 Sonny Betty is here with me. He's the CIO and Chief Data Officer for Snowflake. Sonny, thanks for making the time today. Good to see you. Same here, Dave. Thanks for having me over. Yeah, so you're welcome. So before we get into it, I gotta ask you, I mean, you recently left NVIDIA to join Snowflake. I mean, one of the few companies that are almost as hot as Snowflake. How come? Well, you know, Dave, I joined NVIDIA 12 years ago. I was there for 12 years when NVIDIA was less than 2,000 people company and NVIDIA, you know, had an unbelievable growth trajectory. I went from 2,000 employees to 16,000 when I left in December of 2019 and Snowflake kind of provided the same opportunity to come in and help scale the company. I thrive in an environment where I can be creative. I thrive in an environment where I can build things. I can scale things. I can grow things and it's been just a perfect opportunity to come and repeat that success over here. Awesome. Well, we wish you the best. Talk about your role a little bit. I mean, it's not totally unique. I mean, especially in certain smaller organizations that have the same person in the role of Chief Information Officer and Chief Data Officer, but which are you? Are you more CIO, CDO? How do you balance that out? I would say that I'm both. To be an effective CIO, you need immersion with automation. You need immersion with data. You need immersion with security. And you also need immersion with compliance. So if all these things are together, things are integrated. You have a cohesive way of handling all the pieces that come together. We believe if you keep them separated, you create silos. And we definitely don't want silos. We want integration. We want seamless integration to drive and scale the company for our future. I always felt that my time is balanced between both areas. I mean, I always felt like a lot of the CIOs I talked to, they'd love to get more involved in the data, but they're just too busy trying to keep the lights on. So maybe what are your thoughts on the priorities of each hat, CIO and CDO? Yeah, so look, I mean, I think because we're a full cloud company, we don't have anything on-prem. I don't have any workloads on-prem. We don't have a data center. I really don't have to worry about all the operational challenges that you have to deal with being an on-prem company. So the cycles that I can be involved from a transformational perspective, driving transformation for the company, both on the data side as well as on the IT side, I have that cycles to invest that time and energy into both areas. Typically in a traditional company, which has not yet migrated towards the cloud, a major portion of their bandwidth gets wasted. CIOs bandwidth and IT professionals bandwidth gets wasted in dealing with the operational challenges that you have in an on-prem environment. So having not to worry about that over here gives me all the cycles to be investing my time in both areas. Yeah, a lot of wasted IT labor over the decades. Let me ask you, how is running a data company? We were inside of a fast-moving Silicon Valley tech company. What are the similarities and the differences from some of the customers? I mean, on the one hand, you're moving faster than your customers, at least most of them. And you don't have the technical day. You just described CXL Nirvana. On the other hand, you're an example of what's possible. You can sort of set the best practice mark. How do you see that dynamic? So for a world-class IT organization, it needs to be data-driven. It needs to be highly automated. It needs to enable world-class user experience and then to secure and make the environment compliant and resilient. The cloud platform that we have inside Snowflake allows us to achieve all of that. Now that is an ideal situation to be in where you don't have to deal with all the on-prem type of workloads. So finding the balance is what we're going after. However, this is a journey. For other companies who are not on the cloud, it's a journey. They have to prioritize that. They have to start moving things to the cloud. And that's where we are different and similar. We're different that we don't have to worry about that. Everything is in the cloud for us. And then that's how we see it. So I used to call it the dog-fooding segment, but Oliver Busman was the CIO of SAP. He said, no, Dave, we call it drinking your own champagne, which is how you guys refer to it. But sometimes, still in such situations, you're inside the sausage factory, which is good in a way because you see it before it goes into production. So what's your journey with Snowflake been like? Yeah, so that's a really good question. That's a major portion of what I do at work. And let's start with the first principles. We believe that we want to measure everything in the company that's important for companies' performance. If we measure the right things, we believe we can drive the best outcomes. We are driven through those first principles and we leverage our business applications, our data, our security, our automation, and our compliance to integrate with our product to power all these use cases and workloads. In our own environment, we call that Snowhouse, which is nothing but a Snowflake instance. So for all the new products that we are coming into market with, we work very closely with the engineering team, with the product management team to make sure that we actually become customer zero and try to use as much functionality of that inside our own enterprise and give as much feedback to our engineering and our product management team so that they can make the customer one experience to be world class. So that's kind of in a nutshell how we go to market with those products. So your customers are zero, so all the product guys, do they suck up to you or are they afraid of you? I think it's a very mutual beneficial relationship. So they know that my team's feedback is important to how they're kind of shaping up the product. And it's just not necessarily IT, right? We have folks in finance, folks in sales, marketing. Everybody is drinking the champagne, right? And IT and the data team actually enable that deployment, but the use cases are pretty much in the