Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli said it's foolish to pigeonhole new CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy as a technology when the business he ran at Google, the ad unit, had more employees than Snowflake has today.
Speaking at a JMP Securities conference, Scarpelli talked about last week's big news that Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman was stepping down and Ramaswamy was taking over. The transition news rattled Snowflake's market cap as shares tanked.
A week later, Scarpelli put some perspective on the CEO change. First, Scarpelli noted he has been through many CEO transitions before, and succession is part of being a chief executive. He noted that the board of Snowflake had been talking about succession for two years.
"When we acquired Neeva last May, I remember telling Frank, you've got to spend some time with Sridhar, and Frank quickly did. And we brought Sridhar onto our executive staff, and he quickly was running all of our AI and ML initiatives and the more time Frank, and the Board spent with him, we realized that he could be a successor to Frank," said Scarpelli, who just signed on for another three years as CFO. "If Sridhar were not the CEO here, I would just tell you, he'd be working at a very large company, maybe running all their AI Initiatives."
Scarpelli added that Ramaswamy scaled Google's ad business to $120 billion in revenue and had roughly 12,000 employees. Snowflake is just north of 7,000 employees. "A lot of people mistake that he's a technologist and doesn't have operational chops. He ran a very large team at Google," said Scarpelli, who noted later that Ramaswamy has a PhD in databases.
According to Scarpelli, Ramaswamy is going to be a good recruiter. "With where the company is and where it's going, you need to have someone with strong technical background to be able to run the company to help be able to attract good people as well too. He's very, very good at attracting the top technical talent," said Scarpelli.
Ramaswamy recently hired 5 core engineers from Microsoft, said Scarpelli, who quipped that he cringes as a CFO over the pay packages. "Some of these people you're talking $3 million, $4 million a year. A lot of that's equity," said Scarpelli.
With the extra talent, Snowflake is planning to speed up its path to product GA. "We need to shorten that time frame," he said. "I personally think the selection of Sridhar as the CEO is the right choice for what the company really needs."
