
Snowflake S-1 - kressaty
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1640147/000162828020013010/snowflakes-1.htm
======
veritas3241
Snowflake is _the_ go to data warehouse in my opinion. Redshift and BigQuery
are fine, but Snowflake is head and shoulders above. Good community around it
and tools for it (dbt - works on other warehouse though). They have the
mindshare in the data warehouse market.

There's so much they can do from a user experience perspective to make it even
better. The integration with Numeracy was a trainwreck, but the fundamentals
of the DB are there.

Interesting to see they lose so much money, but I bet their margins have to be
so thin running on the cloud. I wonder if they'll ever have to go bare metal
to make it work.

~~~
dataminded
I can't believe that they will succeed in the long run as an independent
player IN the cloud.

They are always going to be less integrated and less infrastructure-cost-
efficient than the native options (Redshift and BigQuery), without the R&D
budgets and with incremental friction (sales) and risk (data privacy and
cybersecurity).

AWS really should get around to buying them, like they should have bought
Looker or Tableau or Mode or Fivetran or DBT, etc, ect.

~~~
bpodgursky
Snowflake is wildly better than Redshift, no matter how you want to look at it
-- integrations, cost, performance, etc.

Like, in a sane world I agree with you -- Redshift SHOULD have a crazy
competitive advantage. But somehow they've been unable to execute on that goal
for half a decade, and I don't see that changing quickly, given Snowflake's
mindshare and growth.

~~~
dataminded
I agree with you.

Snowflake is better. Redshift has been really slow to execute. AWS is doing
the world's worst job of articulating whatever vision they have for analytics.
AWS's message is laser-focused on infrastructure folks and machine learning
engineers (not analyst, data scientist, not absolutely anything else).

The higher you go up the stack, the slower and less meaningful, AWS's
solutions feel. There is a fantastic job opportunity out there for someone to
reconcile AWS's data analytics offerings. They have so much upside.

I'm still not betting on Snowflake winning a direct competition with their
primary supplier. For the enterprise and the highly regulated: Redshift is
good enough, already there, and they don't NEED the efficiencies that
Snowflake makes available.

------
supernova87a
Wow, Sales + Marketing pretty much 1.5x their revenue ($265M), swinging them
from +50% operating margins to -150-200% net margins. They are really trying
to cram this product down people's throats, huh?

~~~
stefan_
It's absurd. How can you trust any of their "growth" numbers? For all we know,
they are paying people $10 to give them $8 in revenue.

~~~
noahmbarr
Or is it $8/year for several years? The question is what is Snowflake’s net-
churn rate.

------
knes
We at Census ([https://getcensus.com](https://getcensus.com)) are super
excited by this S1 filing. Before Snowflake (and Bigquery and Redshift), data
was seen as something only the fortune 500 could afford by buying Hadoop
clusters and throwing an army of scientists and engineers at it.

But Snowflake has really led the way to democratize Data Warehouse the past
few years and educating the market. You can start on a $50/month plan, and in
our experience, the pricing scale nicely with the value you are getting out of
the data. Snowflake (and Bigquery) also made it a lot less scary to get
started by having an easy way to ETL data from 3rd parties (google ads,
Salesforce, prod DB, etc.) to your warehouse.

Thank you, Snowflake, for paving the path for startups like Census, Fivetran,
DBT, Mode to help (data) engineers and analysts do more with their data

~~~
mint2
If I hear census, especially with a capital “C”, I don’t think a business or
startup. Are you in the US? Do a lot of people express confusion? How will you
trademark your name?

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ganoushoreilly
Now I know why our teams internally have been hammered by sales at Snowflake
for the past 4 months. Like, relentless, to the point where I doubt we'd
entertain their solution even if we had a need. Sorta like Datadog..

~~~
chrisjc
What are you using atm? After dealing with Redshift for a few years, Snowflake
was and continues to be a breath of fresh air.

