>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> When a piece of digital art sells for $69.3 million, more than has ever been paid for works, by Gauguin or Salvador Dali, making it created the third most expensive living artists in the world. One can't help but take notice and ask, what is going on? The latest craze around NFTs may feel a bit bubblicious, but it's yet another sign, that the digital age is now fully upon us. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon's CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to take a look at some of the trends, that may be difficult for observers and investors to understand, but we think offer significant insights to the future and possibly some opportunities for young investors many of whom are fans of this program. And how the trends may relate to enterprise tech. Okay, so this guy Beeple is now the hottest artist on the planet. That's his Twitter profile. That picture on the inset. His name is Mike Winkelmann. He is actually a normal looking dude, but that's the picture he chose for his Twitter. This collage reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage. You may already know the story, but many of you may not. Back in 2005 a college kid from England named Alex Tew, T-E-W created The Million Dollar Homepage to fund his education. And his idea was to create a website with a million pixels, and sell ads at a dollar for each pixel. Guess how much money he raised. A million bucks, right? No, wrong. He raised $1,037,100. How so you ask? Well, he auctioned off the last 1000 pixels on eBay, which fetched an additional $38,000. Crazy, right? Well, maybe not. Pretty creative in a way, way early sign of things to come. Now, I'm not going to go deep into NFTs, and explain the justification behind them. There's a lot of material that's been published that can do justice to the topic better than I can. But here are the basics, NFTs stands for Non-Fungible Tokens. They are digital representations of assets that exist in a blockchain. Now, each token as a unique and immutable identifier, and it uses cryptography to ensure its authenticity. NFTs by the name, they're not fungible. So, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, which can be traded on a like-for-like basis, in other words, if you and I each own one bitcoin we know exactly how much each of our bitcoins is worth at any point of time. Non-Fungible Tokens each have their own unique values. So, they're not comparable on a like-to-like basis. But what's the point of this? Well, NFTs can be applied to any property, identities tweets, videos, we're seeing collectables, digital art, pretty much anything. And it's really. The use cases are unlimited. And NFTs can streamline transactions, and they can be bought and sold very efficiently without the need for a trusted third party involved. Now, the other benefit is the probability of fraud, is greatly reduced. So where do NFTs fit as an asset class? Well, they're definitely a new type of asset. And again, I'm not going to try to justify their existence, but I want to talk about the choices, that investors have in the market today. The other day, I was on a call with Jay Po. He is a VC and a Principal at a company called Stage 2 Capital. He's a former Bessemer VC and one of the sharper investors around. And he was talking about the choices that investors have and he gave a nice example that I want to share with you and try to apply here. Now, as an investor, you have alternatives, of course we're showing here a few with their year to date charts. Now, as an example, you can buy Amazon stock. Now, if you bought just about exactly a year ago you did really well, you probably saw around an 80% return or more. But if you want to jump in today, your mindset might be, hmm, well, okay. Amazon, they're going to be around for a long time, so it's kind of low risk and I like the stock, but you're probably going to get, well let's say, maybe a 10% annual return over the longterm, 15% or maybe less maybe single digits, but, maybe more than that but it's unlikely that any kind of reasonable timeframe within any reasonable timeframe you're going to get a 10X return. In order to get that type of return on invested capital, Amazon would have to become a $16 trillion valued company. So, you sit there, you asked yourself, what's the probability that Amazon goes out of business? Well, that's pretty low, right? And what are the chances it becomes a $16 trillion company over the next several years? Well, it's probably more likely that it continues to grow at that more stable rate that I talked about. Okay, now let's talk about Snowflake. Now, as you know, we've covered the company quite extensively. We watched this company grow from an early stage startup and then saw its valuation increase steadily as a private company, but you know, even early last year it was valued around $12 billion, I think in February, and as late as mid September right before the IPO news hit that Marc Benioff and Warren Buffett were going to put in $250 million each at the IPO or just after the IPO and it was projected that Snowflake's valuation could go over $20 billion at that point. And on day one after the IPO Snowflake, closed worth more than $50 billion, the stock opened at 120, but unless you knew a guy, you had to hold your nose