MC Tech3 | Snowflake CEO Exclusive, Fintech’s trial by fire; and more

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Global CEOs Exclusive: Snowflake + Pure Storage

We spoke to CEOs of two global tech firms- Sridhar Ramaswamy of Snowflake and Charles Giancarlo of Pure Storage. 

Snowflake’s trial by fire

In a free-wheeling interview with us, NYSE-listed Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy reflected on his first year at the helm after an innings as the founder of search engine Neeva.

·         He admits that while it was a trial by fire for the firm and him, both have emerged stronger since then.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: From Kannada medium school to top tech exec

The last time we spoke to Ramaswamy in 2021, he was a passionate founder building an ad-free, subscription search engine Neeva.

·         He is also an alum of IIT Madras and Brown University, was part of the early engineering team that built Google Search.

He later led Google's advertising products, which accounts for a lion's share of its revenue.

From CEO to founder; then CEO again: But he said he doesn’t miss being a founder and is at home in Snowflake, where he gets to set strategy, build teams, and launch products. 

·         He also stressed the importance of building things with urgency. “I drive myself and my team relentlessly”, he said. 

Jumping on the GCC bandwagon

Snowflake is betting big on Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India with plans to expand its staff at its Pune facility which will work closely with captives.

·         Ramaswamy said India is driving decision-making for global firms and is no longer just back offices.

“Sometimes it’s like abbreviations don’t convey the spirit of what is going on. This is no longer back-office work. This is no longer coding work.”

Pure Storage’s India plans

Moving from one global CEO to another, we spoke to data storage and platforms company Pure Storage’s chairman and CEO Charles Giancarlos. 

·         He discussed the company’s India expansion strategy, the US government’s IT spends, AI’s impact on the data centre, and storage industry.

Giancarlos added that he expects “some deflation of the AI bubble,” as existing LLM models of OpenAI and Google have reached competency saturation.

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