MIKE BLANDINA
THE TECHNOLOGY INTERVIEW
ike Blandina has seen enough technology cycles to know when something fundamental is shifting. After five years running payments technology at JP Morgan, he could have coasted into retirement. Instead, he’ s at Snowflake Summit 25 explaining why IT departments need to stop thinking like help desks and start thinking like engineers.
“ I’ ve probably spent more than the last 30 years in financial services, technology and product,” he said. PayPal, Google, Blackhawk Network: if you’ ve moved money electronically in the past two decades, you’ ve likely used something he helped build.“ Basically, moving money electronically – that’ s what I’ ve done.”
The retirement question came up after he left JP Morgan.“ My wife and I were candidly asking ourselves,‘ Should we retire?’ And then she said,‘ I’ m just not sure our marriage will survive that right now!’”
So here he is at Snowflake, drawn by something that takes him back to the beginning.
The data philosophy that universities forgot to teach Mike cut his teeth on data in the 1980s, when E. F. Codd and C. J. Date were writing the rules for relational databases. Back then, British consultant James Martin preached a simple gospel: get your data right first, then build your applications.
“ There was this mindset of‘ get your data right, then build your software,’” Mike recalls.“ That sort of got lost in the universities starting in the late‘ 80s and certainly through the‘ 90s and 2000s. It just really wasn’ t taught anymore.”
Universities stopped teaching data modelling and engineers stopped thinking about structure.“ It became‘ let’ s write code and then we’ ll figure out what to do with the data.’”
The result? Data chaos.“ I think that led to an explosion of data lakes and data warehouses and SQL and NoSQL databases – just data everywhere.”
Now companies spend millions cleaning up the mess.“ Frankly, I think this has helped create an entire industry with Snowflake and others about getting that right again.”
MIKE BLANDINA
TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER
COMPANY: SNOWFLAKE INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: FLORIDA, US
Snowflake CIO Mike previously served as CEO at Bakkt, VP Engineering at PayPal and Engineering Director at Google. He founded two acquired startups and served four years in the US Army.
26 September 2025