 Good morning everyone. It's theCUBE with the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering day three of Snowflake Summit 23 live from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin here. I got a great panel next. Love talking with challenge winners. The Snowflake startup challenge, if you remember last year, is in its third year. It's partnering with the New York Stock Exchange to really take things up a level. My co-host as was last year is Stefan Williams, VP of Corporate Development and Snowflake Ventures. We've got our challenge winner, Maxa. Both co-CEOs are here and their brothers, Rafael and Alexi Steinman. Guys, all of you, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Good morning. So talk to us a little bit about Stefan. Let's start with you, partnering with the NYSE this year to really turn the volume up on the Snowflake startup challenge. Talk to us a little bit about why and what does that fire look like? In the words of rank, amping it up every year. Yeah. No, I think in the first two years we've had an incredible outcome and attraction to the competition. And we started speaking to the NYSE and they showed a lot of interest in building a better brand and a reputation with startups in general, in technology. And we've got a huge amount of momentum and interest in building companies on Snowflake. And so I think it was something that kind of organically came together and we're super happy to have them be part of the competition this year. And they're offering some really interesting and insightful kind of components to the winners. So that these guys will get to benefit from. Very cool. How many applicants or nominees this year? I don't know the exact number. I know that we're at about double from last year. So it's been incredible. I mean, I think we've doubled every year in terms of the interest, the registrants and the companies that are applying to the competition which only speaks to this kind of budding ecosystem that's coming around the data platform. Definitely, definitely. Rafael, Alexi, congratulations on winning. And thank you for being here so early considering last night was a celebration in Vegas. We really appreciate you guys looking so fresh as well. Tell us a little bit about Maxa. What do you guys do? What were the gaps in the market that you saw that you thought we can fill this? So I mean, initially the idea of Maxa, so in my previous life I had another company and literally all of my customers. So what we did is we processed data, a lot of operational data and send it into an ERPs. Then that process of transactions, to do invoicing, inventory and time sheets and what an ERP usually does. And across the board, all my customers were whining that the analytics that they can get from their ERPs were not good. Or it was really hard, lots of manual labor and they were asking us, well, we know your system is producing the raw data. Can we just bypass the ERP and like go straight from the source? Back then the building blocks were like I said, the Lego block didn't exist to really do something. So when I sold that company in 2017, sort of like snowflakes start to become something that was like on the radar. So I think there's new Lego blocks that we can start using and maybe we can give a kick at this and then solve it. And then I talked to my brother saying, I think I found a way of doing something nifty and then solve a big problem that I've seen for like decades. And so I talked to him and I'm a big company guy so I lived the problem acutely for many, many years. So we've together seen this problem through 60 degrees but ERP systems are just too complicated. The data schemas are cryptic. Everyone's tearing their pulling their hair out. So in 2019 we said, well, maybe we drop what we're doing. We come together and we launched in 2020. And what was that like during COVID? I mean, we've seen so many COVID catalysts and kind of silver linings but what was that like launching a startup during COVID? The irony is that it was extremely hard because not being able to see people when you're trying to do B2B software sales was extremely punishing at first. What the silver lining is that sort of Zoom calls and radio calls have democratized the ability to connect with executives everywhere. And now there's less of an expectation that people have to show up at the door physically. So it was hard initially but obviously Snowflake gave us a huge boost and now we're benefiting from the fact that out of our few offices, main office in Montreal but also in some secondary satellite offices we can talk to customers everywhere in the world now. So we have customers on in Europe, UK, US, Canada for a startup like us. It's a pretty interesting. Yeah, and talk about the main problems that you're solving for customers. You both talked about, you had that really unique perspective combined of that customer 360, the pains on both sides, which is so important. What are the main challenges that you're going into CFOs saying we got this? Well, they think like for the challenge for CFOs is like, first of all, they don't care about technology. They just care about outcomes. And what they're trying to do is the first step is they want to make like get a macro of who was going on. So I like to roll up everything. So they can technically do that with a lot of manual labor. So they'll get it in Excel files and the whole thing, data exports, they'll get it. Now, the challenge they have is they also want to make their own opinion about how the business is going. And how do you do that? Well, you have to start drilling down. And to do that, the challenge you have to blend. If you want to take financial data and drill it down to granular, you have to blend operational data. And that's where it's physically not possible for manpower. So think of a company who grows, they start with an ERP, they grow, they grow, they do a little bit of MNA, then they acquire another company, well, it comes with another ERP. They only have two. So you have to roll up two ERPs, start drilling down. So really what we can do is, and with the data cloud is roll them up, blend automatically the raw transactional data, as if, so now two ERPs become one, and then you have complete automated insights. So from the financials, so typically we'll walk in and just roll up all the financials. And then you can start drilling down. And what's interesting is when you start drilling down because we've blended operational data, well you actually start flipping this coin and like the COO really quickly