Wow the styling of that legal document is just gorgeous!
Snowflake S-1
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Snowflake S-1
#22We're hitting some perf issues with Snowflake at work (not necessarily due to Snowflake itself but possibly more what we're trying to do with it: data warehouse storage needs but also a need for close to real-time analytical querying over that data). Has anyone here had any good/bad experiences with MemSQL?
Re: Snowflake S-1
#23Wow, Sales + Marketing pretty much 1.5x their revenue ($265M), swinging them from +50% operating margins to -150-200% net margins. They are really trying to cram this product down people's throats, huh?
It's absurd. How can you trust any of their "growth" numbers? For all we know, they are paying people $10 to give them $8 in revenue.
I was thinking the same thing. It seems so absurd that I fear I probably do not know how to read these financial statements correctly.
Re: Snowflake S-1
#24What is the difference between a "Data Warehouse", a "Data Lake" and a plain old managed SQL Server instance I run on Azure?
data lake is where all your messy historical timestamped immutable data goes so its not lost. data warehouse is where you make sense of it. and your old sql server is just the current snapshot.
Re: Snowflake S-1
#25Snowflake is the go to data warehouse in my opinion. Redshift and BigQuery are fine, but Snowflake is head and shoulders above. Good community around it and tools for it (dbt - works on other warehouse though). They have the mindshare in the data warehouse market. There's so much they can do from a user experience perspective to make it even better. The integration with Numeracy was a trainwreck, but the fundamentals…
One of the barriers for Snowflake is that while it's better than what AWS offers, very few customers start out needing everything Snowflake does. They grow into that. So they stick with AWS, hoping that the features/capabilities there grow fast enough to keep up.
Re: Snowflake S-1
#26What is the difference between a "Data Warehouse", a "Data Lake" and a plain old managed SQL Server instance I run on Azure?
My impression? Data warehouses are more fully featured than a data lake, whereas a data lake implies primarily the storage, with other systems querying it. Sql server is orthogonal in that you need neither if all your data fits in a single sql database (or alternatively, sql server is a small scale data warehouse).
Re: Snowflake S-1
#27What is the difference between a "Data Warehouse", a "Data Lake" and a plain old managed SQL Server instance I run on Azure?
Mostly how much data there is, and how structured it is. Not really sure what the difference between data lake and warehouse is, but either of them will typically have less structured data and more of it than an SQL server. We're talking petabyte-scale. Sure, you can get 16TB drives, but it's still a stretch to put it all on a single machine. Data should ideally be stored as parquet or similar, but there's probably a lot of JSON out there. Couple it with something like Athena, and you can query in SQL. Spark for more complicated stuff.
Re: Snowflake S-1
#28> "Our net loss was $178.0 million and $348.5 million for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively"
Is that supposed to sound attractive to institutional investors?
Re: Snowflake S-1
#29Dumb question, given the filing today what is the earliest date it will be listed on the NYSE? Google time between S-1 and IPO gives a bunch of wishy washy answers.
Re: Snowflake S-1
#30They doubled revenue over the last year and expanded gross margin by 25% ... seems good. Looks like most of the incremental loss comes from expanded marketing costs - but their net revenue retention rate is between 150% and 200%, which is extremely strong. Unfortunately no reported cohort metrics.