How Snowflake Uses M&A to Scale

Kison Patel: [00:00:00] I am Kisan Patel, and you are listening to m and a Science where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during m and a deals.

Kison Patel: Welcome to the m and a Science podcast. This podcast is [00:00:30] part of a mission to rethink how m and a is done. The old school seller led approach, it's instead buyer led m and a, is all about strategy, alignment, and efficiency. Putting value creation at the center of every deal. And let's be real. It's not just about closing the deal, it's about making it successful.

Kison Patel: We uncover what truly works in m and a. By learning directly from the best. I'm your host, Kisan Patel, founder and CEO of Deal room, and Chief Scientist at m and a Science. Joining me [00:01:00] today is Stefan Williams, vice President of Corporate Development and Snowflake Ventures at Snowflake Trade on NYSC. Under SN Oow Stefan LEED Snowflake's Acquisition Strategy and oversees its corporate venture capital and startup accelerator programs.

Kison Patel: Stefan is at the forefront of how snowflake scales through smart m and a and strategic investments giving us a rare look at how a data giant stays ahead in a competitive AI driven world. [00:01:30] Today we'll explore how Snowflake uses a discipline cultural first approach to acquisitions when it prefers strategic investments over buyouts and how its corporate development team aligns, venture bets, startup partnerships and m and a to support growth.

Kison Patel: Stefan, how you doing today?

Stefan Williams: I'm good. Thanks for having me. Welcome to Snowflake.

Kison Patel: Thanks for hosting me. I love the campus. This is awesome.

Stefan Williams: It's great. Yeah. New digs. We moved in around three or so months ago. April timeframe.

Kison Patel: I appreciate you taking the time for doing deals [00:02:00] to have a conversation with me.

Stefan Williams: Thank you for having me.

Kison Patel: Wanna kick things off a little bit? Let's go about your background. So I moved to

Stefan Williams: the Yes, in 2011. I started at a boutique investment bank in the Bay Area, focused on IT service software companies. Quickly realized they wanted to be in-house and came across a company called Genesis, which is in the contact center customer experience management base.

Stefan Williams: Did a big deal with them, did a handful of deals. The biggest and most notable was with a company called Interactive Intelligence, which is a public company at the time, it was around a one and a half billion back in 2015. I quickly [00:02:30] realized obviously SaaS was a real thing, and as I moved from a company that was migrating from an on-prem to SaaS environment, SaaS was obviously clearly a motion and a deployment model that was gaining a lot of traction.

Stefan Williams: When I was doing my research, ServiceNow was a company that started to get onto my radar. Joined ServiceNow in 2016. That's where I met Mike Scarelli and Frank Sluman, who both came to Snowflake eventually. But where I first met them, I was part of the corporate development team there. We did a handful of acquisitions.

Stefan Williams: We stood up a venture, [00:03:00] CBC corporate venture capital arm. We invested in companies that were interesting to ServiceNow at the time, and then in 2019 when Frank Sluman came out of retirement and Mike Scarelli moved from ServiceNow to Snowflake, if there was ever an opportunity to go to another rocket ship.

Stefan Williams: You follow those two?

Kison Patel: Yeah.

Stefan Williams: And I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to come and join Mike here at Snowflake, where my charter was to stand up a corp dev team. We were at a point in time when. It was pre IPO, the company was obviously getting a lot of traction and there was no rigor or [00:03:30] process around inbounds.

Stefan Williams: Companies often come to you and, and talk through strategic alternatives, and there was really no one at the company that had any kind of experience and a way to navigate those waters. And so I was brought in to be corp dev number one and or higher number one, and, and build out that process.

Kison Patel: Build it out from scratch.

Kison Patel: From scratch, yeah. So started banking, got it inside with corporate development at Genesis and went to. Rapidly growing company. It's a ServiceNow. Didn't have enough of that. You did it again and started from scratch. Here at [00:04:00] Snowflake.

Stefan Williams: Yeah,

Kison Patel: originally from

Stefan Williams: uk. Yes and no. Born in San Francisco. Raised in the uk.

Stefan Williams: Oh, interesting. So, uh, yeah, I'm one of the only local San Franciscans that you will, you'll meet. 'cause most people come from other places. I was actually born there.

Kison Patel: I wanted to ask you about culture because I feel like I have to. Snowflake is very recognized for a unique culture. If anybody hasn't read the book, amp It Up by their CEO of Frank Sluman.

Kison Patel: Uh, could we talk a little bit about what makes the culture at Snowflake unique?

Stefan Williams: It's definitely evolved [00:04:30] over time. I came over when Frank took the reigns. I know that Bob Muglia beforehand had a different way of running the company. Frank's an absolute force, an operator that can execute. Snowflake had this incredible technology bringing Franking, which brought this muscle of clarity, ability to execute, move fast, and really enabled the selling motion that Snowflake had on top of this incredible platform.

Stefan Williams: Over the last year and a half, Streetar has been up the helm, and as an engineer by trade has really accelerated the velocity of which we're able to develop product. He's leading from the [00:05:00] top in terms of. He acts as if as he expects us others to act, he puts in 110% every single day and expects that from everyone that he works with to operate a level of excellence.

Stefan Williams: It's an imperative in this AI driven world that we're in. The world is moving so quickly, technology is moving faster than it ever has with things like coding agents and productivity tools that are available to us now and the world's moving faster and we need to continue to move quickly to stay on top.

Kison Patel: Does that mesh well with your UK upbringings?

Stefan Williams: It's been 15 years in, in the Bay Area now, so, uh, [00:05:30] I think, uh, so

Kison Patel: you've adopted,

Stefan Williams: I've adopted, look, I, you know, I'm a sports guy at heart. I love competition. I love being in the heat of those moments, and we're in a battle right now. There's this incredible opportunity to be kind of a, an enduring business.

Stefan Williams: We've got a seat at the table where there's a real opportunity to go and get that. As a competitor, I know many folks in the company are highly competitive and we wanna win.

Kison Patel: The word that stuck out was excellent. I actually had a friend that. Has been at Snowflake for a number of years with Frank and the predecessor, and has seen a dramatic shift in terms of the impact [00:06:00] like leadership makes on the organization.

Kison Patel: That's some very interesting things of way describing it. One phrase I heard was, it feels like you're gonna get fired any day, but it was like attributed to the greatest experience in professional development that person's ever had that brought the best out of them. I wanted to bring that up because I think it's gonna come up in this interview.

Kison Patel: The thing I'm really curious about is if you look at an organization that is committed to that excellence. It drives growth. I mean, ultimately that's what the goal is, to be [00:06:30] competitive and win. And if you experienced that in these last two organizations, that's why I'm really curious because I think there's very few organizations that can actually pull off at high growth velocity organically and then still manage acquisitions with it.

Kison Patel: That's where I'm really curious to learn from you is how do you do that? If we wanna jump right into it. Yeah. So how

Stefan Williams: do you think about m and a in a high growth company? Exactly. There's a flywheel that's moving in the early days. There's a muscle that needs to be built around m and a. It happened at ServiceNow and it's happened at Snowflake, where you start to look at [00:07:00] ways in which you're able to accelerate the velocity of which that firewall moves.