~~~
jrott
Snowflake is pretty nice compared to redshift. Though I really wish there
copying data out of s3 worked better then it does.

~~~
ramraj07
They are actively working on those features from what I hear. Parquet export,
partition control, etc.

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iblaine
Snowflake is the best all around DW product out there. It commonly gets
compared to Redshift, but Amazon built Redshift on top of ParAccel's
technology. Snowflake built its database from scratch. Most of the Snowflake
founders have PhDs with an emphasis on distributed systems and I think you see
that in the product.

I can't say enough good things about snowflake, and I have plenty of criticism
to throw at hadoop, redshift, asterdata & vertica.

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mabbo
Maybe I'm not really wise to the world of finance and what-have-you, but how
many S-1s do I need to see in short succession before I start to ask: "What's
going on, guys?"

Like, is this a indication that a lot of people are trying to exchange their
companies for hard cash as quickly as possible? It kind of looks a lot like
that. This is what, the 3rd or 4th one to hit the HN front-page lately?

Is... is that a bad sign?

~~~
dang
When one post is on HN's front page it's common for there to be a rush of
follow-up posts. Usually we downweight these since there's a power-law dropoff
in how interesting they are. Some of the moderation principles relating to
this:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-
up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-
up%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:da...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=diffs%20by:dang&dateRange=all&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=diffs%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=can%27t%20predict%20from%20seq...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=can%27t%20predict%20from%20sequence%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment)

I'm wondering which of these S-1s are particularly interesting to discuss in
their own right, vs. which are just follow-up/copycat-style threads? Unity is
getting a specific discussion
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261559))
but the other ones seem pretty generic. Oh yeah, that's another relevant
principle:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment).

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TallGuyShort
5 S-1 filings on the front page right now, mostly from tech companies I've
heard of. Why the sudden spike?

~~~
grey-area
We're near the top of a huge an unprecedented bubble in tech stocks. Top 5
stocks are tech and are 23% of the S&P 500, all time highs in the middle of a
pandemic with the global economy stuttering. That's a greater concentration
than the year 2000. So it's a good time to IPO for tech stocks.

~~~
foghornleghorn
And you think that percentage will get lower? Please. Tech will only get
larger in the long run.

~~~
grey-area
A concentration of valuations in a few large companies is not a healthy sign.

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pupdogg
> "Our net loss was $178.0 million and $348.5 million for the fiscal years
> ended January 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively"

Is that supposed to sound attractive to institutional investors?

~~~
jschumacher
It's not supposed to sound attractive, but investors will largely care about
the YoY growth of 121% for Q2.

They spend a ton of money on Sales & Marketing (293,577k in the last fiscal
year). That's what's driving a lot of their growth I assume and it's a lever
they can pull back to increase profitability.

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corford
We're hitting some perf issues with Snowflake at work (not necessarily due to
Snowflake itself but possibly more what we're trying to do with it: data
warehouse storage needs but also a need for close to real-time analytical
querying over that data). Has anyone here had any good/bad experiences with
MemSQL?

~~~
AdamProut
This use case sounds like a good match for MemSQL at a high level (analytics
with an SLA is our bread and butter).

We'll also have a lot of elasticity features of snowflake shortly without
sacrificing our performance advantages. ([https://www.memsql.com/blog/the-
future-is-bottomless](https://www.memsql.com/blog/the-future-is-bottomless))

(disclosure: MemSQL CTO).

~~~
cater90
Will "bottomless" have the ability to spin up multiple compute clusters on a
centralized storage layer?

~~~
AdamProut
Yes

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flyinglizard
What is the difference between a "Data Warehouse", a "Data Lake" and a plain
old managed SQL Server instance I run on Azure?

~~~
manigandham
Data Warehouse is usually a relational database designed for large OLAP
analysis with features like column-oriented storage, vectorized processing,
and distributed scale-out architecture. Since it's a database, the focus is on
strong schemas and structured data, although all major systems also support
JSON datatypes now.

Data Lake is usually object storage or other large storage pool with raw
files. These can be different formats like JSON, AVRO, Parquet containing with
strong schemas or unstructured data. Processing can be done by engines like
Spark, Presto, Drill, etc that support less advanced SQL but more robust
access across data files and storage locations. The point is to serve as a
general dumping ground or "lake" of all the data and then manage it afterwards
(including cleaning and moving important records to a data warehouse).