and buy on day one. And you know, maybe got it at 240, maybe you got it at 250, you might have got it at higher and at the time you might recall, I said, You're likely going to get a better price than on day one, which is usually the case with most IPOs, stock today's around 230. But you look at Snowflake today and if you want to buy in, you look at it and say, Okay, well I like the company, it's probably still overvalued, but I can see the company's value growing substantially over the next several years, maybe doubling in the near to midterm [mumbles] hit more than a hundred billion dollar valuation back as recently as December, so that's certainly feasible. The company is not likely to flame out because it's highly valued, I have to probably be patient for a couple of years. But you know, let's say I liked the management, I liked the company, maybe the company gets into the $200 billion range over time and I can make a decent return, but to get a 10X return on Snowflake you have to get to a valuation of over a half a trillion. Now, to get there, if it gets there it's going to become one of the next great software companies of our time. And you know, frankly if it gets there I think it's going to go to a trillion. So, if that's what your bet is then you know, you would be happy with that of course. But what's the likelihood? As an investor you have to evaluate that, what's the probability? So, it's a lower risk investment in Snowflake but maybe more likely that Snowflake, you know, they run into competition or the market shifts, maybe they get into the $200 billion range, but it really has to transform the industry execute for you to get in to that 10 bagger territory. Okay, now let's look at a different asset that is cryptocurrency called Compound, way more risky. But Compound is a decentralized protocol that allows you to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies. Now, I'm not saying go out and buy compound but just as a thought exercise is it's got an asset here with a lower valuation, probably much higher upside, but much higher risk. But so for Compound to get to 10X return it's got to get to $20 billion valuation. Now, maybe compound isn't the right asset for your cup of tea, but there are many cryptos that have made it that far and if you do your research and your homework you could find a project that's much, much earlier stage that yes, is higher risk but has a much higher upside that you can participate in. So, this is how investors, all investors really look at their choices and make decisions. And the more sophisticated investors, they're going to use detailed metrics and analyze things like MOIC, Multiple on Invested Capital and IRR, which is Internal Rate of Return, do TAM analysis, Total Available Market. They're going to look at competition. They're going to look at detailed company models in ARR and Churn rates and so forth. But one of the things we really want to talk about today and we brought this up at the snowflake IPO is if you were Buffet or Benioff and you had to, you know, quarter of a dollars to put in you could get an almost guaranteed return with your late in the game, but pre IPO money or a look if you were Mike Speiser or one of the earlier VCs or even someone like Jeremy Burton who was part of the inside network you could get stock or options, much cheaper. You get a 5X, 10X, 50X or even North of a hundred X return like the early VCs who took a big risk. But chances are, you're not one of these in one of these categories. So how can you as a little guy participate in something big and you might remember at the time of the snowflake IPO we showed you this picture, who are these people, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Chris Dixon, this girl Sono. And of course Tim Berners-Lee, you know, that these are some of the folks that inspired me personally to pay attention to crypto. And I want to share the premise that caught my attention. It was this. Think about the early days of the internet. If you saw what Berners-Lee was working on or Linus Torvalds, in one to invest in the internet, you really couldn't. I mean, you couldn't invest in Linux or TCP/IP or HTTP. Suppose you could have invested in Cisco after its IPO that would have paid off pretty big time, for sure. You know, he could have waited for the Netscape IPO but the core infrastructure of the internet was fundamentally not directly a candidate for investment by you or really, you know, by anybody. And Satya Nadella said the other day we have reached maximum centralization. The main protocols of the internet were largely funded by the government and they've been co-opted by the giants. But with crypto, you actually can invest in core infrastructure technologies that are building out a decentralized internet, a new internet, you know call it web three Datto. It's a big part of the investment thesis behind what Carlson-wee is doing. And Andreessen Horowitz they have two crypto funds. They've raised more than $800 million to invest and you should read the firm's crypto investment thesis and maybe even take their crypto startup classes and some great content there. Now, one of the people that I haven't mentioned in this picture is Camila Russo. She's a journalist she's turned into hardcore crypto author is doing great job explaining the white hot defining