Stefan Williams: So from a product and technology perspective, what are the palatable acquisitions, small groups of people, teams and IP that you can bring into the company that can accelerate the velocity of which you're able to build product? That's the case, at least within my experiences. M and a is a muscle that needs to be built.

Stefan Williams: You can go as a deal person, go in and execute a deal. But the reality is the company needs to digest and make that successful. And it's not just me doing the deal. There's a team around us that, that are working through the product integration, the people integration, the [00:07:30] technology integration. Starting small is something that we've always done.

Stefan Williams: ServiceNow is exactly the same case. We started small. When I say small, it's sub a hundred, even sub 50 people bringing on those teams, creating success, proving out the thesis and the rationale. Measuring success against what you thought you were going to do, and using that as a way to think about expanding that muscle into new and interesting areas.

Kison Patel: So the main driver. It sounds like is

Stefan Williams: to build product velocity at the beginning, so that continues. Right, and I think [00:08:00] when you're growing so fast, m and a, we talk about this muscle, but it takes a lot of energy to integrate. There's senior people in the company that need to make sure that they're directly responsible and sponsors of the acquisition.

Stefan Williams: It takes a lot of time them to go and cross pollinate, make sure that cultural values are kept together. Not that they're not ostracized, that we're setting 'em up for success. Starting small has always been helpful, but when you're growing at a hundred percent or 50 plus percent, there's less of a need to go and think about a new growth engine.

Stefan Williams: It's more a [00:08:30] case of, holy crap, we've gotta hold onto this. This rocket ship is growing so fast. I remember Snowflake in the early days, it was growing a hundred plus percent year on year, and you're like, wow, let's just keep the car on the road and keep going forward. And less of a need of, oh, where do we find more growth?

Stefan Williams: It's more how do we harness the existing growth that we have, and over time as obviously the base gets bigger, growth rates come down. You start to see a little bit more appetite on, a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, and a pin up of that is Salesforce. They've done a bunch of acquisitions trying to hold onto [00:09:00] that 20% year on year growth.

Stefan Williams: As you mature as a business, the appetite to do more and bigger acquisitions definitely increases, and having that muscle being built over a number of times of doing smaller acquisitions and and iterating on that and perfecting that process. And allowing the business to catch up on what does it mean to integrate a company?

Stefan Williams: What does it mean to bring these people on board to the mission and they, and make sure they sign up for this charter and show success. Like that's something you have to do over a number of different deals.

Kison Patel: You really have to build m and a muscle. It sounds like a lot of the linchpin is around the [00:09:30] integration that you gotta make sure that you get that right.

Kison Patel: That takes some time to really build that capability around. And then the cultural values yes. Is gonna be a, a big one. Can you walk me through what it was like starting an m and a function from scratch? Like where do you start? Yeah.

Stefan Williams: I remember coming in and it was pre IPO for us, so it was a lot of it was getting IPO ready and make sure the S one is in decent shape, less attention on we need to go and buy companies more.

Stefan Williams: How do we make sure we get out and do it right? I remember I was effectively [00:10:00] interviewing the different product leaders in the company. Whilst learning the business as well. Databases aren't an easy technology to comprehend. Snowflake is an easy product to make it work and abstract that complexity. But learning about the database space and then interviewing different subject matter experts and product leaders internally was where I started.

Stefan Williams: And making sure that you have strong alignment with the leaders in the company, the people that are driving the strategy, driving the innovation, and where the product's going. Week one, week two, month one. That's where you start.

Kison Patel: So start off, get to know your [00:10:30] key people in-house, product leaders, SMEs, make sure you're aligned with where they want to go.

Kison Patel: What is the conversations like? Are you like, you guys have any product gaps we can solve with m and a? Like what? What does that look like?

Stefan Williams: It depends where you are at the stage, and this even happens today. You're trying to make sure that you're plugging yourself into the drive train of the company as to where are we going and how are we getting there.

Stefan Williams: This is the beauty of what I think corporate development is, is that whilst it's very financial, you need to understand how to model. You need to understand the finances. You need to understand how funding, environment, venture capital, diligence, all [00:11:00] that stuff. But on the other hand, you are learning product and that is continuously evolving.

Stefan Williams: You have to become a student of your industry and understand what the product roadmap is. What's the broader mission of what this particular area of our business is trying to do? What is our development timeline to get there? Understanding the different companies in that space. What are the landscape of vendors operating in that space?

Stefan Williams: Going, talking to them, how do I speak to as many CEOs as I can? How do I speak to as many venture capitalists that are investing in this space as I can? And how do I speak to as many internal subject matter experts as I can? How do I [00:11:30] educate myself continuously on the areas we need to be going spending time in and start to form an opinion?

Stefan Williams: And that's one of the unique places we get to sit at InCorp dev is that. You get those three really important data points, whether it's VCs, entrepreneurs and CEOs, internal stakeholders that allow you to start forming an opinion. The best corporate development professionals are those that are able to weave the math, the finance, the the VC type mindset along with product strategy and understanding and getting into the pulse of where the business is trying to get.

Kison Patel: Does that naturally shape in your m and a strategy or is it the more to [00:12:00] it?

Stefan Williams: 100%. There's a couple ways to look at it. So one is I'm understanding the different. Product motions internally, and I'm trying to form an opinion on, look, it's gonna take us 12, 18 months to go and build this. Let's go and have conversations with these companies and think about what we're able to do to accelerate those motions and how do we think about the time value of money and the benefit that's brings us and our customers.

Stefan Williams: As you get bigger and more scale, do you start to look at it from a top down approach as well? What are the different markets, the opportunities, the adjacencies that make sense? And you can do a more of a top down approach as as [00:12:30] well, you're trying to tackle it from all directions and pressure test existing.

Stefan Williams: And, and holding people accountable to delivering products. When they say they're gonna deliver those products and using that as data points going forward, the one thing you'll always hear is, but we can build that. We can have that in six months. In reality, it's a lot harder to go and build things. Do you think products can be built relatively easily, but there's magic to product market fit?

Stefan Williams: That's true. Finding that battle consistently as well.

Kison Patel: Is it fair to say there's almost like there's two views, there's a sort of internal view that you gather from all [00:13:00] these conversations around the product vision and then velocities ultimate goal. In the other view, you mentioned the top down, that's essentially the traditional like market mapping exercise.

Kison Patel: Yeah. To know where you sit in the current market, what are the adjacent markets, and have that view

Stefan Williams: a hundred percent. Yeah. The earlier you are on as a company on your corporate development m and a journey, you know, you probably start on the logical accelerators and teams and talent and IP that you can bring in to help you accelerate, and at least we have.

Stefan Williams: And then as you mature, you start to probably lean a little bit more on [00:13:30] broader strategic top down. You'll always be doing both. You'll always have a perspective on both, but as a company, these, the ones that I've been involved with it, it seems to have been on that spectrum of start small and then think about the bigger ones.

Stefan Williams: How does that get

Kison Patel: socialized? Is it you send out the C-suite and talk to the board? Like how does it ultimately get alignment across the organization?

