>> Okay listen, we're gearing up for the start of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit. And we want to go back to the early roots of Snowflake. We got some of the founding engineers here, Abdul Munir, Ashish Motivala and Allison Lee. They're 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. >> Thank you for having us- >> Same. >> It's got to be really gratifying to see this platform that you've built, taking off and changing businesses. So I'm sure it was always smooth sailing, right? There were no debates, where there ever? >> I've never seen an engineer get into a debate. >> Yeah alright, so seriously. So take us back to the early days, you guys choose whoever wants to start, but what was it like, early on we're talking 2013 here, right? >> That's 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, we just had an office that was one room with 12 or 13 engineers sitting there, clacking away at our keyboards, working really hard, churning out code punctuated by 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 were doing. >> So, Abdul was it just kind of heads down, headphones on just coding or? >> I think there was a lot of talking and followed by a lot of typing. And I think there were periods of time where anyone could just walk in into the office and probably out of the office and all they'd hear is probably people typing away their keyboards. And one of my most vivid memory is actually I used to sit right across from Allison and there was these two huge monitors between us. And I would just hear her typing away at her keyboard. And sometimes I was thinking and all that typing got me nervous because it seemed like Allison knew exactly what she needed to do. And I was just still thinking about it. >> So Ashish was this like bliss for you as a developer or an engineer? Or was it a stressful time? What was the mood? >> Then when you don't have a whole lot of customers, there's a lot of bliss, but at the same time, there's a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we build the product. There was a timeline ahead of us. We knew we had to build this in a certain timeframe. So one thing I'll add to what Allison and Abdul said is, we did a lot of whiteboarding as well. There were 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 there we have it. >> Yeah, it is a really exciting time. We can do it any start-up. When you have to make decisions in development and variably you come to a fork in the road. So I'm curious as to what some of those forks might've been, how you guys decided which fork to take. Was there a Yoda in the room that served as the Jedi Master? How are those decisions made? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> That's an interesting question. And as I think back one of the memories that sticks out in my mind is this epic meeting in one of our conference rooms called Northstar and many of our conference rooms are named after ski resorts because the founders are really into skiing. And 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 the sign up flow and there were a few different options on the table. And one of the options that people were gravitating to, one of the founders didn't like it. And they said a few times that this makes no sense. There's no other system in the world that does it this way. And I think one of the other founders said, that's exactly why we should do it this way or at least seriously consider this option. So, I think there was always this tendency and this impulse that we needed to think big and think differently 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. >> Allison, any fork in the road moments that you remember? >> Well, I'm just thinking back to a really early meeting with Ashish 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 column metadata. And I think it's funny that you that you mentioned Yoda, because we often make jokes about one of our founders Thierry and referred to him as Yoda, because he has this 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 what exactly does that mean? I never thought about it that way. So, when I think of the Yoda in the room, it was definitely Thierry, >> Ashish is there anything you can add to this conversation? >> I'll agree with Allison on the Yoda comment for sure. Another big fork in the road I recall was when we changed one of our meadow store, where we store and are willing to try and metadata. We used to use a tool called my SQL and we changed it to another database called foundation DV. I think that was a big game changer for us. And 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 DV and everybody was developing on that branch, it's a little embarrassing but those are the kinds of decisions that have altered the shape of Snowflake. >> Yeah, these are really down in the weeds hardcore stuff that a lot of people might not be exposed to. What would you say was the least obvious technical decision that you had to make at the time? And I want to ask you about the most obvious too, but what was the one that was so out of the box? You kind of maybe mentioned it a little bit before, but I wonder if we could double click on that? >> Well, I think one of the core decisions in our architecture is the separation of compute and storage that is really core to our architecture. And there's so many features that we have today, for instance data sharing, zero-copy cloning, that we couldn't have without that architecture. 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 and being able to have that architecture and still get great performance. >> Exactly- >> Yeah, anything that was like clearly obvious, maybe that was the least and the most that separation from compute and store, 'cause it allowed you to actually take advantage of cloud native, but was there an obvious one that is it sort of dogma that you philosophically live behind to this day? >> I think one really obvious thing is the sort of no tuning, no knobs, ease of use story behind Snowflake. And I say it's really obvious because everybody wants their system to be easy to use. But then I would say there were tons of decisions behind that, that it's not always obvious the implications of such a choice, right? And really sticking to that. And I think that that's really like a core principle behind Snowflake that led to a lot of non-obvious decisions as a result of sticking to that principle. >> To wrap to that now you've gotten us thinking, I think another really interesting one was really, should we start from scratch or should we use something that already exists and build on top of that. And I think that was one of these almost philosophical kind of stances that we took, that a lot of the systems that were out there were the way they were because they weren't built 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 going to build it from scratch and we weren't going to borrow a single line of code from any other database out there. And this was something that really shocked a lot of people and many times that this was pretty crazy. And it was, but this is how you build great products. >> That's awesome, all right, Ashish give your last word, we got like just 30 seconds left take, bring us home. >> Till date actually one of those that shocks people when you talk to them and they say, wow, 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've mentioned, it really changed the direction of how we designed the database. What does the database really mean to 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 it's going to be awesome watching the next decade. So thank you so much for sharing your stories. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you- >> Thank you.