, but we have these kinds of, this concept of a quarterly business review, where we get on the phone every, every quarter we spend an hour together and we go through kind of the things that.
Going well, what are the success stories? What are the customer wins and how are we driving value for customers? And what are the, what are the stories that we can tell around that? Um, but also what's not working well, where could we improve ourselves? And, and so it really. Uh, collaborative effort and trying to, to [00:21:00] drive value for customers that we can then proliferate to, to more customers.
Right? So furthermore customers are able to get to get the value from, from the platform. So, um, uh, I wouldn't say there's kind of a hard and fast. You get these things, ABC and D it's more of a collaboration, uh, and, and exposure to, to the right people to have the right conversations to the right.
Steve: Yeah, it's interesting to think about because you know, you have your black diamond group, you know, your customer's giving you all that very intensive, deep feedback.
Often often it's as a group of people, but sometimes it's individual companies, but here from your portfolio companies, you're getting some really deep probably, um, technology feedback, but also some knowledge of domains of, of markets and things like that. So I could see how that would be a really valuable thing for both the companies going in both
Stefan: directions.
Push us in all the right directions and they continuously pushing us to innovate and moving faster. [00:22:00] So it's a definitely a bi-directional.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Now we've been, we've been talking mostly here. I think about some of the larger investments you've made, you said anywhere from a million to 20 million, but you did mention earlier, you know, you cast a really wide net, uh, in part through, uh, running the snowflake startup challenge.
Talk about that seed money, you know, that program, the kind of money it's in it and the kind of relationships should developing.
Stefan: Yeah. Um, so it's called the snowflake startup challenge. Um, it's currently in year two, but it's just, it's a, it's a startup, it's a challenge or a competition for startups that are very early in the journey and looking for a seed stage funding event.
And it's really around companies that are leveraging snowflake as a core part of their data infrastructure. And so. Last year we announced, I think towards the end of the year, end of 2020. And we, we closed it, um, in, [00:23:00] in March or April. And had we, I think we had over 200 applications from over 50 different countries.
We had, it was such incredible traction. We got that down to a shortlist and then a bunch of semifinalists, which was, I think top 10. Um, and ultimately a top three that presented at our summit June summit user conference, um, in, in front of the thousands of people that were attending and we had a panel of judges.
I think largely the same as what we're having this year. co-founder, uh, Denise personal CMI. We had Carlson Bosch from Sequoia and, uh, Mike Speiser from sort of hill, um, do the judging and, and the winner had the opportunity to win $250,000, uh, from, uh, from a convertible note seating. Um, and so given the traction and the success that we kind of, so from that first year, we've kind of upped the ante.
And so this year we're going to be doing a million dollars of, uh, I guess, prize [00:24:00] money, uh, that really in the form of an investment. So that the not just the top one, it will be the top three finalists have the opportunity to win or to get an investment of up to a million dollars in total, uh, from snowflake ventures.
So that that competition was launched in October. The deadline is in March of next year. And hopefully if, uh, if COVID stays away, we'll, um, we'll all be in, in, uh, in person, in June at our user conference next year with, with, uh, with, uh, a judging panel, very similar to last year. And, and, uh, I'd be an exciting bunch of startups giving us that.
Steve: No. That's very exciting. It'll be so great to get back to normal or semblance of it. Anyway. Yeah. I, I know that, uh, I think it was overlay analytics was the winter last June and they got the 250,000 in cash. What was so impressive about that company and is technology, and does it kind of [00:25:00] exemplify your investment strategy?
How does it reflect.
Stefan: Yeah. Um, uh, overlay analytics was, um, a great winner. They, they kind of give you to give you some context. They kind of rethink financial reporting. So there, and the end application provides mid-market executives, a single view of their entire business while also providing it to. Um, oh, they are the underlying data models.
And it's, if you read the pages that the platform is designed to eliminate data silos by visually and securely, securely conveying a singular data narrative across the firm. For me, that resonates with, with exactly how, how we're operating. And again, they are extending the value of snowflake to, to, to areas of the business that we just are not selling to today.
And so there's perfect alignment from a partnership perspective. Um, they have a great team. They have a product that was in market at the time and continues to get [00:26:00] really good traction with proven customers that were happy. And so, um, it w we're super happy with, with the overlay team is super excited about where they're going as well.
Steve: Yeah, no. Our other guests on the podcast today is Ori may, who is the co-founder and CEO of hunters, and is one of the first independent analytics vendors to build this application on top of the snowflake platform very early on. And the hunters is also one of the companies that snowflake ventures has invested in.
Why did you invest in hunter?
Stefan: We love auntie's content. It has a great as always has been a great partner for a long time. Uh, and I'm not just saying that because they're resolved. Um, so to this point of just extending the persona, that's not like can adhere to, um, we don't sell to the security analyst and, and, and so by, by bringing content in there, we're able to.
