Snowflake Inc.
Leadership History
3 leaders · 2014 to present
Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO of Snowflake, in the role since 2024. The first chief executive was Bob Muglia, from 2014.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sridhar Ramaswamy | Chief Executive Officer | 2024 | Present | 2 |
| Frank Slootman | Former Chairman and CEO | 2019 | 2024 | 5 |
| Bob Muglia | Former CEO | 2014 | 2019 | 5 |
Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW) is a cloud data platform company that lists Bozeman, Montana as its headquarters and operates as a distributed company. Its core idea, separating data storage from the compute used to query it, let customers scale analytics on demand instead of buying fixed hardware from vendors such as Teradata or Oracle. The platform now spans data warehousing, data engineering, applications, data sharing and AI agents, and served 828 customers with more than $1 million in trailing 12-month product revenue as of July 31, 2026.
Snowflake runs a consumption-based cloud data platform on top of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Customers are billed for compute (virtual warehouses, Snowpark, Cortex AI and other services, metered in credits), for storage per terabyte per month, and for data transfer. Most large customers sign multi-year capacity commitments and draw them down as they use the platform; revenue is recognized on consumption, not on contract signing. Professional services and training are a small share of revenue. The Snowflake Marketplace and secure data sharing let customers exchange live data without copying it, which adds workloads and keeps data on the platform.
Chief Executive Officer
2024 – Present
2 years (current)
Ramaswamy became CEO in February 2024, initiating a new era of aggressive product innovation and artificial intelligence integration, overseeing the strategic expansion of Snowpark and the Snowflake Marketplace to capture the next wave of enterprise data workloads.
Former Chairman and CEO
2019 – 2024
5 years
Slootman took Snowflake public in 2020 in the largest software IPO in history, securing massive validation by personally recruiting Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway as a pre-IPO investor.
Brought in as a highly specialized 'turnaround and scale' CEO, he aggressively optimized the enterprise sales motion, rapidly pushing the company's revenue past the $1 billion mark before retiring in 2024.
Former CEO
2014 – 2019
5 years
Muglia aggressively transitioned Snowflake's go-to-market strategy away from targeting small startups toward securing massive, multi-year contracts with Fortune 500 enterprises.
As CEO from 2014 to 2019, he led the company out of stealth mode and built the foundational sales and marketing engine that established Snowflake as the dominant cloud data warehouse.
Snowflake's consumption model means revenue can slow quickly when customers optimize queries or cap spending, as happened during the 2022-2023 cost-optimization cycle when growth fell from triple digits to around 30%. It competes against Databricks and against AWS, Google and Microsoft, which are also its infrastructure suppliers and can bundle analytics into broader cloud contracts. The company remains GAAP unprofitable, with a $1.332B net loss in FY2026, largely due to stock-based compensation. In 2024, attackers used stolen credentials to access data in more than 100 customer accounts that lacked multi-factor authentication, which led Snowflake to make MFA mandatory and raised scrutiny of its security defaults. Data residency rules such as GDPR add compliance cost for its cross-region and cross-cloud features.
Dr. Sridhar Ramaswamy has served as Chief Executive Officer and Director of Snowflake Inc. since February 2024.
Sridhar Ramaswamy holds a PhD in computer science from Brown University. He spent 15 years at Google, rising to Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce (overseeing a $100B+ business), before co-founding privacy-focused AI search engine Neeva, which Snowflake acquired in May 2023.
Frank Slootman served as CEO and Chairman from May 2019 to February 2024. Renowned as one of Silicon Valley's most ruthless and effective operators (author of "Amp It Up"), Slootman took Snowflake through its historic 2020 IPO, expanded revenues from $100M to nearly $3 billion, and cemented its status as an enterprise software titan.
Bob Muglia, a former top Microsoft executive, served as CEO from 2014 to 2019. Muglia steered Snowflake out of stealth mode, launched the product on AWS and Azure, recruited initial enterprise customers, and established its early commercial foundation.
Mike Speiser, Managing Director at venture capital firm Sutter Hill Ventures, served as Snowflake's founding CEO and first board member in 2012-2014, incubating the company within Sutter Hill's offices before recruiting Bob Muglia.
Mike Scarpelli has served as Chief Financial Officer of Snowflake since 2019. Scarpelli formed a legendary operational duo with Frank Slootman across three consecutive multi-billion-dollar companies: Data Domain (sold to EMC), ServiceNow (successful IPO), and Snowflake.
After five intense years scaling Snowflake from pre-IPO startup to global enterprise powerhouse, Slootman retired from executive management at age 65, passing the baton to Sridhar Ramaswamy while remaining on the Board of Directors.
Ramaswamy is focused on transforming Snowflake into the preeminent data platform for enterprise AI, accelerating the rollout of Cortex AI, integrating native Large Language Models, and enabling customers to deploy autonomous data agents securely.
Slootman's leadership playbook centers on increasing operational cadence, raising standards, narrowing focus, eliminating corporate politics, and executing with relentless urgency across sales and engineering.
The executive team includes co-founder Benoit Dageville (President of Products), Christian Kleinerman (Executive VP of Product Management), and Mike Scarpelli (Chief Financial Officer).
Sridhar Ramaswamy is an ACM Fellow, recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on database theory, large-scale search architectures, and machine-learning systems.
Under Ramaswamy's leadership, Snowflake acted with total transparency, mandating multi-factor authentication (MFA) across all global customer accounts and investing heavily in advanced threat intelligence and identity security.
Compare executive leadership tenures and strategic transitions
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