says, okay. So now you can connect what I'm doing in the business, operating, and I can connect it to financials. So out of these five levers I have, which one actually influence margins? And specifically if we think of today where interest rates go up, you're not looking at inventory the same way. That's capital that's on the shelf and usually financed. So it's really interesting, so coming in the CFO, that's like the least path to resistance. Like there's no friction, the CSO like roll me up, drill me down, left, right, this is great. But then very quickly you start moving into more of the operational use cases. That's really super interesting. Really across that C suite, but big business outcomes that you're able to enable. So Fun, talk to us about why these guys won. You talked about double the nominees from last year. You guys narrowed it down to three. I don't even know how you did that, but what was it about Maxa and the pitch that really made them stand out? I mean, so I've known both these guys for a year and a half, maybe two years now. And so we've built a relationship over time. I think I love what Maxa stands for and I think from a Snowflake Ventures perspective, we're continuously looking at ways in which companies can break us into new areas, right? We talk about companies being data driven. And that really does mean having kind of a single viewer consolidated area where you have your data, but unlocking it into the different functions throughout the enterprise, right? So we obviously serve the CIO, but I think Maxa is a really great example of extending that capability or having all of that data in one place and unlocking the CFO and not having a siloed ERP system that stands out to the side, having actually a system that talks to the rest of the enterprise and stands on top of Snowflake. So I think these guys did a great job pitching. They've got good market traction. They have a massive opportunity. And I think they have a huge differentiator being powered by Snowflake with the unlock of the data that they're able to get access to. Talk about that differentiation because every company has to be a data company, whether it's a retailer or a gas station or a grocery store, they have to be, but they have to also be able to unlock the power of the data quickly, gain insights, understand how the business is running, how can they use that data, financial data, marketing data, ops data to refine operations, new products, new services. What is it about Maxa that really differentiates you and helps customers across industries? You think of sort of the value add we bring on top of the Snowflake platform, just the cost structure to run in Snowflake is so much lower that we can really hit companies in the mid-market, mid-sized companies with a price point that they've never seen. Very simple, no friction, no upfront commitment, no setup cost, no nothing. They've never heard this. When you go up the food chain into larger accounts, then security control governance becomes a big deal. So with the Snowflake native application ecosystem, we can now deploy Maxa, the application, directly into the customer's own Snowflake, which gets rid of all the headaches in terms of security and getting this certified, this and that, it all goes away. So for a startup like us, we call ourselves sort of an enterprise-grade startup. We can immediately go after double-digit, billion-dollar revenue companies and they will treat us like a 100% secure, compliant vendor from day one, which is amazing when you think about the potential that this platform is giving. That's huge given data residency, sovereignty, privacy issues, data breaches, all the changes in the cyber landscape that we've seen in the last few years alone. Having that guarantee from a security perspective is huge. It's no longer a nice-to-have for companies, right? It's a huge unlock, I mean, to your point, it's a huge unlock for young startups looking to get the eye of executives in big companies. I think we're able to democratize the type of company that can sell to an enterprise today right now because you can stand on top of the shoulders of somebody who's already been through that. We've got the security, the governance, the compliance, everything within Snowflake and unlocking a different persona, like I was talking about earlier, from a company that even in COVID, you probably wouldn't have had a chance to have got in front of some of these executives without having the power of kind of being able to say, we stand on Snowflake and we're completely secured and governed the same way you have your Snowflake data. Absolutely. And that concern goes both ways because if we had a customer with a security incident, it impacts us. So having us the trust that when we put their most precious ERP financial operational data into Snowflake, we can sleep at night as well. Yeah. Did you look at others besides Snowflake? And if so, what made Snowflake the right partner of choice? Well, there's two things. There's like fundamentally, I mean, infinite storage and infinite compute. That's how you think about it. So that unlocks, if you think of it just the technology of Maxa, we have a universal data model. So essentially what happens is we take many systems of records or many ERPs or other core systems around it and we'll translate that into, or transform that into our universal model. That model, the way it's structured, it's a modern, it's another way of modeling the data or structuring it. It can't exist in an environment where you're limited compute and you have limited storage. So we can have tables with billions of rows, standard database or standard environment. Maybe people will start to become a little iffy about run queries on billions of rows in the data cloud. It's like, when you want the answer? It's more, that's the question. So from the get go, there's that, but there's also the enablement. So at a startup, first of all, every dollar counts and you have limited manpower. So if you think of standing up a customer at Maxa when we sign up in your customer, three seconds later, the environment is created. You can automate the entire onboarding. So literally it's click, click on three seconds later, the entire environment with all the security, all the policies, everything you have to do. So if you think of the manpower to enable, to like where are you spending your time? Are you spending your time like trying to plug things and creating pipelines or are you spending your time actually like putting the best algorithms you can to roll