
Snowflake Computing raises $263M for its data warehouse - jonbaer
https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/25/snowflake-computing-lands-whopping-263-million-for-its-data-warehouse/
======
chatmasta
> this latest round brings Snowflake’s total funding to $473 million

Absurd. When I see deals this large, especially in enterprise software, it
raises alarm bells. It seems likely there are at least a few “quid pro quos”
involved here. When your customers and investors overlap and run in the same
circles, it’s hard to avoid the nepotism inherent in that world. The board
members, investors, and customers are probably all executives at the same
50-100 companies. They have the power to purchase the product (demonstrating
growth), invest in the product (demonstrating increasing valuation), and then
acquire the product at a multiple of what they invested in it for.

I also wonder how much the founders are controlling, or if this is a case like
Box where the founder owns <10% and the rest of the huge valuation is spread
across dozens of different investors.

~~~
shaqbert
Actually, it is quite the opposite. Once an enterprise software company has
crossed the $40m revenue threshold, has low churn, and growth is >2x, you got
yourselves a winner.

Now Snowflake has grown 3x over consecutive years, and with all these big
enterprises coming in, there has gotta be a true advantage.

Now the question is if this current advantage can survive an upgrade of say
e.g. the capabilities of Amazon Redshift, that moves the latter to almost
feature parity.

------
tuna-piano
The question for me is, does Amazon buy Snowflake or beat Snowflake?

Snowflake is built on AWS, you can be sure Amazon has been watching them for
years.

I’ll put my money that by 2020 AWS will have a strong Snowflake competitor.
Honestly, Athena/Redshift Spectrum are getting somewhat close.

~~~
adventured
I'm astounded these days when I pull up an overview list of all of the AWS
products. They currently list 142 products (several should be excluded). It
seems like that has tripled in maybe four years. One of the nice things about
AWS trying to do everything, it's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of
things at a mediocre level. As they aggressively expand that product list, the
number of things they suck at will increase.

~~~
onion2k
_it 's guaranteed they're going to do a lot of things at a mediocre level_

Why?

If it was a smaller company then spreading resources out across more and more
products could result in a drop in quality, but this is Amazon. They have
practically unlimited resources. They can afford to put far more in to
products than other companies, and they've already got a team who can build
some really good stuff. If they can capture what works and use it to
understand how to build their products that should result in _better_ products
rather than worse.

~~~
adwf
By that logic, all big companies must be the best because they have huge
resources.

Scale means you can throw lots of people at something, it doesn't mean you can
make it good.

Bureaucracy, internal politics, budget/cost cutting, unpleasant work
environment, short-term stock price targets instead of long-term goal based
targets... There are a million and one reasons why big companies start to
suck.

------
Pyxl101
I hadn't heard of this company so I looked on their website for more
information about what they do. I came across this demo video that's a bit
under 5 minutes that was pretty helpful:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUL8GO4ZK9s&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUL8GO4ZK9s&feature=youtu.be)

~~~
jmngomes
Here's a helpful link to understand their success:
[https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-
dce9f4c529c1](https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-dce9f4c529c1)

Essentially, their product is (at least) on par with major competitors like
Google and AWS, no small feat for a young company.

------
sol_remmy
Amazon Redshift has some architectural problems in an enterprise environment
that Snowflake solves. Redshift does not scale up well - everything has to fit
on one cluster and eventually you hit limits.

When a Redshift cluster gets too big: 1\. Takes forever to take backups,
create read-replicas, modify anything 2\. Redshift clusters can still only
handle X concurrent queries, no matter how big the cluster is 3\. Also
Redshift is dragging their feet on adding new features i.e. Active Directory
support.

Snowflake clusters allow a theoretically unlimited amount of users to query
the same tables in a database - so it scales up forever.

And each team can create their own "compute cluster" which allows teams to
track and divide costs much more easily then trying to associate this-batch-
user on Redshift with this-team/line-of-business.

Snowflake is well-designed for an enterprise environment where line-of-
businesses need to share/access each others data but still have separate
infrastructure. Redshift does not make it easy go between Redshift clusters.

Also Snowflake as a company is still hungry and is willing to add features if
you pay enough

EDIT: However Snowflake is more expensive than Redshift

EDIT: Splitting data between two Redshift clusters was not efficient for us
and trying to have the same table in multiple Redshift clusters requires you
creating your own tooling and the data might not stay in sync so the only real
option was keeping everything in one massive cluster

~~~
georgewfraser
What makes you think snowflake is more expensive? When I have tested it, it
has given higher performance / $. Have you seen different results with your
workload?

~~~
sol_remmy
If I remember correctly, Redshift became more cost-effective over Snowflake
the larger your compute got.

Snowflake would just run an EC2 instance in the background for compute, and
the very largest EC2 instances were more expensive to run than a Redshift
cluster of similar power.

~~~
georgewfraser
Snowflake is most definitely running multiple instances for anything but the
smallest clusters. It's plausible that one warehouse might scale better as you
increase the number of nodes but I would really be surprised if there was a
big difference---the techniques for query execution are pretty well-known, so
Redshift and Snowflake are probably doing the same things. I did a benchmark I
while ago [1] and I'm definitely planning on adding multiple scales to
evaluate how they compare as you increase data size.

[1] [https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-
dce9f4c529c1](https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-dce9f4c529c1)

------
cup-of-tea
Why would they call this Snowflake? What an awful name.

~~~
bsg75
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_schema](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_schema)

~~~
cup-of-tea
Thank you for the answer. I'd never heard of it. It struck me as odd given
that a snowflake is delicate and ephemeral which is exactly what you don't
want for this kind of technology.

~~~
jmngomes
I agree with your previous post, even though the product's name is eventually
related to a concept on the same field (snowflake data models) it doesn't seem
like a very good choice of branding. I work for one of their customers and
only now do I see their website on Google's top results; namely because they
also don't have a .com for the brand name.

Even though this is less relevant in a B2B context, because research is
usually more thorough, it's still a warning sign in terms of branding when you
have a different brand that could be confused with yours:
[https://snowflakesoftware.com/about/](https://snowflakesoftware.com/about/)
(as posted by another user, strangely downvoted)

Also, snowflake data models are actually not very common (or
appropriate/useful) in data warehouse/mart environments, as they tend to be
harder to understand and use on a self-service approach, and require more
joins between datasets/tables, unlike dimensional models.

------
speg
Not to be confused with
[https://snowflakesoftware.com](https://snowflakesoftware.com)

