Keep pulling the thread on Chris Degnan.
The Snowflake board of directors fired CEO Bob Muglia, who was then replaced by Frank Slootman.
In mid-2016, the Snowflake product experienced a four-hour outage during a sales kickoff event, which was considered a near-death experience for the company.
Snowflake's early strategy, championed by Mike Spicer, prioritized gaining market share over achieving profitability to compete against large incumbents.
Databricks acquired Neon for over $1 billion, while Snowflake had a deal to acquire the company at a price point similar to its $250 million acquisition of Crunchy Data.
While Snowflake is approximately $1 billion ahead of Databricks in revenue, Databricks' sales and engineering teams are both two times the size of Snowflake's.
Chris Degnan believes Snowflake could have "killed" Databricks if it had launched a data science notebook and hosted Spark earlier, instead of focusing solely on becoming the top cloud data warehouse.
Databricks gained a foothold in Snowflake's top customers by targeting data science teams, a user base Snowflake was not effectively serving at the time.
During his 11.5-year tenure at Snowflake, Chris Degnan worked under four different CEOs: Mike Spicer, Bob Muglia, Frank Slootman, and Sridhar Ramaswamy.
John McMahon was recruited to the Snowflake board by interim CEO Mike Spicer, who served on the board of Sumo Logic with McMahon.
At Snowflake, board member John McMahon advised that new sales reps should not be considered productive until they have been employed for six months and one day.
The primary metric for sales success at Snowflake was an individual contributor's ability to consistently sell $250,000 of net new ACV or ARR every quarter, starting from their seventh month of employment.
Snowflake's inside sales team achieved approximately $1 million in annualized productivity per rep, while field sales reps achieved around $2 million.