space or decentralized finance. If you're just at read her work and educate yourself and learn more about the future and be happy perhaps you'll find some 10X or even hundred X opportunities. So look, there's so much innovation going around going on around blockchain and crypto. I mean, you could listen to Warren Buffet and Janet Yellen who implied this is all going to end badly. But while look, these individuals they're smart people. I don't think they would be my go-to source on understanding the potential of the technology and the future of what it could bring. Now, we've talked earlier at the, at the start here about NFTs. DeFi is one of the most interesting and disruptive trends to FinTech, names like Celsius, Nexo, BlockFi. BlockFi let's actually the average person participate in liquidity pools is actually quite interesting. Crypto is going mainstream Tesla, micro strategy putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. We have a 2017 Jamie diamond. He called Bitcoin a tulip bulb like fraud, yet just the other day JPM announced a structured investment vehicle to give its clients a basket of stocks that have exposure to crypto, PayPal allowing customers to buy, sell, and Hodl crypto. You can trade crypto on Robin Hood. Central banks are talking about launching digital currencies. I talked about the Fedcoin for a number of years and why not? Coinbase is doing an IPO will give it a value of over a hundred billion. Wow, that sounds frothy, but still big names like Mark Cuban and Jamaat palliate Patiala have been active in crypto for a while. Gronk is getting into NFTs. So it goes to have a little bit of that bubble feel to it. But look often when tech bubbles burst they shake out the pretenders but if there's real tech involved, some contenders emerge. So, and they often do so as dominant players. And I really believe that the innovation around crypto is going to be sustained. Now, there is a new web being built out. So if you want to participate, you got to do some research figure out things like how PolkaWorks, make a call on whether you think avalanche is an Ethereum killer dig in and find out about new projects and form a thesis. And you may, as a small player be able to find some big winners, but look you do have to be careful. There was a lot of fraud during the ICO. Craze is your risk. So understand the Tokenomics and maybe as importantly the Pump-a-nomics, because they certainly loom as dangers. This is not for the faint of heart but because I believe it involves real tech. I like it way better than Reddit stocks like GameStop for example, now not to diss Reddit. There's some good information on Reddit. If you're patient, you can find it. And there's lots of good information flowing on Discord. There's people flocking to Telegram as a hedge against big tech. Maybe there's all sounds crazy. And you know what, if you've grown up in a privileged household and you have a US Education you know, maybe it is nuts and a bit too risky for you. But if you're one of the many people who haven't been able to participate in these elite circles there are things going on, especially outside of the US that are democratizing investment opportunities. And I think that's pretty cool. You just got to be careful. So, this is a bit off topic from our typical focus and ETR survey analysis. So let's bring this back to the enterprise because there's a lot going on there as well with blockchain. Now let me first share some quotes on blockchain from a few ETR Venn Roundtables. First comment is from a CIO to diversified holdings company who says correctly, blockchain will hit the finance industry first but there are use cases in healthcare given the privacy and security concerns and logistics to ensure provenance and reduce fraud. And to that individual's point about finance. This is from the CTO of a major financial platform. We're really taking a look at payments. Yeah. Do you think traditional banks are going to lose control of the payment systems? Well, not without a fight, I guess, but look there's some real disruption possibilities here. And just last comment from a government CIO says, we're going to wait until the big platform players they get into their software. And so that is happening Oracle, IBM, VMware, Microsoft, AWS Cisco, they all have blockchain initiatives going on, now by the way, none of these tech companies wants to talk about crypto. They try to distance themselves from that topic which is understandable, I guess, but I'll tell you there's far more innovation going on in crypto than there is in enterprise tech companies at this point. But I predict that the crypto innovations will absolutely be seeping into enterprise tech players over time. But for now the cloud players, they want to support developers who are building out this new internet. The database is certainly a logical place to support a mutable transactions which allow people to do business one-on-one and have total confidence that the source hasn't been hacked or changed and infrastructure to support smart contracts. We've seen that. The use cases in the enterprise are endless asset tracking data access, food, tracking, maintenance, KYC or know your customer, there's applications in different industries, telecoms, oil and gas on and on and on. So look, think of NFTs as a signal crypto craziness is a signal. It's a signal as to how IT in other parts of companies and their data might be organized, managed and tracked and protected, and very importantly, valued. Look today. There's a lot of memes. Crypto kitties, art, of course money as well. Money is the killer app for blockchain, but in the future the underlying technology of blockchain and the many percolating innovations around it could become I think will become a fundamental component of a new digital economy. So get on board, do some research and learn for yourself. Okay, that's it for today. Remember all of these episodes they're available as podcasts, wherever you listen. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Please feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or tweet me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action and data science. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, be careful out there in crypto land. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante snowflake's eye-popping ipo this week has the industry buzzing we have had dozens and dozens of inbound pr from firms trying to hook us offering perspectives on the snowflake ipo so they can pitch us on their latest and greatest product people are pumped and why not an event like this doesn't happen very often hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll give you our take on the snowflake ipo and address the many questions that we've been getting on the topic i'm also going to discuss at the end of this segment an angle for getting in on the ground floor and investments which is not for the faint of heart but it's something that i believe is worth talking about now let's first talk about the hottest ipo in software industry history first i want to say congratulations to the many people at snowflake you know the big hitters yeah they're all the news slootman mooglia spicer buffett benioff even scarpelli interestingly you know you don't hear much about the founders they're quite humble and we're going to talk about that in some future episodes but they created snowflake they had the vision and the smarts to bring in operators that could get the company to this point so awesome for them but you know i'm especially happy for the rank and file and the many snowflake people where an event like this it really can be life-changing versus the billionaires on the leaderboard so fantastic for you okay but let's get into the madness as you know by now snowflake ipod at a price of 120. now unless you knew a guy he paid around 245 at the open that's if you got in otherwise you bought at a higher price so you kind of just held your nose and made the trade i guess you know but snowflakes value it went from 33 billion to more than 80 billion in a matter of minutes now there's a lot of finger pointing going on this is this issue that people are claiming that it was underpriced and snowflake left four billion dollars on the table please stop that's just crazy to me snowflakes balance sheet is in great shape thanks to this offering and you know i'm not sure jamming later stage investors even more would have been the right thing to do this was a small float i think it was around 10 percent of the company so you would expect a sharp uptick on day one i had predicted a doubling to a 66 billion dollar valuation and it ended up around 70. now the big question that we now get is is this a fair valuation and can snowflake grow into its value we'll address this in more detail but the short answer is snowflake is overvalued in my opinion right now but it can grow into its valuation and of course as always they're going to be challenges now the other comment we get is yeah but the company is losing tons of money and i say no kidding that's why they're so valuable we've been saying for years that the street right now is rewarding growth because they understand that to compete in software you need to have massive scale so i'm not worried in the least about snowflakes bottom line not yet eventually i'm going to pay much closer attention to operating cash flow but right now i want to see growth i want to see them grow into their valuation now the other common question we get is should i buy when should i buy what are the risks and can snowflake compete with the biggest cloud vendors i'll say this before we get into it and i've said before look it's it's very rare that you're not going to get better buying opportunities than day one of an ipo and i think in this case you will i remember back in 2015 it was i think it was the first calendar for quarter and servicenow missed its earnings and the stock got hit and we had the opportunity to interview frank slootman then ceo of servicenow right after that and i think it's instructive to hear what he said let's listen roll the clip well yeah i think that a lot of the high-flying cloud companies and obviously we're one of them you know we're we're priced to perfection right um and that's that's not an easy place to be for uh for for anybody and you know we're not really focused on that it's it's this is a marathon you know every quarter is one mile marker you can't get too excited about you know one versus the other we're really pacing ourselves we're building you know an enterprise that's going to be here for for a long time you know and after that we saw the stock drop as