Stefan Williams: Yeah. Aligned is a word that I'm told I use too much. What's your job? It's. Maintaining the right relationships across the organization. Like one of the threads I was talking about was [00:14:00] just managing those internal relationships with different product engineering, go to market leaders.

Stefan Williams: Having a, an incredibly tight relationship with our head of product, our head of engineering. I'm lucky enough to be in a position where one of the companies we acquired. The CEO of that company is now the CEO of our company. I have a, a naturally, a good relationship and a good functioning relationship with him where I have the ability to talk through and soundboard and make sure that I'm not going down a rabbit hole without at least some level of alignment.

Stefan Williams: We have regular cadences with the different leaders internally and try to bubble that up into different themes and [00:14:30] to make sure that we get the right executive exposure. And there's obviously memos that get drafted and those are used to further iterate on. What makes sense, what doesn't? Are we spending our time in the right areas?

Stefan Williams: Are these the right priorities? And you go from there. So

Kison Patel: that's

Stefan Williams: just

Kison Patel: tends

Stefan Williams: to get

Kison Patel: a little bit more public in the organization when you're sharing those

Stefan Williams: memos. No, try not to. I mean, M and a's pretty sensitive. It usually impacts both internally and externally around when you're doing an acquisition. We try to keep it pretty buttoned up as a team, the leadership level.

Stefan Williams: So yes, at the leadership level, but there's also deal sponsors that you're [00:15:00] basically part of a team. So Hope Dev is one arm. We help navigate and help folks make sure that they're walking the right. Path as it relates to the process we have, but we're working with them to build a business case that ultimately the team stands behind and gets conviction behind and promotes to, to the executive leaders with us.

Stefan Williams: It's not just corp, they saying, Hey, we're gonna go, we wanna buy this company, isn't it? No. It's a team of people that collectively believe this is the right thing and that team is small and it's cross-functional, so it usually stays within those teams. And then obviously, yeah, with the executives in the company.

Kison Patel: And [00:15:30] that's a evolving process. You get the strategy, obviously environments and fast.

Stefan Williams: It's iterative. It's every week, it's being thinked and updated.

Kison Patel: What was it like building out your team? Who was the first role you hired for? When did you hire them?

Stefan Williams: We went public and we started to get a lot more activity and we started to buy a company or two.

Stefan Williams: And it was clear that I know I, I couldn't be the only person doing this. I did bring on one at a time, a manager, which was kind of a, a mid-level corporate development professional to help with some of the blocking and tackling. So that could, at [00:16:00] least, that would've uplevel myself a little bit and make sure that the ship was still being steered in the right direction.

Stefan Williams: So that was about a year or so into my journey at Snowflake. We started a venture group and about a year in, we made our first investment in late 2020. That's a different motion. There's a different motion around how you think about investing in companies. Maybe two years in, we brought in somebody that was gonna focus a little bit more on the venture side of things, and then you go from there,

Kison Patel: and then you have venture partnerships.

Stefan Williams: Yeah. Charter is m and a. It's ventures, it's [00:16:30] startups and strategic partnerships.

Kison Patel: What does startups mean?

Stefan Williams: Startups. So as a platform, snowflake is extremely relevant for startups. We can abstract the ability to get a company and our product up and running extremely quickly. We can be a core component of their infrastructure.

Stefan Williams: We can be a very interesting deployment model that gives them access to data, ai, and enterprise customers. There is a whole community that are building products on top of Snowflake, our startup teams. Snowflake for Startups, is a group of people that can help startups [00:17:00] think through the right partner programs that we have.

Stefan Williams: We have accelerators, we have different programs. We have technical resources. A whole effort on. How do we make sure that when startups are thinking about building data-driven applications, data and AI-driven applications, that snowflake's a component of that conversation and that team is chartered to go and help those startups stand up their businesses and be successful.

Kison Patel: Interesting. Are you consider that

Stefan Williams: still like part of the non or inorganic? It's not really. Part of what I was saying earlier is that I'm speaking to VCs all the time. I'm [00:17:30] speaking to startups all the time. I'm speaking to internal stakeholders all the time. Okay. As part of that, you start to get plugged in on, in the startup ecosystem, it's part of how you keep a finger on the pulse.

Stefan Williams: Interesting. Six plus months ago, the opportunity came up to take over that team and it's been an incredible expansion of my charter and. We've been able to make some real headway in terms of the communities that are starting to build on Snowflake. We have a, an annual startup competition where we had nearly a thousand applicants that applied for this.

Stefan Williams: The startup competition that was ultimately came to a presentation at our user conference in June. And then we've got [00:18:00] great things around the SVA hub. So the SV AI Hub, it's the Silicon Valley AI hub. It's here in the Midland Park office on the top floor. It's a dedicated space for startups to come in and collaborate and have as a workspace and to talk about data and ai, and obviously snowflake's a key component of that.

Stefan Williams: It's a really interesting way to keep your finger on the pulse. When I put my m and a and venture hat on, I'm well read, I'm informed, I know what's going on, especially within the Snowflake ecosystem.

Kison Patel: The venture group. I'm familiar with m and a, we talked through that, but what's the thinking [00:18:30] behind the venture group?

Kison Patel: I'm curious because I feel like it's evolving in the industry. Yeah, because I feel like there was, this just did a podcast, kind of calling it version one, version two, where originally it was similar to the venture where you wanted to make some bets and look for return on it. Now it's like more of a focus on getting access to technology or IP so that you can.

Kison Patel: Accelerate without necessarily acquiring the early stage startup that might have a crazy high valuation.

Stefan Williams: The great thing about Snowflake is it's a consumption based business model. When we can [00:19:00] enable a startup to work with Snowflake and solve customer problems with their data, that customer is getting more value from the data they put in Snowflake.

Stefan Williams: They're likely more sticky. And they're likely driving more consumption and we make money when customers drive consumption or we their data. From a venture perspective, if we can use ventures as a tool in a suite of tools, one was obviously the startup team and all the programs and benefits that come with that.

Stefan Williams: But for those that are really showing product [00:19:30] market fit, that are showing customer success, it's a tool that truly is strategic capital where we wanna put wind behind the sales of emotion that we know is working. And that can really help a broader suite of customers if they only had the opportunity.

Stefan Williams: When we invest, we actually formulate a strategic partnership or a commercial agreement whereby we get in a room, we get the smart people in the room, we talk about what are the integrations with the two technologies that we can round out and build that's ultimately gonna lead to better customer experience and better customer traction.

Stefan Williams: And we say, okay, you know, whether it's 1, 2, 3 phases over 6, 12, 18 months [00:20:00] time. What are the things that make sense such that we're gonna, we're doing the right thing for the customer, and we agree on those? We also agree on, okay, once we hit these different milestones, we think here's the go to market.

Stefan Williams: Things that we can do actually drive traction across our sellers, across our customers, across our partners. We document that and it's our North Star. We've all agreed that these are the integrations that we're gonna do collectively, and largely that's on the startup team to go and build those integrations out.