entire enterprise of the company in every aspect of it. Well, you know, including security. Well, you know, as I was just saying, we always talk about alignment, but it's like it's almost alignment by design as opposed to being this forced thing. I'm interested in this sort of snowflake on snowflake concept that you guys talk about. What were your objectives going in and maybe thinking about the outcomes? What did you expect? Did you work backwards from that? What were you trying to achieve? Yeah, I mean, look, again, back to the first principles. We believe we want to measure everything that's important to our business that would drive the right outcomes. We then layer the application layer. We then overlay the business process layer. We then overlay the compliance and security layer. And the end result really is operationalizing snowflake internally to drive our business, making the right choices, right decisions for the company. So we have a ton of use cases that are just ideal using snowflake on snowflake. And I can give you some examples of that if you like, but security being one of the biggest use cases, we use the entire monitoring and remediation work that goes in the security compliance world all through snowflake. And we are finding real-time events through data sharing with our key suppliers. And we're ensuring that we're protecting our environment as much as possible with that whole infrastructure. We talk about layering, governance, security, et cetera. I'm imagining a coat of primer paint, nice and smooth. It's not a bolt-on. I want to press you on that because it can't be an afterthought. And what you're describing is much more of a modern approach. And I want you to differentiate between the layers that you talked about and what you've surely seen in your experience over the years as a bolt-on. What's the difference? Well, I mean, the security world, there's a lot of data. And a lot of the data that is critical to your environment, you want to make sure, A, it's fully complete. You're getting it in the right hands, in the right platform to understand and doing the correlation work that needs to happen real-time. Our platform allows all that data to be ingested in real-time. And anything that is suspicious that's being out there, we're finding that stuff in real-time, the monitoring has to be real-time. And if there is an event, somebody needs to take an action real-time. So the platform allows it to integrate all together. And basically, the suppliers that we're using are also doing data sharing with us on this platform. So it makes the whole security remediation to be really, really fantastic experience. Well, I think too, I share often with my audience, when I talk to practitioners that are using Snowflake, surprising to me when I first heard this, they said, well, would you show Snowflake because of the security? I went, what? But the simplicity and the workflow is simpler. And it just means less human labor involved in setting these things up. So I wonder if you could talk about the team that you put together, the culture that you're building, and what's the makeup look like? Sure. So are you specifically asking about the characteristics of how we're building up the culture? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I think we're looking for obviously very much high-energy folks, people who have high accountability, they're data-driven. We want to measure everything that's important to us. We're looking for folks who have situational awareness. And then finally, high sense of urgency. I think all of these elements allows IT organization to be integrated with the business. In a lot of the traditional companies, IT organizations kind of disintegrate with the business. We want to integrate with the business to drive the best outcomes that are needed for the company. I want to ask you about some of your favorite use cases. You mentioned measurement. How do you measure? What are you measuring? Sure. So I would say that let's just take security because we talked about security. Let's just use security as a use case. So in security, there are many different frameworks, as you may know. There is the Nest framework. There is the CIS framework. There is an ISO framework. We have adopted towards a CIS framework inside Snowflake. That framework has 20 controls, and that 20 controls has another 20 sub-controls. So we're talking about 400 controls potentially. Not every control is applicable to us, but the majority of them are. And so for every control, there is a source of data that's being ingested in Snowflake. I'll give you an example of that is asset management. So asset management for endpoints, asset management for our servers, or asset management for our network gear, all of that data gets ingested inside Snowflake. We measure that. We can tell you exactly how many endpoints I have. I can tell you exactly when an employee gets onboarded. What laptop we have given them. When the employee leaves the company, are we collecting that laptop back on time? Are we working all that access? That's part of CIS control 1 as an example. And we're measuring all of that. And I can tell you exactly at my real time inside Snowflake how effective I am for that specific control. That's just an example of that, Dave. Now imagine 400 of these items that make up the whole security CIS framework. You want to measure everything on that 400 controls or 400 sub-controls. And you want to make sure that if any of that control is not being managed properly, you're alerted about it, and you're remediating it to prevent a security issue that may pop up. Awesome. Visibility and automation component. Are you the CISO too, Sonny? We don't really have that title. We don't really have a CISO title, but I do where the security had as well. It's actually a joint responsibility between... I manage the corporate security. The product security is inside the product team, but we use the same common framework. We use the same common telemetry. We use the same common methodology. Incident management response teams are very similar. And it's all powered through Snowflake. Okay. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We've got more great content coming your way.