>>Okay, >>listen, we're gearing up for the start of the snowflake Data Cloud Summit, and we wanna go back to the early roots of Snowflake. We've got some of the founding engineers here. Abdul Monir, Ashish Motive, Allah and Alison Lee There three individuals that were at snowflake in the early years and participated in many of the technical decisions that led to the platform and is making snowflake famous today. Folks, great to see you. Thanks so much for taking some time out of your busy schedules. Hey, it's gotta be really gratifying. Thio, See this platform that you've built, you know, taking off and changing businesses. So I'm sure it was always smooth sailing. Right? There were. There were no debates. Wherever. >>I've never seen an engineer get into the bed. >>Alright, So seriously so take us back to the early days. You guys, you know, choose whoever wants to start. But what was it like early on? We're talking 2013 here, right? >>When I think back to the early days of Snowflake, I just think of all of us sitting in one room at the time. You know, we just had an office that was one room with, you know, 12 or 13 engineers sitting there clacking away on our keyboards, uh, working really hard, turning out code, uh, punctuated by you know, somebody asking a question about Hey, what should we do about this, or what should we do about that? And then everyone kind of looking up from their keyboards and getting into discussions and debates about the work that we're doing. >>So so Abdul it was just kind of heads down headphones on, just coating or e think there was >>a lot of talking and followed by a lot of typing. Andi, I think there were periods of time where where you know, anyone could just walk in into the office and probably out of the office and all the here is probably people, uh, typing away at their keyboards. And one of my member vivid, most vivid memories is actually I used to sit right across from Alison, and there's these huge to two huge monitor monitors between us and I would just here typing away in our keyboard, and sometimes I was thinking and and and, uh and all that type and got me nervous because it seemed like Alison knew exactly what what, what she needed to do, and I was just still thinking about it. >>So she she was just like bliss for for you as a developer engineer was it was a stressful time. What was the mood? So when you don't have >>a whole lot of customers, there's a lot of bliss. But at the same time, there was a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we build the product. There was a time line ahead of us. We knew we had to build this in a certain time frame. Um, so one thing I'll add to what Alison and Abdulle said is we did a lot of white boarding as well. There are a lot of discussions, and those discussions were a lot of fun. They actually cemented what we wanted to build. They made sure everyone was in tune, and and there we have it. >>Yes, so I mean, it is a really exciting time doing any start up. But when you know when you have to make decisions and development, invariably you come to a fork in the road. So I'm curious as to what some of those forks might have been. How you guys decided You know which fork to take. Was there a Yoda in the room that served as the Jedi master? I mean, how are those decisions made? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I think one of a Zai think back. One of the memories that that sticks out in my mind is is this, uh, epic meeting and one of our conference rooms called Northstar. Many of our conference rooms are named after ski resorts because the founders, they're really into skiing. And that's why that's where the snowflake name comes from. So there was this epic meeting and I'm not even sure exactly what topic we were discussing. I think it was It was the sign up flow and and there were a few different options on the table and and and one of the options that that people were gravitating Teoh, one of the founders, didn't like it and and on, and they said a few times that there's this makes no sense. There's no other system in the world that does it this way, and and I think one of the other founders said, uh, that's exactly why we should do it this way. And or at least seriously, consider this option. So I think there was always this, um, this this, uh, this tendency and and and this impulse that that we needed to think big and think differently and and not see the world the way it is but the way we wanted it to be and then work our way backwards and try to make it happen. >>Alison, Any fork in the road moments that you remember. >>Well, I'm just thinking back to a really early meeting with sheesh! And and a few of our founders where we're debating something probably not super exciting to a lot of people outside of hardcore database people, which was how to represent our our column metadata. Andi, I think it's funny that you that you mentioned Yoda because we often make jokes about one of our founders. Teary Bond refer to him as Yoda because he hasn't its tendency to say very concise things that kind of make you scratch your head and say, Wow, why didn't I think of that? Or you know, what exactly does that mean? I never thought about it that way. So I think when I think of the Yoda in the room, it was definitely Terry, >>uh, excuse you. Anything you can add to this, this conversation >>I'll agree with Alison on the you're a comment for short. Another big fork in the road, I recall, was when we changed. What are meta store where we store our own internal metadata? We used >>to use >>a tool called my sequel and we changed it. Thio another database called Foundation TV. I think that was a big game changer for us. And, you know, it was a tough decision. It took us a long time. For the longest time, we even had our own little branch. It was called Foundation DB, and everybody was developing on that branch. It's a little embarrassing, but, you know, those are the kind of decisions that have altered altered the shape of snowflake. >>Yeah. I mean, these air, really, you know, down in the weeds, hardcore stuff that a lot of people that might not be exposed to What would you say was the least obvious technical decision that you had to make it the time. And I wanna ask you about the most obvious to. But what was the what was the one that was so out of the box? I mean, you kind of maybe mentioned it a little bit before, but what if we could double click on that? >>Well, I think one of the core decisions in our architectures the separation of compute and storage on Do you know that is really court architecture. And there's so many features that we have today, um, for instance, data sharing zero copy cloning that that we couldn't have without that architecture. Er, um and I think it was both not obvious. And when we told people about it in the early days, there was definitely skepticism about being able to make that work on being able Thio have that architecture and still get great performance. >>Anything? Yeah, anything that was, like, clearly obvious, that is, Maybe that maybe that was the least and the most that that separation from computing story because it allowed you toe actually take advantage of cloud native. But But was there an obvious one that, you know, it's sort of dogma that you, you know, philosophically lived behind. You know, to this day, >>I think one really obvious thing, um is the sort of no tuning, no knobs, ease of use story behind snowflake. Andi and I say it's really obvious because everybody wants their system to be easy to use. But then I would say there are tons of decisions behind that, that it's not always obvious three implications of of such a choice, right, and really sticking to that. And I think that that's really like a core principle behind Snowflake that that led to a lot of non obvious decisions as a result of sticking to that principle. So, yeah, I >>think to add to that now, now you've gotten us thinking I think another really interesting one was was really, um, should we start from scratch or or should we use something that already exists and and build on top of that? And I think that was one of these, um, almost philosophical kind of stances that we took that that a lot of the systems that were out there were the way they were because because they weren't built for the for the platforms that they were running on, and the big thing that we were targeting was the cloud. And so one of the big stances we took was that we were gonna build it from scratch, and we weren't gonna borrow a single line of code from many other database out there. And this was something that really shocked a lot of people and and many times that this was pretty crazy and it waas. But this is how you build great products. >>That's awesome. All right. She should give you the last word. We got, like, just like 30 seconds left to bring us home >>Your till date. Actually, one of those said shocks people when you talk to them and they say, Wow, you're not You're not really using any other database and you build this entirely yourself. The number of people who actually can build a database from scratch are fairly limited. The group is fairly small, and so it was really a humongous task. And as you mentioned, you know, it really changed the direction off how we design the database. What we what does the database really mean? Tow us right the way Snowflake has built a database. It's really a number of organs that come together and form the body and That's also a concept that's novel to the database industry. >>Guys, congratulations. You must be so proud. And, uh, there's gonna be awesome watching the next next decade, so thank you so much for sharing your stories. >>Thanks, dude. >>Thank you.