Stefan Williams: And if these are gonna achieve, we're gonna go and put these go to market motions in play that really brings this kind of strategic narrative to investments that we're making. [00:20:30] It's. Here's a company that's typically doing something pretty interesting with AI and data, something that's probably resonating with some Snowflake customers and something that's actually gonna be doing a lot more in the future if you wanna sign up for whatever they're offering.

Stefan Williams: There's some real GoTo market motions that we can enable to these startups. So long way of saying we're not investing to get eyes and ears and to potentially acquire. We're investing to build an ecosystem around AI and data in service of our customers, and so they can get use of data in more ways than just from Snowflake.

Stefan Williams: They can utilize their [00:21:00] data by using best of breed products across common underlying data platform. That is Snowflake, that might touch, snowflake typically would service the CIO, but. Now with Partner X, the CSO or the CHRO or the CRO or the CMO now can actually start to get functionality through applications powered on data that they already have.

Kison Patel: So you get them as a committed customer and then you're able to help them accelerate their growth. But the

Stefan Williams: go to market sometimes when there's different deployment models. So yes, sometimes they can be snowflake's customer directly. [00:21:30] Others, we can actually be a deployment model for the partner. So partners can actually connect into the customer's underlying snowflake.

Stefan Williams: In a secure and governed way and get access to a technology without having to go through a bunch of vendor security risk assessments and governance and legal requirements. As a startup, I'm a five person startup based in some random country in the world. If I'm building and deploying within the boundaries of Snowflake through Snowflake's marketplace and with a Snowflake customer, you're able to do so with much less friction, and you're able to do so at Enterprise customers.

Stefan Williams: Now you can go and deploy [00:22:00] AI enabled data applications at the biggest companies in the world. As a small startup without having those lengthy vendor risk assessments that take months and that hinder business.

Kison Patel: That's interesting. That's why we see this model like popping up with other ecosystem plays.

Kison Patel: Yeah. Just hit the startup fund, but it's more, now I get a real sense of why they do that.

Stefan Williams: For Snowflake, obviously more data gets put in Snowflake. Customer stickiness drives consumption. Yes. For the customer. They get to activate and use more of the data that they have in Snowflake across many different lines of [00:22:30] businesses and workflows.

Stefan Williams: So I would say best of breed data platform with best of breed modular applications that sit on top of that in a common underlying data infrastructure. And then the partners, they get streamlined, go-to market and they get access to data to empower their applications. To the extent we can show real success, we can lean in more on the go-to-market side as well.

Stefan Williams: So it's a three-way win, which is organic and it's not a stick, it's a carrot. I

Kison Patel: asked about the journey about building the m and a function, how you've already expanded it to the three different pillars. You went from m and a venture, then the startup slash [00:23:00] strategic partnerships, and we talked about the team brought in a mid-level person.

Kison Patel: I take it, they're helping with more of the execution, financial modeling, quarterbacking, diligence. Yeah. How did the team expand from there? Did you bring in leads for these different groups and just things got more naturally? A lot of them were already

Stefan Williams: somewhat stood up, so there's teams that were in place.

Stefan Williams: We've got people in the startup team that have been here for 10 years. We were part of the sales organization when it very first started. Those are folks that have already been established and there was a natural alignment between the two teams where it made a lot of [00:23:30] sense. We were having the same conversations.

Stefan Williams: The startup team was talking to venture capitalists, they were talking to startups. We were talking to venture capitalists and startups, and it's like, hang on. Why are we having the same tech conversation twice? A lot of it was like streamlining the systems and processes internally. To unlock a lot more efficiency and now I feel like we've done that.

Stefan Williams: Now we're on the offense, we're working as a team and driving business on, so that

Kison Patel: makes a lot of sense on, on this sort of front end. You've got alignment on the strategy, you're getting the right people in place and everybody's getting blind on what the goals are. When it comes to going back to what we mentioned, like the biggest risk is the [00:24:00] integration that doesn't go right and like how you made that point in these small and build up to it.

Kison Patel: Was there anything there that you had to do to get the organization ready?

Stefan Williams: There was a couple of early deals with, you know, when you get the deal done, you ring the bell, you pat each other on the back, and you're like, great, let's think about the next one. Or some, you know, some leader in the company comes down on the next deal that's like the next highest priority and suddenly the company just acquired, it's not really top of mind and had been balls that were dropped.

Stefan Williams: We did bring in somebody on the integration site, one person that focuses on a lot of the project management and integration efforts and, and make sure that [00:24:30] nothing's dropped because there's definitely this, when a deal is on and you become very tunnel vision on getting that deal done, and you can lose sight of some of the smaller things that maybe in and of itself aren't gonna break things over time, they start to accumulate and things start to get dropped.

Stefan Williams: It was extremely important to bring on. This integration lead who had six, seven years of integration experience directly onto the team so that when we do, I think we did, you know, eight to 10 deals in one year. Wow. Where we needed it, and that was really where we had to make sure that we were a scaled team.

Kison Patel: This is where we turn into a little bit of therapy [00:25:00] session. We might visit, revisit some painful memories here, but bear with me when we think about this first one, two acquisitions. What were those like? Lessons learned, if you wanna frame it that way. Yeah, that sort of got you thinking about what needed to change.

Stefan Williams: There's always lessons learned, whether you on completed deals, but also deals that don't materialize for one reason or another. And we try to do a good job of making sure we take some time after every deal to think through what are the things that work, what are the things that didn't, what do we need to change, what should we do more of and document it.

Stefan Williams: We've done a pretty [00:25:30] good job. Of making sure that we are learning from our mistakes.

Kison Patel: So when I do my first deal, I'm gonna screw a lot of things up and I'm trying to shorten my learning curve here. So if you can just kind of gimme a few. It's cut the chase. Yeah. Gimme a few things of make sure I don't, I mean,

Stefan Williams: the first deals that we were doing, they were very small in nature.

Stefan Williams: One of the things I've learned is that once you do a deal, and we talked a little bit about it on the integration side, but on the product side, who's directly responsible for the success of that integration? 'cause everyone has different priorities and everyone has things that they need to get done. And if you don't have one [00:26:00] person or maybe two that are directly accountable for the success of the deal, and make sure you have defined timelines post acquisition, to get back in a room and talk through, here's what we said we were gonna do and here's where we're at.

Stefan Williams: Be honest, hold yourself accountable to what we said we were gonna do, and where are we at on a regular cadence? 30 60, 91 80 after the deal, days after the deal. That's a very important thing to just not lose sight of. Again, as deal people, we get excited by the next deal, and once you get it, it feels like another notch on the belt.

Stefan Williams: That's just the beginning. [00:26:30] When you do the deal, that's the beginning for the company. How do you integrate yourself and be part of that process to make sure that it's successful? Because guess what? If it's not successful, you can have a harder time doing the next one, two, and three deals.

Kison Patel: Accountability of integration and then having

Stefan Williams: and

Kison Patel: clear having owners, timeline

Stefan Williams: owners.

