He entered the very closed club of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but it will be difficult to find traces of the megalomaniac in him in hoodie dreaming of conquering the world. To hear it, Benoit Dageville did not dream of being an entrepreneur. This pure engineer, born in Antibes, trained in Jussieu, would not have had, he says, for merit that “not to miss the boat ”.
Yet here he is at the head of the success story tech of the year: Snowflake, the company he founded in 2014 with Thierry Cruanes, another Frenchman, and Marcin Zukowski, went public with a bang in September and has a valuation of $ 70 billion – so enough to make Benoit Dageville, who owns 3.5% of the company, a multibillionaire, at least on paper.
Pub
A young engineer, Benoit Dageville discovered a passion: databases. Far from Silicon Valley, he began his career thanks to a European program to support computer research and found himself at Bull which, in the early 1990s, was nothing more than the ghost of the computer giant once dreamed of by the French leaders. Very quickly, ambitions were reduced, the research center closed and Benoît Dageville left for Grenoble, where he did engineering for Bull. But he has no desire to become a chef and, in France, this lack of managerial ambition offers him few prospects. Salvation will come from a mission of a few months for Oracle in California.
” Our goal was not to create a business ”
There, Benoît Dageville discovered a dream working environment: a multicultural environment and the possibility of developing his high-tech expertise at the highest level. He spent 16 very rich years, working at the heart of one of the largest databases in the world. But at the turn of the 2010s, he realized the potential of disruption cloud, the astronomical amounts of data generated by the rise of the Internet, and their management in real time by machines. Oracle is missing this turn, and Benoît Dageville decides to join forces with Thierry Cruanes, his Norman colleague, to launch their business in 2012. ” Our goal was not to start a business, but to make a product. If it had been possible, we would have done it at Oracle “. They name their start-up Snowflake, in reference to their shared passion for skiing.
The two engineers buy a printer and a whiteboard and spend several months looking for an alternative system, which would adjust resources to the demand of each customer, so as to pay only as needed and expand the endless capacities. An intense and stressful time, he recalls, but the duo find a solution after 4 months. With the help of their investor Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures – one of the first funds of venture of Silicon Valley – the start-up released its first products in 2014 and hired Bob Muglia, a former Microsoft executive, as CEO, allowing the co-founders to stay focused on what they love to do: development.
Very quickly, Snowflake met with massive success with the largest American companies. ” We have experienced impressive growth and most importantly, our customers appreciated our service and communicated it to us. “. The company has great ambitions: it raised $ 26 million in 2014, $ 79 million the following year, 105 million in 2017 and even 450 million in 2018 and 479 million last February. The young shoot does not need the money but she nevertheless decides to give the “go” to her IPO, for two reasons. On the one hand, faced with competition from big names like Google or Amazon, the company wants to acquire a status and greater visibility. On the other hand, it wishes to offer an option to exercise their shares to its employees.
” There is no miracle recipe, but we must not miss the boat », Summarizes the entrepreneur, and it is clear that Snowflake has hit the nail on the head. The company surprised its world by announcing the entry of Warren Buffett, the oracle of Omaha, and smashed records during its IPO: it raised $ 3.4 billion, the largest IPO of History for a group of software. Its stock market price more than doubled on its first day of listing and has largely been maintained since. Benoît Dageville attributes this success to several criteria: “ the Snowflake ‘data cloud’ product now makes it possible to move and share data, this very secure network effect is a real revolution. Our amazing team led by Frank Slootman (the CEO recruited in 2019 to manage growth, editor’s note) was rewarded for her work, and this great achievement is only one step towards the final goal: to make Snowflake the world leader in cloud and big data “.
