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Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Snowflake has always been known as the data warehouse.

But today, owning the data is not enough.

You have to ship with it, too.

And Snowflake understands that.

The company has undergone an AI-fueled identity shift in recent months, including laying

off entire teams, launching agentic products,

and dropping more than 400 AI features in the last year. Their CEO, Sridar Ramoswamy, has pretty

much declared 2026 to be the end of the chatbot era and the beginning of the agentic era.

And he's here today to walk us through his vision and the recent changes at Snowflake. Sridar, welcome to the show. Rebecca, great to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so you've had such an interesting background. You co-founded Niva. That was an ad-free privacy-focused search engine. And then Snowflake actually acquired Niva, what, in 2023? And later you came on as the CEO. You've had quite a wild ride.

Where were you at before that? I think Google, right?

Well, I'm an academic by training, worked into search labs in places like the labs for a while

before going to Google. Little did I know that I was joining one of the most amazing businesses

of all time, which was the search ads business at Google.

I spent over 15 years there, eventually running the ads and commerce team at Google, helping them get to $100 plus billion in revenue, which was not something honestly that any of us expected to do.

And then, of course, Nevan Snowflake after that.

I'm blessed to have had so many different opportunities.

Yeah, I mean, that's quite a flex from $1.5 billion to $100 billion in revenue in the 15 years that you were there, right?

So, you know, you've said that 2026 is the year that organizations

will move beyond chatbots and coding assistance. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean

...