Stefan Williams: You need somebody to have as a directly responsible individual. We call them DRIs

Kison Patel: DRIs. This is helpful. So first deal, double down on that. Make sure you got folks that are really gonna hold accountability, ownership RIS for the [00:27:00] integration. Then have clear timelines. Yeah. These companies, when you acquire them, we talked about culture earlier, how do you look at that?

Kison Patel: I guess then versus now you look at organization and it, it's more about you're identifying a culture fit and that sort of lends to make a go, no go decision. Is that part of it? Is it more of. This is how we're gonna change this company's culture, or this is maybe gonna modify our integration plan based on their culture.

Kison Patel: Like everybody's got a different view.

Stefan Williams: Culture is super, super important, and [00:27:30] it's hard to put your finger on, oh, ask these questions and you'll have the magic number. My magic answer or magic number. I often allude to m and a being like the process of getting married. It takes many different engagements and interactions to validate is this the right person for me and do we have the right values?

Stefan Williams: How do we think about these things? Whatever it might be, like culture and trust you discover and get that over time. That's part of diligence. That's part of why, at least in my experience, and I know it has happened in diff different deals, but like m and a isn't done. [00:28:00] You know, you can get deals done in a month or whatever timeframe.

Stefan Williams: It needs to be weeks these days. It's really, relationships are built up over time.

Kison Patel: But now here's the thing, take it, you're not buying all your assets on auctions. 'cause if you really wanna build relationships, you gotta take the buyer led, be proactive out there, building relationships ahead of time. 100%.

Stefan Williams: Is that most of your deals? Most of our deals are very much not the first time we've eng engaged. Yeah. We'll have typically engaged with them beforehand. Not all of them, but most of them. Coming back to the concept of [00:28:30] culture. How do you identify whether the folks are the right culture or not? It's something that you get a perspective on over time.

Stefan Williams: Earlier, you can have conversations with companies that maybe at the time you're not looking to acquire. You have a relationship, you have a partnership, you've want to a joint customer success. All of that kind of leads into understanding how the company operates, how the company thinks.

Kison Patel: It's just like dating.

Stefan Williams: You gotta spend the time. It's very similar to dating. You gotta just, yeah, you gotta put the time in. You gotta ask the right questions. You gotta understand the incentives of people. You need to [00:29:00] understand how they operate, how they treat people. How they treat their customers, how they treat their investors, how they treat their employees, how many deals you've done since you start the on snowflake.

Stefan Williams: Yeah. M and a deals we're coming up to probably 20 acquisitions at Snowflake. 20 acquisitions,

Kison Patel: so added 20. I'm curious about this. So. You're obviously proactive. You're getting to know everybody. How many of them like turn into full blown auctions? That proactive relationship development, did that give you like up in auction process?

Stefan Williams: It's interesting. Every banker will tell you that you need to have a competitive process to drive the optimal, most [00:29:30] optimal price.

Kison Patel: Yes. Every banker listening to this right now would agree. What I'm trying to get to is. You put all this effort, and this is like I did this bio LED framework, and this is like the first pillar is really having a clearly defined strategy.

Kison Patel: If you have a clearly defined strategy, it allows you to actually go be proactive. Yeah. And build those relationships. Yeah. Then what I'm curious about is what does that look like when it unfolds? Because really buy, or is it really like a process? Yeah. 'cause I mean, it's inevitable at times. It's inevitable.

Kison Patel: If it's something that obviously the person has like multiple [00:30:00] people inquiring, then they'll probably gonna hire a banker or or something like that. So that's what I was curious about. 20 deals, how many of them actually end up in a bank process, and then what does that look like? Because sometimes it's.

Kison Patel: A banker is in there, but it's still, they're just facilitating versus running a, an actual competitive process. Yeah. Other times they're running a competitive process. Yeah. And then I'm just curious, because you've invested in that time, how does it impact the outcomes of those scenarios?

Stefan Williams: We often get banker processes, and if you have a relationship with the CEO at the time, that's, [00:30:30] that's gonna be very helpful for your participation in that process.

Stefan Williams: I don't think there's ever a case in which a relationship that you have is gonna hurt you in any type of process for a buyer led motion. Obviously that's gonna, CEO to CO is incredibly important, cultivating that relationship over time and, and everyone's different. This is why m and a is so personal.

Stefan Williams: Everyone acts different. And when you're doing deals, you've got different things that different folks care about. Every seller has different motives, every person is different. And you need to kind of dial in to understand [00:31:00] what's their motivating factor. A relationship with the CEO and the relevant, maybe the relevant board, like those are helpful in and of themself ever Gonna stop.

Stefan Williams: Uh, seller or a company's being bought, not sold? Are they gonna stop them testing the market? Depends how strong that relationship is. Depends on the price that you're talking about. Depends on conviction that the, and the relationship that the folks have. There's just a lot of different factors that come into play to say,

Kison Patel: so outta 20 deals, how many, oh, and how many ended up in [00:31:30] a, in a full blown auction?

Kison Patel: And then how many ended up just being represented and how many were purely proprietary.

Stefan Williams: There's definitely some that are buyer led and that were done in a way which enabled us to get a deal done without having to go down the complications of an active process for one reason or another. I would say the norm is probably companies that are.

Stefan Williams: It happens on a daily basis at this point in time is I'm testing the market, I'm raising my series A, B, C, whatever it might be. But I've [00:32:00] also, one of these conversations has turned strategic, and so I'm talking to a handful of companies and if I was gonna think of anyone, I'd love to think of Snowflake as a potential outcome.

Stefan Williams: Is this something of interest That's the most common. Outreach that we get,

Kison Patel: that's someone you've already talked to, they're just responding back. Typically, we're in,

Stefan Williams: we could be an investor, we could be a partner, we might not be a partner, and we might be banker in outreach. But I guess to level up a little bit, part of what allows you to operate a little bit more efficiently is to have a good understanding as to where is the company going from a product perspective.

Stefan Williams: What are the [00:32:30] strategic priorities? How do we think about proactive m and a versus reactive m and a, and how do we have a buyer led process versus, Hey, this company's for sale. Are you interested, which we'll always look at. You can cut through the noise a little bit if you are focused on what matters for you versus being reactive all the time

Kison Patel: for any of those 20 deals.

Kison Patel: Came in from a banker book

Stefan Williams: first time you heard about the company? I don't think so. First time I've heard of the company is unlikely.

Kison Patel: Yeah.

Stefan Williams: At a minimum I've heard of the company, maybe haven't had a conversation with 'em, may maybe not had a conversation.

Kison Patel: So a very, [00:33:00] very proactive approach in terms of how you guys build pipeline and ultimately execute these deals.

Stefan Williams: We try to be as proactive as possible, but you need to be very receptive to being reactive. Having clarity on your strategy can help navigate those waters a lot more efficiently. If you do have that clarity on where do we think m and a is gonna be able to be most utilized, whether it be from a acquihire product acquisition or even transformative is maybe a different case, but across the different spectrums of a of m and a.

Kison Patel: This is a big investment of time to build a relationship with all these CEOs. Yep. [00:33:30] Date them. Understand the culture. Yep. Things become actionable. Like I, I feel like early on you're investing a lot of time in the relationship, but if, if we think like ultimately outcome is to have a successful integration, how, how do you take this phase in between your con, your confirmatory diligence when you get things signed and move to close?

