Pros
Being a smaller company, senior leaders are comparatively accessible. You can actually get access to very senior folks, which is rare versus larger tech companies. There is a core revenue base that is unlikely to disappear very quickly even if growth stagnates.
Cons
These are the things that in my opinion hold the company back Heavy bureaucracy and slow execution. Quarterly planning is a recurring tax: lots of busywork, too much “planning to plan,” and not enough sustained delivery. Feels like the planning and coordination overheads are more than companies that are 10 - 100x larger Decisions have to be vetted in large forums with too many people who lack context and add no value to the discussion. It’s expensive ramping up all these people. Weak learning/accountability loops. Initiatives can slip massively or churn through multiple redesigns, yet meaningful retrospectives are non-existent. Leaders are never held accountable. If anything the scapegoats are usually at the bottom of the org chart. The current crop of senior product and engineering leaders i.e. directors - > VPs have failed at building an agile org or driving the diversification the company needs. Several just don’t have the experience or the chops to be in their role. The few who were capable seem to have voted with their feet. The company is now burdened with a lot of organization debt picked up when it was coasting on past successes. There is a lot of leadership deadwood from that era that needs clearing up. Some context Snowflake has a good foundation and brand, but in my experience the company’s biggest constraint right now is leadership and operating cadence. The business is overly dependent on its core data warehousing product, and 14 years on feels like a one trick pony. That’s a huge leadership miss. You only need to compare the revenue growth rate at Databricks and its AI revenues to see this.
