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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

This still in no way answers why Snowflake is so valuable, though. I completely understand our argument, and I agree with it; I just don’t think the article’s arguments are anything else than ex post facto rationalization. When they mentioned NPS I almost snorted my coffee, that metric can be gamified in any way you want it.

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>> Almost all the big companies I worked for had a "database gang" -- a database group which, in the name of centralization, forced you to bow to them to get anything. New DB? bow to them. More nodes? bow to them. Reboot? bow to them. The internal budget "prices" would be off the charts unbelievable.

> This still in no way answers why Snowflake is so valuable, though.

It explains it to a T! You have something you want, but internal company politics and territoriality keep you from getting it the way you want. An outside provider lets everyone get it for a bit of cash. It's basically the same play as Salesforce. It's not some kind of technical moonshot. It has to do with a modicum of technology delivered by a 3rd party who can avoid all of the internal friction.

The next founder who can think of this kind of play, then execute on it, will be the next Salesforce/Snowflake, and will probably have the ear of the same investors!

What I meant was why Snowflake specifically is so valuable. BigQuery, Redshift or any other cloud db would fill this gap as well. Why Snowflake?

It's a chance for investors to get in on the next big thing and invest specifically in data warehousing. No one can put his money directly into BigQuery or Redshift.

Edit: why are so many people downvoting this? Is there some other reason for Snowflake's valuation (aside from tech bubble playing a role)?

I find Snowflake much easier to use than BigQuery, Redshift. It is also cloud-service-provider agnostic. So your only hook at that point is ingest + any snowflake-specific SQL (and obviously security migration etc.) So for retention, they compete on UX rather than walls.

W/r/t value, the idea is a disproportionate of egress from Oracle, Teradata, etc will end up at Snowflake, hence huge TAM, SAM, and SOM.

Snowflake fanboy here who can't really answer your question about why it's so valuable. Not sure I can rationalize the current value. Not sure I think it should be valued this much.

But I can probably answer why Snowflake instead of Redshift (sorry, not too familiar with BigQuery)...

First of all it's cloud-provider agnostic so you can set up Snowflake on any or all of the 3 major cloud providers as well as set up replication between them directly or indirectly through their data exchange. Probably the most powerful feature is the way that Snowflake has the ability to scale (up or down) compute (vertically and horizontal) and storage independently of each other. Furthermore, you have the ability to scale compute down to nothing, and spin up "instantly" when the demand arrives. On top of all of this there is an incredible selection of functionality that i could go on and on about.

Honestly, if you don’t mind, please do. I believe the decoupled elastic compute / storage advantage has been well described; what are the more granular or technical things you like?

Edit: seems you’ve already answered this :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24265856

> What I meant was why Snowflake specifically

Marketing. Vast amounts of marketing.

Not just that. Being the neutral 3rd party who can overcome intra-company roadblocks has real value. I'm not sure Redshift, etc, could be as well focused on being that.

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