Kison Patel: Now, how do you take that time to really set the deal up for a success? And especially like culture is a big part of it. There's

Stefan Williams: a rigorous diligence process. You learn from a lot of deals that you've done. Every deal, you learn something new. We have. Pretty refined [00:34:00] business cases that get put together, that have how we're thinking about integration.

Stefan Williams: What are the measures of success? What are the integration milestones over what timeframes? It's documented. Everything's documented. You basically create like an integration thesis. 100%. It's documented. There's an integration thesis, and by the way, it's something that you need to collaborate on with the target.

Stefan Williams: You're kind of appealing the onion with every layer of diligence. And at some point you get to a place, once you've got through maybe the initial term sheet and you've agreed on price, the elephant in the room and broad deal structure, things [00:34:30] become a lot more collaborative because you are all on the same train of trying to get a deal done.

Stefan Williams: It's not just a case of this is our view and this is how we're gonna do it. And then you day one, the company comes in and is like, right, how are we doing things? What's going on? So we've been working on this for the last few weeks. We're in agreement on not only the integration plan, but the timeline and my charter.

Stefan Williams: You start with a thesis. You refine and iterate internally. You get through an initial hurdle of, let's just say the term sheet, and then you start to work increasingly collaboratively with the target. Get to a place where there's [00:35:00] high conviction on the integration plan, and you're acting as a team.

Kison Patel: You're socializing the integration plan with the target.

Stefan Williams: At some point you have to, during confirmatory diligence, this is opening up in the process of getting married, right? You have to start to open up. You do have to start to share, and they're gonna start to share information that is increasingly sensitive.

Stefan Williams: As a buyer, you need to lean into that. It's a two-way thing. It's not just tell me, gimme everything and, and I'll make the decision. It's collaborative and by the way, founders have perspectives on what am I gonna be doing? What's my charter? What's the team going to be doing? Are you gonna split them up into the four corners of the company?

Stefan Williams: Are we gonna maintain it? Being a team, do we have a [00:35:30] goal? What's our responsibility? Who do we roll into? What's the hiring plan? If we get married, we're gonna

Kison Patel: buy

Stefan Williams: a little

Kison Patel: house in the prairie. Get a chicken coop. Yeah. A bunch of dogs and cats running around. Build the empire. Like we wanna be clear about that before.

Stefan Williams: Exactly. How do you build conviction? It's a process. You start with a thesis, you pressure test it, and then you collaborate on it and you collectively own it. And at the point of signing the definitive agreement, we're already acting as a team. It's we and us, not you and me. And day one it's like, right, let's go get this done.

Stefan Williams: You told me you did [00:36:00] eight deals in one year. There was a year that was very busy.

Kison Patel: I'm curious about this part because you took all the stuff we've already talked about. There's a lot of effort, complexities, alignment, and accountability. Managing concurrent deals, I feel like is its own challenge. Yeah. And I'm curious about like, what have you learned from, because obviously you don't do eight sequentially, like they're running some concurrent deals, and how do you do that without blowing up people?

Stefan Williams: You don't? Uh, it's the short answer. I think we've done three deals at one point in time and then we're [00:36:30] obviously at different stages. And this is where you do need to start building the team out and making sure that both the corp dev team, but also the functional diligence and integration teams, we can probably do those deals, but it does be.

Stefan Williams: They're on the company and it distracts people from their day job, and this is incremental to their day jobs. So you do end up burning the midnight all a little bit. It's deal based work. When it comes, you've gotta be all on. And we didn't do three deals off the bat. Team of one, I had two deal leads, myself, an analyst that was helping.

Stefan Williams: We've got an [00:37:00] integration manager that's working on the integration that's orchestrating all the different functional diligence and integration teams. There's often 70 to a hundred people on the integration team across all the different functions in the company, making sure that we're integrating the systems and processes and people, and it's a big effort.

Stefan Williams: It's tough because there's different term sheets and deal terms and negotiation tactics to think through the different dynamics of every deal. It's, it's making sure that you're extremely organized, documenting things and trying to stay on top of it. It's not something I would like to do [00:37:30] consistently, but it has happened.

Stefan Williams: Make sure you got the right people on it. The right teams in place built that muscle. So it's not new to anyone. Right? It's they've done it before.

Kison Patel: Mm-hmm.

Stefan Williams: And look, some of them were smaller, so it was a lot easier to go and do the diligence and integration. These aren't huge deals that you're doing. Three concurrent, but

Kison Patel: I can handle it.

Kison Patel: This is how we do things at Snowflake.

Stefan Williams: Amp it up.

Kison Patel: Amp it up. You convince people to sell. Is it the relationship game and you're waiting for the phone call back or a call from the banker? Or

Stefan Williams: there's like the tactical of like [00:38:00] on the economic side is an economic. Answer to that question, but I don't think we're trying to convince people to come and work at Snowflake.

Stefan Williams: That's probably not the right deal to be doing. Often people see Snowflake as a scaled company by which the technology that target company has built can really impact the world. I can't think of con conversations that haven't really started that way. I don't think convincing somebody to sell is like the right part to start inspiring.

Stefan Williams: It

Kison Patel: sounds like you got the better together story.

Stefan Williams: The early [00:38:30] discovery is, the early part of that relationship is what would that better together story look like? Does that interest you? Trying have a pretty open conversation up front. Where's your heart and your head at and is this something we should lean in on or is this something maybe you're not ready for and you need to start getting signals as early as you can.

Stefan Williams: You don't wanna be going down a process where. There's just no chance this company's gonna sell, and you're trying to convince it the whole way that that sounds like a lot of wasted energy. Inspire them to sell, let them put the pieces together. You want them to want it, right? Yeah. It's almost a little bit of, and and there's something, when you get into these cycles of talking about D, there's genuinely, [00:39:00] there's some sort of excitement.

Stefan Williams: You talk about the Gartner hype cycle and the more you engage, you're like, wow, this is gonna be incredible. We're gonna change the world. And then you get, this is amazing, and then it's, wow, we need to integrate into this way and this is gonna take time and it's gonna, you get into this trough of disillusionment and then you get onto this path of like.

Stefan Williams: I see the light and we've got a real path here. If you're starting off that beginning part of the hype cycle, that is, that's

Kison Patel: excitement's gotta be seated within that company, the target, CEO, like they gotta have some, it's almost like an organic excitement.

Stefan Williams: Yeah, I think so. You nurture and cultivate that [00:39:30] through the CEO to CEO and leadership to leadership conversations that you have.

Stefan Williams: And you're gonna know pretty quickly coming outta that meeting whether it's, oh, that's really, that's actually really cool. It's usually not one party saying that. Usually you come out both kind of thinking along those lines. Convincing somebody to sell doesn't feel like the recipe for success.

Kison Patel: When you're talking to CEOs, how do you decipher between this is an m and a conversation versus the venture conversation?