up data and really like cracking that. So it's the capabilities of running data, but if you also think of just standing up customers a little bit to what my brother, Alexia, alluded to, it's also the ability to like govern that data. As Maxa, we're playing on customers systems. So every customer equals a unique snowflake and you have to manage that and all that automation, like it's almost like auto magic with snowflake. It's really, it makes it so easy and trustworthy. So it. You had me at three seconds. I'm looking at your website. I always love like business metrics based outcomes. You've got some great ones here. What are some of the big metrics based outcomes that you're helping customers achieve? So cash tied up somewhere, an inventory, elsewhere, margins. So I'm a repair shop and I repair big components. So and I have limited staff or limited components or limited both. What work do I actually perform? Which work order do I fulfill today that gives me the highest margin? So being able to make those tactical decisions with historical data, statistical data, forward-looking data. And I mean, for a company that's maybe running at $50 million of annual revenue, for example, a typical mid-sized customer. I mean, the impact can be $10 million. These are big numbers. And Raphael said initially, CFOs, they like technology, but they don't really care about it. They're looking for business outcomes. So the way we've structured the company, we have sort of a front end that talks business and a back end that has deep technical and snowflake knowledge. Stefan, how does Max kind of embody the snowflake challenge, especially as it's evolving? Embody the challenge as it's evolving. I have an idea. Yeah, go for it. If you want me to momentary one. Yeah, go for it. At the keynote speech on Monday, there was Frank Slutman, CEO of Snowflake, and Jensen Wang from NVIDIA. They were chatting. And Jensen said every person in this room, including executives, need to ask themselves two questions, right? What is my most valuable data at my company? And number two, if I had a super smart person between me and that data, what would I want to ask? I eat AI. And that's how generative AI will allow our executives, our customers to interact, engage with their data, unscripted, plain English, and having the guarantee that whatever comes out is 100% accurate, ever free. I think in terms of a lot of, where a lot of getting back to sort of the question, where a lot of companies are going now is they're trying to figure out, this is amazing, the dragon's out, right? The genie is out of the bottle. What do we do with this? What applications and value add do we build? And I think that's where- Yeah, so that's a great answer, thank you. The other thing I think is, even in the competition itself, I think one of the things that Benoit had mentioned was, you're already front and center on native applications. You're already kind of leaning in as it relates to some of the latest and greatest functionalities around snow park container services. You're thinking forward about how do you embrace this technology of LLMs and bring that to the data for the customers to get benefit from? So, I think Max has done an incredible job of really leaning on the best in class technologies that Snowflake has, but also the newest innovations that are coming out, such that when we go live with some of these in public preview and GA with these products, I mean, you're in lock set with us and we're able to go to customers and deliver value immediately out the gate. And that's exactly what customers want is that value as soon as possible. You mentioned some of the great styles. Share with us maybe your favorite customer story that you think really, really just unlocks the value proposition that Max is delivering. Well, we have a customer in transportation, so good old trucking company, and they actually do buy a lot of competitors. They're the new president, he's a young guy, he has ambition, so he's literally buying competitors. And so what happens when you buy a competitor is, well, you actually buy an ERP. Right, many. So if you think of, and they're transport trucking, like they're not high flying, so they're dealing with bolts and garage doors and putting big trucks on the roads and servicing them. So if you think of his, he's gonna buy, I don't know, 10 maybe competitors this year across North America. In his plan, he's like, well, when I buy one and then I can roll him up into my finance in day two, the new management gets our group dashboards. My CFO is not even pulling his hair, he's like, we have the finances, right? And so the new team, when they get acquired, they actually get just blended in really quickly. So he has no limits. Like usually we're talking a little bit earlier, like you do some M&A, it's how fast can you ingest and sort of bring it in. Technology is not the limiting part, it's literally the teams. So for him and his growth plans, he's like, he's using this as an edge over his competition where he can actually bring them in and operate and sometimes have a sense like, do I want to buy them? Just if this is complicated to roll them in, not going to buy them because it's not strategic. And you're helping that business scale so much more easily. Last question, Alexi, now Maxa is a snow fake native app. What's next? Where do you go from here? Deploying, as they name it at native app. So going back to all of our current customers and converting them over and obviously winning new customers as deployed as a native app. And we're hard at work on the gen AI, generative AI initiative at Maxa where it's the holy grail, it's allowing executives to engage with their data and having the assurance that what comes out is 100% accurate. That's absolutely critical. Guys, thank you so much for joining me on the program. It's so fun, great to have you back as my co-host. I hope that we do the same thing next year. Looking forward to seeing how this partnership continues to evolve. And again, congratulations to Maxa. Thank you very much. All right, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Up next, Dave joins me again. We're going to be talking with two leaders on how Snowflake and Snowplow are really offering competitive advantages over Google Analytics. If you missed any of our content from Snowflake or any of our cute content that you just want to re-watch because you love it so much, thecube.net is where you go. Analysis and editorial content is on siliconangle.com. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.