At the end of 2019, I did something few senior leaders ever do: left my comfortable corporate job at a global, multi-billion dollar software organization to join a little known Series E analytics startup called ThoughtSpot.
Today, the world is moving faster than ever before. In an age where a single insight can be the difference between hitting your number and hitting a wall, it’s never been more important to have a finger on the pulse of your business. This means understanding everything that’s happening, as it’s happening, so you can take smarter actions for your business in the moment.
Much of my focus over the last couple of decades has been in analytics, big data, and AI, and Joe DosSantos and I discussed the progression of these fields over time in a recent Data Brilliant podcast episode. My subtitle for that episode might be, “The Promise and Perils of a Hot New Field,” as we addressed several aspects of how these popular concepts have evolved in the first fifth of the 21st century.
When we founded Snowflake, we set out to build an innovative platform. We had the opportunity to take into account what had worked well and what hadn’t in prior architectures and implementations. We saw how we could leverage the cloud to rethink the limits of what was possible.
Arjun (my son) sat next to me at my desk. He was a bit nervous but we had practiced 3 times before he was ‘on stage’ in front of hundreds of people and the zoom meeting turned to him. My ten year old began to demonstrate how to deploy an Operational Database in AWS, showcasing how auto-scaling worked and how to set up replication. All of the sales team and my colleagues were quite impressed with him, and I am very proud of him.
