Coronavirus News (240)

Biggest software IPO ever 

Snowflake shares more than double. It's the biggest software IPO ever Snowflake helps blue chip companies analyze and share data in the cloud. ........  now has more than 3,100 customers, double the total from a year ago. That includes 146 of the Fortune 500 firms. ........... Snowflake competes with Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure and the Google Cloud platforms. .........  Revenue more than doubled in the past six months, to $242 million. But the company posted a net loss of $171 million, slightly less than the loss it posted in the same period a year ago.

You're never too old to excel: How Snowflake thrives with 'dinosaur'​ cofounders and a 60-year-old CEO  Say hello to 53-year-old co-founder Benoit Dageville, the nonstop explainer with bushy eyebrows and a pirate’s grin. Sitting across from him is Thierry Cruanes, 52, the quick-witted interrupter with a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard. Both men left their native France decades ago, with dreams of making it big as software architects in the United States. Everything since has been the tech sector’s version of a buddy movie. ............  In their mid-40s, they quit Oracle and rented a tiny office in downtown San Mateo, across the street from a hamburger joint. The cofounders picked a whimsical company name that reflected their shared love of skiing. Then they bought cheap furniture from Ikea, coaxing their kids into doing much of the assembly. ..............  “We’re French,” Cruanes explains, as he recounts those days. “Even if we failed, we knew we could do it in style.” ............ From that puny start, Snowflake has raised more than $900 million in venture money, while achieving a valuation that tops $4 billion. Snowflake’s engineers have redefined data storage and computation to take full advantage of cloud computing’s flexibility. The result: a data-warehousing system that’s easier to use and stunningly faster than older alternatives. ........  Enterprise software is the sector where older engineers, salespeople and other employees are most likely to flock. In these business-to-business markets, product cycles are longer, customers’ priorities evolve more predictably and even the boldest innovators keep building atop what has come before. As a result, long-time pros bring valuable knowledge. There’s room for people who grew up in the age of cassette tapes instead of Spotify. ............... Blunt to a fault, Slootman is famous for acid-tongued comments that make his subordinates gasp. Barely eight minutes into our interview, he tells me: “Silicon Valley is a highly promotional, self-congratulatory culture. Everybody wants to feel good all day long. Not me. I make people feel bad all day long.” ............ Even Snowflake’s elegant snack stations distress him. “We’ve got five kinds of coffee,” he observes. “Do you really need that?” .............  He’s been refining his messages steadily in nearly 30 years of tech leadership. Raise your standards. Act decisively. Shrink your priority list, so you can focus on doing just a few things brilliantly. .................. “I don’t want to high-five,” he explains. “I want to have conversations about the things that aren’t working well, or things that can be better.” ......... Most changes in software are incremental and small. What Snowflake’s doing is radical and ginormous.” ........... Data-centric businesses -- which means basically everyone these days -- are intrigued by the power of big cloud-computing platforms run by Amazon, Microsoft or Google. But moving everything to the cloud can get clunky, especially when users’ data projects create intense spikes and slowdowns in the amount of storage versus compute power they need. ................ Snowflake’s software separates compute and storage, making it faster, cheaper and easier for customers to run all the data queries they crave. ......... A lot of Snowflake’s culture reflects the steady values of lifelong engineers. The hallways are quiet. Distractions are rare. Helping everyone else succeed is a core value; showing off is not. People get their work done by 6 p.m. or so, and head home.  

Snowflake, Before It Was Obvious The founders of Snowflake felt that the problems lay not with relational technology itself, but with the way it had been implemented. They were certainly in excellent position to know, having been key architects of several generations of database products at Oracle and elsewhere. They believed that relational could be unleashed by rearchitecting it to take advantage of the power of the cloud. If they were right, the benefits would be enormous: the mainstream enterprise was already built around relational, with legions of analysts and DBA’s were fully trained in SQL, providing a large and ready market. But this notion was way out of step with the Silicon Valley belief system of the time. .........  In November 2012, Amazon released its Redshift cloud-based data warehouse into preview beta. This product would compete directly with Snowflake. Not only that, Snowflake was building its product on top of AWS computing and storage services. Amazon would be Snowflake’s chief competitor and primary supplier. .........  In 2013, the enterprise data warehousing market was largely captured in on-premise deployments of Oracle, Teradata, Microsoft and a few others. .............. there was enough enterprise data “born in the cloud” to constitute a viable early market, and that the volume and importance of cloud-born data would ultimately dominate. ..........  there is a strategic rationale for customers to embrace a focused, cloud-neutral guardian of the “Data Cloud” that allows them to unlock the power of all their data assets and put them to use however they choose. ...................  They also embraced help in the areas they needed it most from people like Mike Speiser (lead investor and original CEO), Bob Muglia, Frank Slootman and a host of other amazing team members that have made Snowflake a rare talent magnets. ........... Those of us in the early Snowflake supporter camp always believed that the company could carve out a big chunk of the enterprise data warehousing market. And we thought that the best way to penetrate would be to make it easy for customers to try the Snowflake service. This is why so much of the development effort was devoted to making Snowflake super-easy to adopt and effortless to use – in stark contrast to the brain-exploding experience customers had come to expect from legacy data warehousing projects. ................  “Snowflake is addictive,” I was told by a Snowflake Sales Ops leader. “Once customers try it, they inevitably want more.” There was more pent-up demand for analytics in the enterprise than most of us realized, and Snowflake was breaking open the dam with its new model of delivery and consumption. .............  Today one of the most celebrated dimensions of the Snowflake business model is its superlative NRR (Net Revenue Retention) on quite substantial six-figure-plus ACV’s. ............  is there a bigger happening in enterprise technology than Snowflake? The company has become the foundation of the Modern Enterprise.  