To help sell a new workload, [00:27:00] uh, for a new user persona. That's ultimately driven by snowflake under the hood. I think what's really interesting with hunters that they have a couple of deployment models, which are really interesting to think through, um, for the snowflake customer, uh, or the joint customer that we have.
Hunters can sit on top of the customer's existing snowflake account and augment their existing data. So. Um, in this model, when I, when, when a customer uses hunters, the data, doesn't leave their snowflake account and they're consuming the ranch life like credits. And that's really interesting for a couple of reasons.
I think from the customer's perspective, they get to keep control of the data and there's a governance and compliance kind of benefit to that from the snowflakes perspective. It's really interesting because. Our reps are now wanting to bring in Qantas to, to our accounts so that they can drive additional consumption, um, which they benefit from directly being in the sales organization and for hunters and from Ella area speak to in a bit.
But [00:28:00] they benefit from the fact that we've now got go to market alignment and a bunch of our reps are trying to bring them into, into, into new accounts. So, um, you know, hunter. Very first investments and we're extremely happy as to how they progressed and grown as a business.
Steve: Now, I understand that snowflake is a Hunter's customer as well.
Could you describe kind of how snowflake uses the technology?
Stefan: Yeah, and to be honest, that's the way we actually are. I became aware of company at the beginning was that we were customer, um, they it's only for like security team. You just like, like as a way to get visibility across our infrastructure and applications.
Um, you know, this gives us a big boost to the people keeping our solution secure, but just having the data, uh, in a, in a snowflake security data lake and being able to analyze it quickly, it's not really enough in, in this world. And so what hunter Springs is, is the algorithms that connect the dots across huge datasets that we [00:29:00] have in snowflake.
So, for example, if I have an, you know, if there's an admin that gets a bad email and then, you know, they use it as something bad on a laptop and then something bad happens in another system, you know, how comfortable we'll catch it. And so they, they faked world-class human expertise into something that just works at machine speed and it doesn't get tied, uh, off the top of Christmas dinner.
And it's been a really valuable life. A snowflake as a, as one has helped keep us secure.
Steve: Yeah. Cool. So Ori you've shown great patients here listening to Stefan. Uh, but I want to talk to you now. It would be great if you would start by describing what your technology does and why it's such a breakthrough in cloud data security.
Uri: Thank you, Steve. And thank you, Stefan for the, for the kind of, and doing such a great job of reckless at the contest. How does the security operation center platform that is focused on helping analysts to detect, investigate, and respond to threatened? [00:30:00] One of the biggest, uh, um, unique capabilities that we bring into the table is our ability to take large amounts of data, form of very diverse set of data sets that are generated from security products, all over the environment and on unique behavior that analytics on top of.
And then correlate the signals that they're extracting to actually format and holistic on the presentation of the attacks that are happening in that environment in today's world. This is something that is very complicated to, it requires very deep understanding of the way our tacos operate and then the ability to model those techniques, tactics, and procedures that attackers are using into analytics that can Alliance.
And then learning those analytics on massive amounts of data, sometimes petabytes of data with a lot of [00:31:00] challenges around creating the signal from the noise. And so just do happen to wrap it up. I would say that one of the biggest things that we'll blame it. Um, Nick domain expertise. That is the leader customer's data, as I mentioned earlier, without any data limitation and with a very high signal to noise ratio, in terms of the level of the insights that we're able to generate.
Steve: So how did the relationship with snowflake begin and kind of, how has it developed since then?
Uri: So I think it's, um, it's a really good example of a, of a very healthy solution in terms of the partnership we started as, um, with snowflake security team, as a customer, they will want to for earliest customer and in the beginning of world, um, in the capacity of a desirable. In the walk with a security [00:32:00] team, we actually realized snowflake is an amazing platform.
And the work that we've done for this for snowflake security team is something that we can actually replicate and also to other security, to other snowflake customers. And that's what led to the partnership that was all about. Reaching out to our customer base and seeing if they're interested in a new way to analyze their data and to support the security operation center analyst.
Um, and I think that, I mean, the results were amazing and we saw that there is, um, really high demand for new ways to leverage, uh, security data, to improve the overall security posture of enterprises prices all over the world. They out of. Uh, customer base and that led us to be on the radar or stay fun.
And the new venture that the TN snow trips set up back in the days a year [00:33:00] ago, and that led to an investment from snowflake. So we went all the way from being just a customer, to being a customer, to also be a customer, an apartment apartment, and a portfolio company.
Steve: So, um, does the relationship include a lot of integration or coordination of the technologies so that they've worked together really well or seamlessly for the.
Uri: Yeah, absolutely. So the aggression between hunters and snowflake is very deep. Eh, we leverage normally capability for data sharing, and that is basically all about allowing customers to use hunters, to integrate into the different security products that they have ingest that data into their own snowflake.
