Snowflake S-1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Snowflake S-1

#101

Post by yrotsih » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

yrotsih wrote: post #100

publiccomps wrote: post #99

I just wrote a S-1 teardown of Snowflake: https://blog.publiccomps.com/snowflake-s1-ipo-teardown/ Would love feedback! Included some helpful quotes from this thread too on why Snowflake vs Redshift.

With all the hype over last few years, thought they had half a billion revenue, instead a paltry $265MM in 2020(per their chart) and a loss of $365MM. In comparison, teradata has $2B revenue in 2019(market cap < $3B). Just another VC fueled. Wait for an year after IPO. The real value will be clear.

Remember the heydays of cloudera, hortonworks, the big data hype cycle in the recent past. It is instructive to see the current valuation of these high-fliers once.(all these vendors sell to the very same end customers). Look at the current valuation(I know cloud is the current hype thing, just like bigdata was 5 years ago). Further, all the primary cloud players, google, amazon, microsoft has their own cloud dbs.Very competitive market. it is one thing the VCs and their friends pushing it to friendly data centers, market will eventually reveal the "real value". Probably worth $4B or less in an year(after the early and late VCs have cashed out)

Re: Snowflake S-1

#102

Post by 1290cc » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

bpodgursky wrote: post #55

dataminded wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Snowflake is wildly better than Redshift, no matter how you want to look at it -- integrations, cost, performance, etc. Like, in a sane world I agree with you -- Redshift SHOULD have a crazy competitive advantage. But somehow they've been unable to execute on that goal for half a decade, and I don't see that changing quickly, given Snowflake's mindshare and growth.

Redshift is an onpremise piece of software that was converted into a cloud platform (acquired by AWS). Snowflake was built from day 1 as a cloud platform with awesome big data frameworks as its internal architecture. Its very hard for Redshift to rearchitect itself in the way Snowflake was designed from the start because they need to continue supporting existing instances and create an entirely new product.

Re: Snowflake S-1

#103

Post by suhel » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 11:43 PM UTC

deepGem wrote: post #91

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…

"Our business benefits from powerful network effects. The Data Cloud will continue to grow as organizations move their siloed data from cloud-based repositories and on-premises data centers to the Data Cloud. The more customers adopt our platform, the more data can be exchanged with other Snowflake customers, partners, and data providers, enhancing the value of our platform for all users. We believe this network effe…

This is one hypothetical way they could capture this value:

1) Building a common platform to upload datasets by anyone. e.g. weather data, retail data, govt data, other open data, or close data (copyright etc). They gave the example of COVID cases in their S-1 doc.

2) Providing mechanism for others to find data through a marketplace; some data is free, other only via payment (with diff monetisation models, e.g. per consumption, per month). Allow other customers to consume it as & when needed. Note, based on their S-1 doc, data is never copied when shared with others, so cost is limited to share with a wide audience.

3) More data on the platform, more data is shareable in the 'marketplace' and more data used by everyone. This increases the value of the whole platform through network effects.

4) Also opens up alternative revenue streams. e.g. more revenue through storage (more data on platform from different people). and revenue from shared data that is consumed (maybe)

Here is a company that is doing something similar in Australia. https://www.datarepublic.com/solutions/use-cases/data-collab...