low as 50 today servicenow is a 450 stock so my point is that snowflake like servicenow is going to be priced to perfection and there will be bumps in the road possibly macro factors or other and if you're a believer you'll have opportunities to get in so be patient now finally i'm going to make some comments later but i'll give you the bumper sticker right now i mean i calculated the weighted average price that the insiders paid on the the s1 that they paid for snowflake and it came out to around six dollars a share and i heard somebody say on tv it was five dollars but my weighted average math got me to six dollars regardless on day one of the ipo the insiders made a 50x return on their investment if you bought on day one you're probably losing some money or maybe about even and there are some ground floor opportunities that exist that are complicated and may be risky but if you're young and motivated or older and have some time to research i think you'll be interested in what i have to say later on all right let's compare snowflake to some other companies on a valuation basis this ought to be interesting so this chart shows some high flyers as compared to snowflake we show the company the trailing 12-month revenue the market cap at the close of the 16th which is the day that snowflake ipod and then we calculate and sort the data on the revenue multiple of the trailing 12 months and the last column is the year-on-year growth rate of the last quarter and i used trailing 12 months because it's simple and it's easy to understand and it makes the revenue multiple bigger so it's more dramatic and many prefer to use a forward revenue uh but that's why i put the growth rate there you can pick your own projected revenue growth and and do the math yourself so let's start with snowflake 400 million dollars in revenue and that's based on a newish pricing model of consumption not a sas subscription that locks you in for a year or two years or three years i love this model because it's true cloud and i've talked about it a while so for a while so i'm not going to dwell on it today but you can see the trailing 12-month revenue multiple is massive and the growth rate is 120 which is very very impressive for a company this size zoom we put zoom in the chart just because why not and and the growth grade is sick so so who knows how that correlates to the revenue multiple but as you can see snowflake actually tops the zoom frothiness on that metric now maybe zoom is undervalued i should take that back let's see i think crowdstrike is really interesting here and as a company that we've been following and talking about quite a bit in my last security breaking analysis they were at a 65 x trailing 12-month revenue multiple and you see how that's jumped since they reported and they beat expectations but they're similar in size to snowflake with a slower growth rate in a lower revenue multiple so there's some correlation between that growth rate and the revenue multiple sort of now snowflake pulled back on day two it was down early uh this morning as you would expect with both the market being off and maybe some profit taking you know if you got in an allocation at 120 why not take some profits and play with house money so snowflake's value is hovering today it actually bounced back is hovering today you're just under 70 billion and that that brings the revenue multiple down a bit but it's still very elevated now if you project 2x growth let's say 100 for next year and the stock stays in some kind of range which i think it likely will you could see snowflake coming down to crowdstrike revenue multiples in 12 months it'll depend of course on snowflakes earnings reports which i'm sure are going to beat estimates for the next several quarters and if if it's growing faster than these others at that time it should command a premium you know wherever the market prices market's going to go up it's going to go down but we'll look at all these companies i think on a relative basis snowflakes still should command a premium at higher growth rates so you can see also in this chart you've got shopify awesome mongodb twilio servicenow and their respective growth rates shopify incredibly impressive [ __ ] and twilio as well servicenow is like the old dog in this mix so that's kind of interesting now the other big question we get is can snowflake grow in to its valuation this is a chart we shared with you a bit ago and it talks to snowflake's total available market and its expansion opportunity there tam expansion this is something we saw slootman execute at servicenow when everybody underestimated that company's value and i'll briefly explain here look snowflake is disrupting the traditional data warehouse and data lake markets data lake spending is relatively small it's under 2 billion but data lakes they're inexpensive and that's what made them attractive the edw market however the enterprise data warehouse market is it's much much larger now traditional edws they're they're big they're slow they're cumbersome they're expensive and they're complicated but they've been operationalized and are critical for companies reporting and basic analytics but they've failed to live up to their promise of the 360 degree view of the customer and real-time analytics you know i had a customer tell me a while ago that my