How Snowflake became the biggest software IPO in the history 

Historically, companies used to store the data on physical servers. IBM, Oracle, SAP dominated this space. Instead of storing the data on-premises, Snowflake helps companies store data in the cloud. It also made it easy to query the data. Snowflake was founded at the right time. Here’s the timeline:

2012 – Founded by 3 data warehousing experts 

2014 – Out of stealth with 80 customers

2015 – First commercial version 

2017 – Opened offices in Europe with four key people 

2018 – Raised $263M at $1.5B valuation, making it a unicorn

2020 – 3400 active customers; public company via IPO 

Strategy 1: Defined a new market 

Snowflake wanted to enable organizations to store and access the data easily and affordably. Snowflake built a data warehouse that required zero management by the customers. This data warehouse is built for the cloud from the ground up. Snowflake offered cloud data warehousing before Amazon, Microsoft and Google released the products

Strategy 2: Product-led growth

Snowflake hired the best engineers, built the product in stealth for two years listening to early customers and made sure the product works with the tools that enterprise users already knew and loved. Since then, Snowflake is adding new industry-leading capabilities 

Strategy 3: Smart positioning 

Snowflake launched its data warehousing products to work seamlessly on Amazon S3 since 2014, on Microsoft Azure since 2018 and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019. Enterprises often worry about getting locked to one cloud platform vendor so neutrality offered the advantage

Strategy 4: Expand customer base 

Snowflake has a focused approach – stealth to get the product right with 80 customers; built a huge customer base in North America before expanding to Europe and Asia