DATA & DATA ANALYTICS
Oracle’ s systems could not handle this new reality. Hadoop – an opensource system designed to process vast amounts of unstructured data across clusters of commodity servers – was one alternative, but frustrated both founders.
“ I hated Hadoop: it was slow, it was complicated,” Benoit says. The excuse was always that complexity was inevitable given the data volumes“ We didn’ t believe that.”
In August 2012, they left Oracle and rented a small apartment in San Mateo. Benoit bought a whiteboard and for months the two engineers worked alone, trying to design a system that could separate data storage from compute power and make thousands of servers available instantly, then release them just as quickly.
Today, Snowflake can allocate 1,000 servers in less than one second.
The data sharing breakthrough came from their own frustration while preparing Series A presentations. They exchanged slides through email until Thierry discovered Google Docs.“ We looked at it and I said‘ Wow, this is amazing – sharing documents,’” Benoit says. They realised the same principle should apply to datasets. If the cloud could enable real-time document collaboration, why not petabytescale data sharing?
“ At the end of the day, most of what you’ re going to do on Snowflake will not be developed by Snowflake”
BENOIT DAGEVILLE CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF PRODUCTS, SNOWFLAKE
AI agents with built-in governance Jeff Hollan joined Snowflake three years ago after 15 years at Microsoft. Today, as Director of Product for AI agents and Cortex AI applications, he oversees the company’ s push into conversational data interfaces.
“ The biggest change, especially for developers, is the amount of output they’ re able to create is way higher with the use of AI,” Jeff says.“ What used to take me six or seven hours to build and code now takes me 30 minutes.”
Beyond the coding benefits, business users can now query enterprise data through natural language rather than learning SQL or waiting for analyst reports. This democratisation was always Snowflake’ s goal, but required AI to make it practical.
104 August 2025