data warehouse it's like a snake swallowing a basketball he gave me example where a change in a regulation this was a financial company it would occur and it would force a change in the data model in their data warehouse and they'd have to ingest all this new data and the data warehouse choked and every time intel came out with a new processor they'd rush out they'd throw more compute at the problem he called this chasing the chips now what snowflake did was to envision a cloud native world where you could bring compute to massive data volumes on an elastic basis and only pay for what you use sounds so simple but technically snowflakes founders and those innovations of that innovation of separating compute from storage to leverage the flexibility of the cloud it really was profound and clearly based on this week's performance was the right call now i'll come back to this in a bit now where we think snowflake is going is to build a data cloud and and you can see this in the chart where your data can be ingested and accessed to perform near real-time analytics with machine learning and ai and snowflake's advantage as we've discussed in the past is that it runs on any cloud and it can ingest data from a variety of sources now there are some challenges here we're not saying that snowflake is going to participate in all these use cases that we show however with its resources now we expect snowflake to create new capabilities organically and then do tuck-in acquisitions that will allow it to attack many more more use cases in adjacent markets and so you look at this chart and the third layer if that's 60 billion it means snowflake needs to extend into the fourth layer because its valuation is already over 60 billion it's not going to get 100 market share so we call this next layer automated decision making this is where real time analytics and systems are making decisions for humans and acting in real time now clearly data is going to be a pretty critical part of this equation now at this point it's unclear that snowflake has the capability to go after this space as much of the data in this area is probably going to live at the edge but snowflake is betting on becoming a data data layer across clouds and presumably at the edge and as you can see this market is enormous so there's no lack of tam in our view for snowflakes that brings us to the other big question around competition everybody's talking about this look a lot of the investment thesis behind snowflakes snowflake is that slootman and his army including cfo mike scarpelli and what they did at servicenow will be repeated scarpelli is this operational guru he keeps the engine running you know with very very tight controls and you know what it's a pretty good bet snoopman and scarpelli and their team i'm not denying that but i will tell you that snowflake's competition is much more capable than what servicenow faced in its early days now here's a picture of some of the key competitors this is one of our favorites the xy graph and on the vertical axis is net score or spending momentum that is etr's version of velocity based on their quarterly surveys now i'm showing july survey october is in the works it's in the field as i speak on the horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the data set so it's a proxy for market share it's it's based on mentions not dollars and and that's why microsoft is so far to the right because they're huge and they're everywhere and they get a lot of mentions the more relevant data to us is the position of snowflake it remains one of the highest net scores in the entire etr survey based not just the database sector aw aws is its biggest competitor because most of snowflake's business runs on aws but google bigquery you can see there is is technically the most capable relative to snowflake because it's a true cloud native database built from the ground up whereas aws took a database that was built for on-prem par excel and brilliantly really made it work in the cloud by re-architecting many of the pieces but it still has legacy parts to it now here's oracle oracle's huge it's slow growth overall but it's making investments in r d we've talked about that a lot and that's going to allow it to hold on to its customers huge base and you can see teradata and cloud era cloudera is a proxy for data lakes which are low cost as i said and cloudera which acquired hortonworks is credited with the commercialization of that whole big datum and hadoop movement and then teradata is in there as well which of course they've been around forever now there are a zillion other database players we've heard a lot of them from a lot of them this week is on that inbound pr that i talked about but these are the ones that we wanted to focus on today the bottom line is we expect snowflakes vertical axis spending momentum to remain elevated and we think it will continue to steadily move to the right now let's drill into this data a bit more here we break down the components of etr's net score and this is specifically for snowflake over time now remember lime green is new adoptions the forest green is spending more relative to last year than more five percent more uh than last year or or greater gray is flat spending the pink is less spending and the bright red is we're leaving the platform the line up top that's