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India is rapidly emerging as a hub for global business decision makers, with more companies placing their top managers, from C-suite to vice-president, in the country, said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive officer at Snowflake Inc, a NYSE-listed cloud data analytics company.
“We are investing significantly in tech enablement in India. The reason is that many global companies are shifting entire divisions, especially data divisions, to India. We’re seeing that decision makers for major US banks are actually based here. Several of our own customers have VPs of data in India, even though the companies are US-centric or multinational,” said Ramaswamy, who leads the $40 billion US-based company having more than 600 employees in India.
He added that some of Snowflake’s own executives are opting to move back to India after spending decades in the US, citing “value realisation” and the “quality of talent.”
Ramaswamy, who took over as CEO this February, said in his first interview with Indian media that his top priority as the leader of a high-growth company is to ensure teams remain “paranoid and protective about success.”
“Honestly, Snowflake received too much recognition too early. We were valued at $100 billion while making $1 billion in revenue—not profit, revenue. That kind of recognition can lead to overconfidence,” he said.
Ramaswamy drew from his experience at Google, where he spent more than a decade scaling the tech giant’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to more than $100 billion in revenue.
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“My teams at Google reached $100 billion in revenue because they worked just as hard in the 14th year, when we were making $80 billion, as they did in the first year when we were making $1.6 billion,” he said. Ramaswamy also acknowledged that Snowflake was initially overvalued when it went public. At its IPO in September 2020, the company’s valuation was $33.2 billion, marking the largest software IPO at the time.
By November 2021, the valuation surged to $122 billion. Since then, Snowflake’s stock has fluctuated sharply, and currently trades at about a fourth of its peak value.
“Being valued at $100 billion on $1 billion of revenue is irrational exuberance. A company’s valuation may rise or fall, but that’s not a true reflection of its value. The real measure is customer satisfaction, strong growth, customer willingness to invest more, and whether employees feel both challenged and rewarded.”
On competition from data analytics firms like Databricks and Tredence, Ramaswamy said, “As a high-growth company, competition is inevitable. Many will copy or compete with you.” Ramaswamy says his current focus is on reinforcing Snowflake’s core to “deliver value predictably.”
“The first step I’ve taken is to prioritise operational efficiency. We aim to ship products quickly on the engineering side and closely align with go-to-market teams. For me, credibility, predictability, and growth are equally important,” he noted.
Ramaswamy described generative AI as a “new human-computer interface,” creating a powerful bridge between unstructured and structured data.
“Just as smartphones unlocked computing for everyone, I believe Gen AI will unlock the power of data and software for many more people,” he said.
“The way data is accessed could be massively disrupted. If someone has a good dataset, instead of going through an analyst or a BI (business intelligence) tool, they could directly query or interact with the data.”
Snowflake has developed the Cortex AI platform, enabling companies to build Gen AI applications using fully managed LLMs, vector search, and text-to-SQL services.
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