A snowflake is a political insult for someone who is perceived as too sensitive. This post is not about that.
Snowflake, the Bay Area company could become the largest software IPO of all time. It starts trading tomorrow.
It was initially priced between $75-$85, upped to $100-$110 and again upped to $120. At that price, it would be valued ~ $40B. Some banks are going to make a killing.
I started hearing about Snowflake a few years ago when a few data oriented startup companies mentioned them often. They were compared with Looker. Looker was acquired by Google in 2019 for $2.6B.
The other interesting tidbit was that Bob Muglia, an ex Microsoft veteran who last ran Server and Tools served as CEO for this company for three years until he was ousted in March 2019. His ouster apparently came a week after he said that Snowflake didn’t have to IPO soon as it had a ton of cash at hand. The guy who founded ServiceNow is now the CEO. Talk of the Hot Hand. On that note, the new book Hot Hand by Ben Cohen is a good read.
They had revenue of $265M last year, a 173% growth. NRR was 158%. It makes sense that NRR is that high. Being a complex data integration project, it’s hard for a customer to switch to another platform quickly.
Snowflake’s data cloud platform breaks down data silos, enabling customers to consolidate data into a single source of truth to drive meaningful business insights, build data-driven applications, and share data, delivered through a customer-centric, consumption-based business model, only charging customers for the resources they use. Snowflake allows companies to use/access data across the big three public cloud computing vendors AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Snowflake is a customer and competitor to the large public cloud vendors, but their respective offerings don’t offer the agnostic cross platform capability, so its independence is a key differentiator.
Berkshire and Salesforce are each buying $250M in the offering. Convincing Berkshire to buy in the offering is indeed a coup.
If it opens at $200 / share, that would be like 100x sales.
If you are one of the lucky ones to get an allocation, hold onto it. Chasing this one is likely to take a strong gut.
Let it Snow! Let it Snow!
While Main Street is hobbling, tech IPOs and Wall Street are humming. The tale of two Americas.