netscore which subtracts the red from the green is an indicator of spending velocity the yellow line at the bottom is market market share or pervasiveness in the survey based on mentions now note the the blue text there that's etr's number one takeaway on snowflake two h-20 spending intentions on snowflake continue to trend robustly mostly characterized by high customer acquisition and expansion rates new adoptions market share among all customers is simultaneously growing impressive let's now look at snowflake against the competition in fortune 500 customers now here we show net score or again spending momentum over time for some of the key competitors and you can see snowflakes net score has actually increased since the april survey again this is the july survey this was taken the april survey was taken at the height of the us lockdown so snowflake's net score is actually higher in the fortune 500 than it was overall which is a good proxy for spend because fortune 500 spends more google mongodb and microsoft also also show meaningful momentum growth since the april survey you know notably aws has come off its elevated levels from last october and april it's still strong but that's something that we're going to continue to watch finally let's look at snowflakes market share or pervasiveness within the big three cloud vendors again this is a cut on the fortune 500 and you can see there are 125 respondents within the big three cloud and the fortune 500 and 21 snowflake respondents within that base of 125 and you can see the steady and consistent growth of share not huge ends but enough to give some confidence in the data now again note the etr callout but this trend is occurring despite the fact that each of the big three cloud vendors has its own competitive offering okay but i want to stress this is not a layup for snowflake as i've said this is not servicenow part two it's a different situation so let's talk about that look the competition here is not bmc which was servicenow's target as much as i love the folks at bmc we're talking here about aws microsoft and google amazon with redshift is dialed into this i've said often that they have copycatted snowflake in many cases and last fall at re invent we heard andy jassy make a big deal about separating compute from storage and he took a kind of a swipe at snowflake without mentioning them by name but let's listen to what andy jassy had had to say and then we'll come back and talk about it play the clip then what we did is because we have nitro like i was talking about earlier we built unique instances that have very fast bandwidth so that if you actually need some of those data from s3 for a query it moves much faster than if you just had to leave it there with without that high speed bandwidth instance and so with ra3s you get to separate your storage from your compute if it turns out by the way on your local ssds that you're not using all the ssd on that local ssd you only pay for what you use so a pretty significant enhancement for customers using redshift at the same time if you think about the prevailing way that people are thinking about separating storage from compute letting people scale separately that way as well as how you're going to do this large-scale compute where you move the storage to the a bunch of awaiting compute nodes there are some issues with this that you got to think about the first is think about how much data you're going to have at the scale that we're at but then just fast forward a few years think about how much data you're going to actually have to move over the network to get to the compute and we so look first of all jassy is awesome he stands up at these events for like reinvent for two hours and it connects trends and business to technology he's got a very deep understanding of the tech he's amazing however what aws has done in separating compute and storage is good but it's not as elegant architecturally as snowflake aws essentially has tiered the storage off the cluster to lower the overall costs but you really you can't turn off the compute completely with snowflake they've truly separated compute and storage and the reason is that redshift is great but it's built on an on-prem architecture that was originally an on-prem architecture that they had to redo so when jassy talks about moving the data to compute what he's really saying is our architecture is such that we had to do this workaround which is actually quite clever but this whole narrative about the prevailing ways to separate compute from storage that's snowflake and moving the data's use the word data's plural to the compute it really doesn't apply to snowflake because they'll just move the compute to the data thank you hadoop for that profound concept now does this mean snowflake is going to cakewalk over redshift not at all aws is going to continue to innovate so snowflake had better keep moving fast multi-cloud new workloads adjacent markets tam expansion etc etc etc microsoft they're huge but as usual there's not a lot to say you know about them they're everywhere they put out 1.0 products they eventually get them right because with their heft they get mulligans that they turn into pars or birdies but i think snowflake is going to bring some innovations to azure and that they're going to get good traction there in