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Snowflake S-1

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Re: Snowflake S-1

#41

Post by dataminded »

veritas3241 wrote: post #10

Snowflake 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…

I can't believe that they will succeed in the long run as an independent player IN the cloud.

They are always going to be less integrated and less infrastructure-cost-efficient than the native options (Redshift and BigQuery), without the R&D budgets and with incremental friction (sales) and risk (data privacy and cybersecurity).

AWS really should get around to buying them, like they should have bought Looker or Tableau or Mode or Fivetran or DBT, etc, ect.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#42

Post by actualanswer »

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, 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?

How is this different from any enterprise sales growth company? Not a surprise

Re: Snowflake S-1

#43

Post by manigandham »

dataminded wrote: post #41
veritas3241 wrote: post #10

Snowflake 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…

I can't believe that they will succeed in the long run as an independent player IN the cloud. They are always going to be less integrated and less infrastructure-cost-efficient than the native options (Redshift and BigQuery), without the R&D budgets and with incremental friction (sales) and risk (data privacy and cybersecurity). AWS really should get around to buying them, like they should have bought Looker or Table…

For them to be an attractive acquisition target means they are succeeding, otherwise what would a cloud vendor gain from buying them?

Re: Snowflake S-1

#44

Post by mabbo »

Maybe I'm not really wise to the world of finance and what-have-you, but how many S-1s do I need to see in short succession before I start to ask: "What's going on, guys?"

Like, is this a indication that a lot of people are trying to exchange their companies for hard cash as quickly as possible? It kind of looks a lot like that. This is what, the 3rd or 4th one to hit the HN front-page lately?

Is... is that a bad sign?

Re: Snowflake S-1

#45

Post by saas_sam »

supernova87a wrote: post #16

Wow, 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?

You pay a lot to acquire customers up front but as long as your churn is net negative (ie., customers end up spending more year over year) you end up coming out way ahead. Sales reps only get paid on a contract one time, based on the value of that initial subscription revenue. $0 commission when it renews next year, and the year after, and the year after...

(Small caveat that someone probably gets commission on follow-on expansion revenue, but not that initial subscription amount.)

Re: Snowflake S-1

#46

Post by outworlder »

mabbo wrote: post #44

Maybe I'm not really wise to the world of finance and what-have-you, but how many S-1s do I need to see in short succession before I start to ask: "What's going on, guys?" Like, is this a indication that a lot of people are trying to exchange their companies for hard cash as quickly as possible? It kind of looks a lot like that. This is what, the 3rd or 4th one to hit the HN front-page lately? Is... is that a bad sig…

5 from companies in the Bay Area alone. There were more.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#47

Post by foghornleghorn »

grey-area wrote: post #38
TallGuyShort wrote: post #31

5 S-1 filings on the front page right now, mostly from tech companies I've heard of. Why the sudden spike?

We're near the top of a huge an unprecedented bubble in tech stocks. Top 5 stocks are tech and are 23% of the S&P 500, all time highs in the middle of a pandemic with the global economy stuttering. That's a greater concentration than the year 2000. So it's a good time to IPO for tech stocks.

And you think that percentage will get lower? Please. Tech will only get larger in the long run.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#48

Post by dang »

mabbo wrote: post #44

Maybe I'm not really wise to the world of finance and what-have-you, but how many S-1s do I need to see in short succession before I start to ask: "What's going on, guys?" Like, is this a indication that a lot of people are trying to exchange their companies for hard cash as quickly as possible? It kind of looks a lot like that. This is what, the 3rd or 4th one to hit the HN front-page lately? Is... is that a bad sig…

When one post is on HN's front page it's common for there to be a rush of follow-up posts. Usually we downweight these since there's a power-law dropoff in how interesting they are. Some of the moderation principles relating to this:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I'm wondering which of these S-1s are particularly interesting to discuss in their own right, vs. which are just follow-up/copycat-style threads? Unity is getting a specific discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261559) but the other ones seem pretty generic. Oh yeah, that's another relevant principle: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Re: Snowflake S-1

#49

Post by Xavdidtheshadow »

veritas3241 wrote: post #39
mobileexpert wrote: post #29

Dumb 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.

I had the exact same question. Pg 127 seems to give the answer. > Date Available for Sale in the Public : The 91st day after the date of this prospectus (First Release). Edit: Seems like I was wrong. This is for current shareholders. I saw somewhere on the internet sometime in October. That's a wild guess though.

Assuming "Date of this prospectus" is today (Aug 24), then 91 days from now is Monday November 23, 2020.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#50

Post by panarky »

chrisjc wrote: post #4
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #3

Now I know why our teams internally have been hammered by sales at Snowflake for the past 4 months. Like, relentless, to the point where I doubt we'd entertain their solution even if we had a need. Sorta like Datadog..

What are you using atm? After dealing with Redshift for a few years, Snowflake was and continues to be a breath of fresh air.

In your experience, what does Snowflake to better than Redshift?
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