Benoit Dageville bought a whiteboard from Amazon and put it in the living room of his apartment. His wife, he later joked to a New Zealand interviewer, was not happy about it. That whiteboard was the first office of Snowflake.
Dageville and Thierry Cruanes were French database engineers who had met at Oracle, the company whose warehouse software defined the market. In 2012 they quit to build something Oracle's design could not do. A third engineer joined them: Marcin Zukowski, who had moved to Amsterdam for the last year of his studies at the Vrije Universiteit, earned a PhD at the Dutch research institute CWI, and co-founded the database company Vectorwise.
Cruanes described a sinking feeling at the valuation, and Dageville said he would have preferred a lower one.
Older warehouses tied storage and computing together, so customers paid for capacity they rarely used. The three wanted to pull the two apart and build for the cloud. Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures became the first chief executive. Snowflake was incorporated on 23 July 2012 in San Mateo, and Sutter Hill put in $5 million.
What the later success hides is how close it came to never starting. Dageville has said the strength of his friendship with Cruanes was the main reason they nearly did not go ahead: they feared that arguing over a company could damage it. They went ahead anyway. He says the company has since made the friendship better.
Handing over control was the second hard choice. After the first product in 2014, the founders brought in Bob Muglia, a longtime Microsoft executive, as chief executive so they could stay with the engine. In May 2019 Frank Slootman, who had run ServiceNow, took over. Slootman retired on 28 February 2024, and Sridhar Ramaswamy succeeded him.
Money followed the product. A $263 million round in January 2018 valued the company at $1.5 billion, and a $450 million round led by Sequoia that October valued it at $3.5 billion. In September 2020 Snowflake went public, raising $3.4 billion, one of the largest software listings ever.
Even that day was not simple joy. Cruanes described a sinking feeling at the valuation, and Dageville said he would have preferred a lower one. For the year ended 31 January 2026 the company reported revenue of about $4.7 billion and a net loss of about $1.33 billion, and its market value was around $95 billion on 6 November 2026.
Both men still write code. The whiteboard story is a small one, but it holds the lesson: the partnership you protect at the start is the asset the company is built on.