my opinion now google bigquery is interesting by all accounts it gets very high technical marks google's playing the long game and i would expect that snowflake is going to have a harder time competing in google cloud than it does within aws and what i'm predicting for azure but we'll see the last point here is that many are talking about the convergence of analytic and operational and transaction databases and the thinking is this doesn't necessarily bode well for specialists like snowflake and i would say a couple of things here first is that while it's definitely true you're not seeing snowflake positioning today as responding at the point of transaction to say for instance influence and order in real time and this may have implications at the edge it's going to have a lot of real-time inferencing but we've learned there are a lot of ways to skin a cat and we see integration layers and innovative approaches emerging in the cloud that could address this gap and present opportunities for snowflake now the other thing i'd say is you know maybe that thinking misses something altogether with the idea of snowflake in that third data layer that we showed you in our tam chart that data as a service layer or data cloud which is maybe a giant opportunity that they are uniquely positioned to address because they're cloud agnostic they've got the vision and they've got the architecture to allow them to very simply ingest data and then serve it up to businesses nonetheless we're going to see this battle continue between what i've often talked about these integrated suites and converged databases in the case of oracle converged pipelines in the case of the cloud guys versus the best of breed players like snowflake we talk about this all the time and there really isn't one single answer it's really horses for courses and customer preferences okay well you know i know you've been waiting for for me to tell you about the angles on ground floor investing and you probably think this is going to be crazy but bear with me and i got to caution you this is a bit tongue-in-cheek and it's one big buyer beware but as i said the insiders on snowflake had a 50x return on day one you probably didn't so i want to talk about the confluence of software engineering crypto cryptography and game theory powered by the underlying value of blockchain and we're talking here about innovations around a new internet in a distributed web or d-web where many distributed computers come together to form one computer that guarantees trust between two or more users for a variety of use cases not just financial store like bitcoin but that too and the motivation behind this is the fact that a small number of companies say five or six today control the internet and have essentially co-opted the major protocols like tcp http smtp pop3 etc etc and these people that we're showing here on this chart they're working on these new innovations there are many of them but i just name a few here olaf carlson we he started poly chain capital to invest in core infrastructure around these new computing paradigms this gentleman mark nadal is someone who's working on new d apps tim berners-lee who invented the internet he's got a project called solid at mit and it emphasizes data ownership and privacy and of course satoshi got it all started when she invented bitcoin and created the notion of fractional shares and by the way the folks at andreessen horowitz are actively making bets in this space so you know maybe this is not so crazy but here's the premise if you're a little guy and you wanted to invest in snowflake you couldn't until late in the game if you wanted to invest in the lamp stack directly in the late 90s there was no way to do that you had to wait for red hat to go public or to get a piece of the linux action but in this world that we're talking about here there are opportunities that are not mainstream and often they're based yes on cryptocurrencies again it's dangerous there are scams and and losers but if you do your homework there are actually vehicles for you to get in on the ground floor and you know some of these innovations are going to take off you could get a 50x or 100 bagger but you have to do your research and there's no guarantee that these innovations are going to be able to take on the big internet giants but there are people really smart technologists and software engineers that are young they're mission driven and they're forming a collective voice against a dystopian future because they want to level the playing field on the internet and this may be the disruptive force that challenges today's giants and if your game i would take a look at the space and see if it's worth throwing a few dollars at okay a little tangent from snowflake but i wanted to put that out there snowflake wow closes its first trading week as a company worth 66 billion dollars roughly the same as goldman sachs worth more than vmware and the list goes on i mean what's what's more is there to say other than remember these episodes are all available as podcasts so please subscribe i publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com so please check that out and please comment on my linkedin post or feel free to email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr thanks for watching everyone we'll see you next time you