SQL Server is a single-node OLTP relational database but most database engines
are fast enough now that you can do everything you need up to hundreds of
millions of rows. Best SQL and feature support with full update capabilities.
Some DBs like SQL Server have also added OLAP features like columnstore tables
to further delay or eliminate the need for a data warehouse.

~~~
sails
Great answer.

On Data Lakes: I often use an S3 data lake construct as a staging area for my
Snowflake data warehouse.

------
eganist
Snowflake's put in more effort around security than I've seen from other data
warehouses (that have offered me e.g. AWS SOC3s rather than their own
SOC2type2s).

Just my experience. Glad to see them reaching for cash. They're effective at
what they do.

------
alexbanks
Snowflake is by far the best data warehouse I have ever used. I would use it
at any job where data warehousing was a keystone of our work. Really 10/10,
not even close.

~~~
FridgeSeal
Out of curiousity, have you used ClickHouse?

Because I had the opposite experience - you literally couldn't pay me to use
Snowflake again.

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mobileexpert
Dumb question, given the filing today what is the earliest date it will be
listed on the NYSE? Google time between S-1 and IPO gives a bunch of wishy
washy answers.

~~~
veritas3241
I had the exact same question. Pg 127 seems to give the answer.

> Date Available for Sale in the Public : The 91st day after the date of this
> prospectus (First Release).

Edit: Seems like I was wrong. This is for current shareholders. I saw
somewhere on the internet sometime in October. That's a wild guess though.

~~~
mrgordon
No this section is about the rules on selling for current shareholders.

~~~
veritas3241
Ah good catch. I don't know then.

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publiccomps
I just wrote a S-1 teardown of Snowflake:
[https://blog.publiccomps.com/snowflake-s1-ipo-
teardown/](https://blog.publiccomps.com/snowflake-s1-ipo-teardown/)

Would love feedback! Included some helpful quotes from this thread too on why
Snowflake vs Redshift.

~~~
yrotsih
With all the hype over last few years, thought they had half a billion
revenue, instead a paltry $265MM in 2020(per their chart) and a loss of
$365MM. In comparison, teradata has $2B revenue in 2019(market cap < $3B).
Just another VC fueled. Wait for an year after IPO. The real value will be
clear.

~~~
yrotsih
Remember the heydays of cloudera, hortonworks, the big data hype cycle in the
recent past. It is instructive to see the current valuation of these high-
fliers once.(all these vendors sell to the very same end customers). Look at
the current valuation(I know cloud is the current hype thing, just like
bigdata was 5 years ago). Further, all the primary cloud players, google,
amazon, microsoft has their own cloud dbs.Very competitive market. it is one
thing the VCs and their friends pushing it to friendly data centers, market
will eventually reveal the "real value". Probably worth $4B or less in an
year(after the early and late VCs have cashed out)

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huac
They doubled revenue over the last year and expanded gross margin by 25% ...
seems good. Looks like most of the incremental loss comes from expanded
marketing costs - but their net revenue retention rate is between 150% and
200%, which is extremely strong. Unfortunately no reported cohort metrics.

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alex_young
Net loss last year: $348M

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swalsh
They're going to have to add a new section "daily S-1 filings" if this keeps
up, we can put it next to the show hn link.

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yrotsih
Isn't it unusual for the VCs to own close to 67%. Bankers made money! Not the
actual engineers who toiled away!

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staysaasy
Absolutely phenomenal product and company. I have a huge enterprise SaaS crush
on these folks. Very solid, thoughtful team as well in my experience.

Their massive marketing spend is interesting, I suspect that they perceive
themselves to be the first (or at least, strongest) mover in a once-in-a
generation land grab.

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Konohamaru
Wow the styling of that legal document is just gorgeous!

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yrotsih
Or the founders already cashed out...

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tooker
Go Jonathan!

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yrotsih
.

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whynotwhynot
Will they be contributing back to FoundationDB(FDB)? I ask this because they
had used FDB since 2014 to build the Snowflake metadata store, and they've
supposedly advanced FDB in the process, and I assume some of those advances
are generic and would benefit all FBD users. Now that they'll have the IPO
cash, I hope they will contribute back. For example, I know FDB maintainers
would love help with optimizing FDB for EKS and other managed K8s platforms on
major clouds. Congrats on the IPO! I might buy a few shares :-)