And then to data sharing we're actually analyzing and reading. Eh, and security, telemetry data sets that we're analyzing and we're [00:34:00] able to provide those unique insights. What we call the fact stories, which are basically correlated the signals that are coming from all over the attack. It could be email or network or endpoint or cloud or SAS.
And, and all of that is, is, is being delivered. Like I said earlier, as, as. Uh, the cloud solution where snowflake is basically the data. And so the data is stored in snowflake, it's in the customer snowflake. So they have complete control and the house food or the full kill switch, and they own it. So no vendor log.
And then from our perspective, we get the chance to enjoy the scale and performance that the snowflake platform is also.
Steve: how has the relationship helped hunter succeed?
Uri: That's I think the biggest thing for any startup. Accelerating the go to market, um, our ability to build that partnership and then scale [00:35:00] it and use that to access snowflake. The vast customer base was amazing. And when we started talking about replacing legacy systems, it made it even more concrete.
And when, when you talk about replacing the same, which is such a mission critical system inside the security organization, Doing it in association with the snowflake brand. And I'm the into snowflake umbrella gave us a lot of very needed external validation and him, and that was super important for us.
And until now the integration itself was amazing also for the customers that we're able to enjoy massive total cost of ownership reduction in the same time, the ability to introduce data sets that until now will too big to even start thinking about analyzing before they met a solution. I can't doesn't snow.
Steve: No, that's great. Hey, [00:36:00] you know, I thought of something else. I think when I first talked to you a year ago, the name of the company was Hunter's AI, and now it's changed to hunters. Is there an interesting backstory behind the name change?
Uri: Not really. I think we felt that one of the, um, the immediate reaction that customers have to AI and security is a little bit like snake oil.
Um, and it's, it's small about the, how it's not about the, what. Um, and I think that we'll, we'll sing this then now in marketing, what a lot of those companies are coming off to the AI and talking about the essence and what they're actually doing.
No real concrete change, like the architecture or the technology or something like that.
Steve: Yeah. So, I mean, the AI is an ingredient. It's not the whole thing. It's like the magic of the congrats. Oh, that makes total sense. Yeah. And we go in these, we go in these hype cycles and sometimes. Yeah, that was certain point in the hype cycle.
The hype seems too much. [00:37:00] Right. And then it starts to lose its luster. Yeah. That's
Uri: interesting.
Steve: Oh, wow. We're still at the beginning of it though. Right? So. Anyway. Hey, well, thank you for answering those questions. I want to go back to Stephan real quickly before we wrap up, you know, uh, stuff. And I, I noticed that, uh, so far snowflake has made very few outright acquisitions.
And do you expect that to pick up, um, you know, at some point or, or, or is it mainly going to be, you know, the, the ventures approach with, with, with small strategic investments or even medium-sized strategic investors? What's the potential for acquisitions.
Stefan: Yeah. So, um, w we're always on the lookout and evaluating different opportunities, um, on the MNA side to help think through how do we kind of augment and accelerate our existing efforts.
Um, so [00:38:00] while they may not be as many true acquisitions that you're seeing, I think there's still a lot of, a lot of thinking and a lot of work going on. Um, I think that we we're in the early innings, uh, only now just every year coming, coming through IPO process, but really at the early innings of all M and a journey.
Um, and so I, I, you know, it's, it's kind of a crawl, walk, run approach. You don't want to go and do something huge that you can't integrate and digest and prove value from and say, how do you, how do you kind of start crawling before you run? Um, and, and, and have. Dedicated teams and processes in place to actually make those acquisitions, um, successful and valuable for the company and our customers like w we're on a journey we're early on.
Um, I do, you know, I do think over time it becomes an increasing component of our business, but, uh, at this point we're still very much on the, um, tech and talent. Uh, how do we [00:39:00] accelerate the roadmap thinking?
Steve: Yeah, that makes a lot of spots. So w you know, when I, when I. The history of technology over the past, you know, a hundred years or so, you know, ecosystems have proven to be very powerful and durable, both for the participants in the ecosystems and also for their customers.
So it's really good to see another strong ecosystem really taking off. And so I think this has been a, a wonderful conversation about that. Um, And I thank you both for, for talking to us today and great insights for both of you. You know, I want to, yeah, I want to, uh, I want to close. This is the last episode of our season, our second season, but I want all of our listeners to stay tuned for a special bonus episode, early 20, 22.
I'll be catching up with snowflake CEO, Frank Slootman on his upcoming [00:40:00] leadership and business book, amp it up. And we know that that Frank. And he, he knows from which he speaks. So I'm really looking forward to that conversation. And I think a lot of people will be interested to see what he has to say about leadership.
So thank you all very much.
Stefan: Thanks Dave. Thank you, Steve. Thanks
Uri: for having me. Thank you.