Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

6Scale Your Culture

“Put customers first.”

—Snowflake’s number 1 value

Our first efforts to develop our sense of culture were what a small team of engineers and sales folks desperately needed. Back then, we focused on the interpersonal. We worked so hard at coding and prospecting that we needed other things at Snowflake to look forward to. We represented a number of different countries, and each wore a few hats, but everyone would show up to the events we organized. Our culture was built upon camaraderie, mainly. Soon after Bob arrived in 2014, we decided to codify the Snowflake values. At our weekly all-hands meetings, Bob would ask what was really important to us. The engineers had a big say in what our values should be. They were here from the very beginning, but everyone participated. It was the right time.

Soon after we went GA, we began hiring sales reps who worked remotely across the United States. We opened up small offices in major metropolitan areas where sales teams started to grow in numbers. We were expanding at our Silicon Valley headquarters as well. We had moved out of our small offices in downtown San Mateo and occupied two floors of a larger building just a block away. We kept that office space as we started to further expand into a nine-floor building right across the street. We took over the ground floor, then the fifth, and eventually the ninth. We were the youngest people, by a few decades, that traversed the lobby. Often, we opted to take the stairs ...