Kison Patel: Because you even mentioned that you'll have folks that are at their next venture round, but then they're exploring m and a. [00:40:00] How do you sort of look at that opportunities of which hat to wear or does it just come up through those early

Stefan Williams: conversations? It goes back to something we talked about earlier, just being plugged into the business and understanding what's interesting from an m and a perspective and what's not.

Stefan Williams: There's a lot of opportunities that come my way or it's clearly not gonna be an acquisition opportunity for us, but there is often a partner motion and given that they're raising and we, so we don't lead rounds, we typically participate in rounds. So given the raising round that they're like, is there a conversation to be had on the investment side?

Stefan Williams: Which then comes down to what is it from a [00:40:30] product perspective that we're doing that's interesting. What is the movement of data? Do we have any joint customer success today? And if we did get into rumors that, what are the things that could be interesting to really double down on from a product and engineering perspective that could lead to a better outcome for customers?

Stefan Williams: And if there's something to talk about there, that's when ventures can be a lot more impactful. But deciphering between one or the other is making sure, again, you have alignment with where the product is going, what our strategy is, how we think about m and a, make sure we have alignment across the executives.

Stefan Williams: Hopefully by understanding that you at least know when [00:41:00] something's interesting or not from an acquisition perspective. And if it is, then obviously there's a path to go and double click and learn more and have the right conversations across both companies to hopefully get to a no, which is always easy answer or.

Stefan Williams: That's actually a little bit interesting. Why don't we go and do these one or two things more to learn more.

Kison Patel: So the, if you're participating in these venture deals, you're not negotiating for a call.

Stefan Williams: A call option. Yeah. No.

Kison Patel: Write a first refusal.

Stefan Williams: No. We ask for a write of notification. Yeah. Roen notification.

Stefan Williams: Uh, write of first refusal. I know an acronym for it. Ro Fin write of first notification, which is basically [00:41:30] we're gonna invest. We're gonna lean in the partnership. We're gonna try to give you some go-to-market benefits. We're gonna try to, in good faith, do the right thing. And if you're gonna sell the company, I just want a heads up.

Stefan Williams: I don't wanna read it about it in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. I want a heads up. And that heads up is, Hey, we've been approached. Before I sign anything that's exclusive, I'm just giving you your notification. I don't have the right to understand who the buyer is, how much it's for. But I do have the right to participate if I wanted to, to put an offer in.

Stefan Williams: And then you get, as a founder, get the decision to make as to whether that's interesting or not, but at least I have a seat at the table when the [00:42:00] decision's being made. That's a fair outcome. That's fair.

Kison Patel: Can we talk about just some of the deals, like, you don't have to name the company, but I'm just what, like a deal you're most proud about?

Kison Patel: Just wanna hear like how it went down and,

Stefan Williams: yeah. Recency bias a little bit, just 'cause they're more top of mind, but Nivo was a pretty cool deal. Street's now our CEO. Buying a company that ultimately ends up being the company that you work for as CEO. There's value that you're adding as a corporate development professional, you're always trying to think about how am I bringing value to the table?

Stefan Williams: And are these deals actually driving real business outcomes and success? And al's obviously an an [00:42:30] incredible leader and. Leading the ship at Snowflake now. It's been an incredible year and a half. Maybe that's Street

Kison Patel: Acquisition

Stefan Williams: Street's Company, Neva we acquired through an acquisition and now Sridhar is our CEO.

Kison Patel: Oh, wow.

Stefan Williams: That was obviously a really good deal for the company and Street's. Co-founder is the head of our engineering team, and it was really the foundation of a lot of what we do in AI today. An incredibly important acquisition for the company, and we've obviously got the most important leaders in our company now being driven by a lot of that company that came into Snowflake, so extremely impactful acquisition.

Stefan Williams: I'd say two more. Recent ones are pretty [00:43:00] interesting. We acquired a company called Data Volo, which is now what Snowflake calls OpenFlow, which is a kind of a connectivity platform that allows a lot of data to come in by structured and unstructured into snowflake. The whole framework that we've stood up upon, the product we acquired, which has been extremely impactful.

Stefan Williams: We announced it at our user conference. So again, when I answer these questions, it's like, what are the most successful, I guess I'm answering in most impactful. And then the most recent one we did was Crunchy Data, which is a whole new opportunity. It's a Postgres database in a managed service company or [00:43:30] has managed service around hosting Postgres databases and the prospect of weaving and integrating it into Snowflake.

Stefan Williams: And the. Workloads that are gonna be relevant for us as a company going forward and the applications that are gonna be more relevant. That's extremely exciting. Top of mind. They're more recent ones, but yeah, those three are, have been pretty impactful. Hopefully continue to be successful at the company.

Kison Patel: That would be so daunting, like joining your team at this time because it's just matured so much when early days when I got to know Snowflake. I'll take that as a compliment. Hopefully we've matured. No, these are awesome to hear about the, [00:44:00] some of those deals. And I guess what I wanted to lend into is just this current market we're in.

Kison Patel: AI things are getting pulled under your rug in multiple different directions, and how do you keep up with it fast. We're in a tiny little space of m and a technology fast. I can't even keep up with how many AI companies from m and A are popping up. I'm sure they're reaching out to you.

Stefan Williams: Yeah. Companies just going from zero to 10 to a hundred million in a couple of years, which is just, it's unheard of.

Stefan Williams: And yeah, the product market fit there is incredible. So. How do you stay on top of it? It's just be [00:44:30] continuing this theme of just being a student of your industry, a student of your, of the product that you have, the landscape that you operate in, and the newest and most innovative technologies that are coming out in the world.

Stefan Williams: And obviously that's AI today. How you ha you have teach me

Kison Patel: how do you do this? How do you diligence these companies even know you're buying the right thing? Use ai.

Stefan Williams: A good answer out of the box. Knowing the right thing is it's not one thing, it's a combination of things, as we talked about earlier. It's having the right systems, processes, [00:45:00] the right alignment, the right ownership, the right measurements of success, the right integration plan, all of that is like gonna lead to whether a deal can be integrated and successfully driven to a, to a hopefully the conclusion that you thought it would be.

Stefan Williams: Staying on top of industry trends, it's, I speak to a VC pretty much every day. These guys are putting money where their mouth is, their livelihoods are based on carry and they're investing a lot of time into a particular space. And I'll do your job, I'll question upon question and just be curious and inquisitive and understand the trends and double down on that and [00:45:30] ask the same question to another founder or investor or whatever, whoever it might be.

Stefan Williams: And then go and have a similar conversation internally. What do you think about this tech technology category? Have we thought about this? Are we looking to build? Are we looking to potentially integrate? What are your thoughts on that? This kind of. Hunger to always learn, always be curious, always question and make sure you understand.

Stefan Williams: If you can continue to do those types of things, again, lead you to be the student of your profession. You're gonna be much better situated to go and figure out how to navigate the waters in a vastly evolving AI market.

Kison Patel: Gotta do your homework.

Stefan Williams: Gotta [00:46:00] do your home.

Kison Patel: When you look at just this AI landscape and all these companies popping up, how do you even keep tabs on them?