Coronavirus News (239)

Airbus Just Unveiled Three New Zero-Emission Concept Aircraft 

At 75, is the United Nations still relevant or necessary? Legitimate criticism and lingering questions surround the UN, even as it makes important progress in areas mostly unseen and vastly under-reported Instead of using the UN as a scapegoat for political failures, criticism should be turned on to states that overpromise and underfund humanitarian operations

Australia has ‘painted itself into a geopolitical corner’ with China, but what is Beijing’s trade endgame? Australia agreed to lead the investigation into the origins of the coronavirus following a call between its Prime Minister Scott Morrison and US President Donald Trump China has since imposed anti-dumping tariffs on Australian barley, suspended certain beef imports and launched two investigations into wine imports

Indonesia’s biggest YouTube star Atta Halilintar on fame, fortune, his mistakes – and why he’s not happy any more Atta Halilintar has 25.5 million subscribers on a channel that earns him up to an estimated US$1.6 million a month But he says being number one comes at a price and that at his lowest he has thought of famous people who had committed suicide

Who’s playing the Taiwan card in India-China tensions, Modi or the RSS? Members of expatriate Indian Hindu nationalist groups are unofficially calling for greater engagement with Taipei – something likely to anger Beijing While the calls mirror a hardening of New Delhi’s stance, it is unclear how much weight they carry with PM Modi – and for him, that’s very convenient

China’s middle-class dream of a second home in Malaysia dashed by coronavirus and geopolitical tensions Many Chinese people have left Malaysia, opting to sell their homes remotely rather than wait to see when and if they will be allowed to return Individual Chinese investors are often unprepared – both financially and psychologically – for the risks of overseas investment, expert says

50 startups on the rise

Global income falls by $3.5 trillion

CEOs speak out on remote work

The Keys to Remote Work - What We Have Learned in a Decade of Leading an Award-Winning Remote Team  .... the importance of boundaries in remote work. ...... There’s a misconception that people who work from home are not accountable and let their home-life distractions spill into their work. For many remote workers, however, the opposite is more often the case. ..........  keep a structured schedule and be intentional about how time is used .......... schedule breaks into their day and stick to those break times. ........ manage your energy and keep yourself from burning out from too much uninterrupted work .......... can be easy to dive deep into work, not get up from your desk for hours, and exhaust yourself in the process ........  In the fitness world, there’s a widespread practice of interval training: strong bursts of rigorous exercise, followed by a brief period of rest. This builds your strength and stamina without overex­erting your body. Interval training can be applied to mental tasks as well—it’s important to sepa­rate periods of mentally strenuous work with short breaks to ensure you don’t burn out. ........... I like to schedule periods of intense work in the morning—when I am cognitively strongest—for tasks that involve writing and development of new materials. Then, I’ll follow that with a break and reserve the afternoon for meetings and tasks that are discussion-oriented and don’t require as much mental capacity and acute focus. ..........   Physical boundaries are also very important. We encourage employees to have a place in their home that is specifically designated for work. ........... Commuting can be a pain, but we often underestimate how much that time in the car or on the subway helps us separate from work on the way home. 

How live music makes a comeback

LinkedIn Top Startups 2020: The 50 U.S. companies on the rise.  Our editors and data scientists parsed hundreds of millions of actions generated by LinkedIn’s 171 million members in the U.S., looking across four pillars: employee growth; jobseeker interest; member engagement with the company and its employees; and how well these startups pulled talent from our flagship LinkedIn Top Companies list. 

Covid-19: A Global Perspective  everyone needs to do their part: governments, the private sector, civil society, and the general public .......... COVID-19 has killed more than 850,000 people. It has plunged the world into a recession that is likely to get worse. And many countries are bracing for another surge in cases. .............  we argue for a collaborative response. There is no such thing as a national solution to a global crisis. All countries must work together to end the pandemic and begin rebuilding economies. The longer it takes us to realize that, the longer it will take (and the more it will cost) to get back on our feet. ..........  How bad the pandemic gets and how long it lasts is largely within the world’s control.