Benoit Dageville had just finished conducting a seven-piece orchestra when he walked on stage at Snowflake Summit 2025 to deliver a message that would have surprised his younger self: stop building so much software.

After 12 years creating cloud data infrastructure that has transformed how companies store information, Snowflake’ s co-founder now believes the secret to the platform’ s future lies in what other people will build on top of it.

“ My dream is that the platform becomes really extensible to run applications,” says Benoit.“ At the end of the day, most of what you’ re going to do on Snowflake will not be developed by Snowflake.”

From Oracle frustrations to cloud-native architecture The strategy stems from lessons Benoit and co-founder Thierry Cruanes learned at Oracle, where they witnessed two shifts that would reshape data management. First, data was expanding beyond neat

102 August 2025