Kison Patel: And that's something I'm even struggling with. My trackers just gets longer. Longer every day. The tracker

Stefan Williams: does get long. Yeah. There's obviously the logistical, like how do you keep tabs on track and document and make sure you're keeping tabs on? I think for companies that are either AI relevant or being built in and around data and ai, thinking about Snowflake, that's where the.

Stefan Williams: Snowflake for startup teams is really helpful in having a feed of information. It's almost a little [00:46:30] bit like a pipeline, more on the venture and partnership side versus m and a, but it's always good to know who's doing well in and around the ecosystem as it relates to ai. There's a huge push in the company to be increasingly AI forward.

Stefan Williams: We've got some incredible initiatives out there. We've got the Tex Rest API service that can abstract the complexity of which underlying foundation model you want to have and put your data against. Have your application run against the whole Cortex Service with Cortex Analyst, cortex Search and [00:47:00] Snowflake Intelligence, which is an intelligence layer across all of your data where you get to ask questions of your data.

Stefan Williams: There's so much activity happening with companies building on top of those primitives that Snowflake builds is it's extremely exciting. And one of the good things is we have a lot of telemetry on the activity and the consumption that these startups are. Making happen within Snowflakes. There is a data feed that you have that helps understand who's driving the best outcomes, what are the signals from customers that we're getting.

Stefan Williams: So that's obviously one way we keep abreast of it, but that's a smart way to do it.

Kison Patel: You got a [00:47:30] big startup ecosystem. We've got a big startup ecosystem. We

Stefan Williams: get a lot of data. There's a whole separate kind of partnership team as well outside of the strategic partnerships that I manage that are managing a lot of those relationships and making sure that we're making the right kind of.

Stefan Williams: Or getting them to provide the right telemetry to ultimately give us information to help make them successful to the extent they're able to be successful. There's a lot happening, and when I just level up a little bit and talk about a lot of the cortex of the AI services that we provide, the principle behind how we are relevant is that whether you're a company or a [00:48:00] startup, you're able to use the most innovative AI technologies against your data.

Stefan Williams: From a customer perspective, it's gonna allow. Increased business outcomes from a partner perspective, it allows you to get access to a lot more data to drive those business outcomes. One of the more interesting areas that we're spending a lot of time is agents are everywhere. Yeah. And agents are the ability to act as if a knowledge, as a knowledge worker and pick your function.

Stefan Williams: And if you can empower knowledge workers with, obviously the AI [00:48:30] capabilities that are generic, but also specific and bespoke to your data, your needs, I think snowflake's an incredible platform to think about as you look to use AI to drive those business outcomes. I'm gonna revisit

Kison Patel: it. I'm like, we're a deal room.

Kison Patel: We gotta figure out how we can leverage generic connect with Snowflake, especially so many organizations. We should work together on that. We should. There's some opportunity there. I got a couple just quick little fire questions before we wrap up here. Yeah. I wanna know, what's the top thing that you look for when you talk to these founders, CEOs of companies?

Kison Patel: What is the top trait that gives you a good [00:49:00] signal that this is a, a strong company

Stefan Williams: to look talk to from a company perspective? Customers success speaks volumes. If customers are willing to pay for something, there's obviously real value there. What's the traction, what do those retention rates look like?

Stefan Williams: What's the growth profile look like? Net new customers coming on board. What are the growth patterns there? So customer data points and customer metrics speaks volumes and obviously rolls into revenue. From a culture perspective, I like to meet founders that are. Hungry, A humble and knowhow to hustle.

Stefan Williams: That's the [00:49:30] ideal. Being humble isn't underrated. Having humility and, and the ability to kind of appreciate one's perspective, but have strong conviction in, in your own opinion, and being willing to debate and talk through things is an extremely appealing trait. But I think in this world of ai, if you don't have hustle, you are not going far.

Kison Patel: Those are good. I, I think they even get harder as you like, start achieving success. All of a sudden it gets harder to be humble and

Stefan Williams: Yeah, it does. When you start to see success, it, it's hard to have tho those three hungry, humble, and

Kison Patel: unfortunately I got immigrant parents, they go visit them. They remind me, [00:50:00] they my life.

Kison Patel: Yes, I need to go help clean the, sweep the floor and if you can tell me what's, what are like the red flags, you know, just what are the red flags I should look out for to run away from a deal

Stefan Williams: early on. Usually you're speaking to just a founder or CEO. The red flags are probably gonna be from conversations with them, signals on prioritizing outcomes for an individual versus thinking about the broader mission and team having founders that care about the joint mission going forward.

Stefan Williams: They [00:50:30] care about how their employees are treated versus soul, I mean. Folks economically we'll try to solve for the highest dollar, but there's within reason there. There's obviously, it needs to be, the price needs to be right, but equally important is landing on the right mission and having the right message to deliver to their team.

Stefan Williams: And if that starts to become out of focus, that's a red flag. It's a really

Kison Patel: good point.

Stefan Williams: Gotta be more

Kison Patel: than yourself. Yes. What's the craziest thing you've seen in m and a?

Stefan Williams: I haven't seen as many crazy things of, or heard as many crazy things of [00:51:00] you have, but I would say in line with. It's not done till it's done.

Stefan Williams: The deal's not done till that you've signed on the dotted line. We've been down at least one process. I remember pretty far down a path pretty much ready to go and sign a deal, only to be informed by the CEO that an offer three times the amount has been put on the table, which at the time was already a pretty high price for the company, the size and the scale that they were.

Stefan Williams: It goes to say that no deal is done until it's done. Don't count your chickens before [00:51:30] they hatch and put us a little off guard, but. These things happen.

Kison Patel: One of the big three came and overpaid. No comment. That's technically it's big four, but yeah. Okay. That happens. Isn't that good? Not fun.

Stefan Williams: No, it wasn't fun.

Stefan Williams: A lot of effort for nothing. No outcome. Again, deals happen as part of business. You know, if a

Kison Patel: seller, you can have a breakup fee the buyer doesn't commit, you can have a breakup fee, but if the seller falls out, there's no nothing.

Stefan Williams: There was no breakup for you in the deal. Yeah,

Kison Patel: because you wouldn't do that.

Kison Patel: Stefan, this is a great conversation. I really [00:52:00] appreciate taking a break from doing deals to help me become a better m and a scientist.

Stefan Williams: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the time. Good conversation.

Kison Patel: Anyone is still listening to this. You made it all the way to the end. You are my fellow brother, sister m and a scientist out there.

Kison Patel: I love to hear from you. Reach out to me LinkedIn. Love to hear your ideas for topics, criticism. I take it until I get better at doing this till next time just to the deal.[00:52:30]

Kison Patel: Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of m and a with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post, add a review on Apple Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up an m and a function or optimizing one that you already have. We're here to help, and if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can.

Kison Patel: You can reach out to me by email Kisan, K-I-S-O-N, at ma science.com, [00:53:00] or you can text me directly at 3 1 2 8 5 7 3 7 1 1. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit ma science.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that's ma science.com.

Kison Patel: Here's to the deal.[00:53:30]

Kison Patel: Views and opinions expressed on m and a science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual. This podcast is purely educational and is not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.