Benoît Dageville @ RAISE 2025: Zero to IPO and Beyond. From Startup to Snowfall Building Snowflake

In this intimate fireside chat, Benoit “Ben” Dageville—Co-founder of Snowflake—recounts the journey from a whiteboard in a small El Camino apartment (2012) to a global Data Cloud powering customers like OpenAI, Canva, and Disney. Ben explains how Snowflake reimagined analytics by decoupling storage and compute, embracing cloud elasticity, and unifying structured, semi-structured, and now unstructured data—all while keeping product simplicity at the core.
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Key discussion points include:

• Founding thesis: Why Hadoop + the public cloud’s elasticity inspired a new, cloud-native architecture.
• “Hide the revolution”: Selling a radical platform in familiar terms so customers could adopt it with confidence.
• Scaling the culture: Preserving simplicity and managed service values as the company grew to 7,000+ employees and 40+ offices.
• IPO in 2020: The thrill and pressure of becoming the most high-profile software listing of the year—and why IPO isn’t the goal, product is.
• AI’s impact on data: Bringing unstructured data (PDFs, images, audio) into the Data Cloud, advanced search, and natural language to SQL to democratize analytics for every business user.
• Product philosophy: “iPhone of data”—hide complexity, deliver performance, and make enterprise data usable for all.
• Founder notes: Ambition, optimism, and having fun matter more than any single piece of advice.

If you’re building in data platforms, AI analytics, or the modern data stack, don’t miss this conversation. Like, comment, and subscribe for more founder stories and practical lessons from RAISE Summit.