- Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO of $43 billion AI company Snowflake, hosts a weekly “war room” of staffers to strategize the best products and rollouts. He picked up leadership lessons while working at Google—and argues with employees over ambition.
Since Sridhar Ramaswamy took over Snowflake, the $43 billion AI company has experienced a resurgence. Now the CEO has revealed that a weekly war room is to thank for winning back Wall Street’s confidence and gaining a top spot in the AI race.
“You can think of this as a cross-functional meeting that had engineers, product managers, marketing people, sales people,” Ramaswamy explained in an interview with LinkedIn at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “We said, ‘We’re going to meet every week, we’re going to identify a set of customers that we want to push [products] to, and we’re going to learn.’”
During these meetings, the 58-year-old ex-Google veteran even pitches his own ideas alongside his head of product.
“We kind of almost went into this as a little startup saying, ‘We need to prove our credibility, we need to become a powerhouse,'” he added.
For some businesses, a weekly war room may seem extravagant, but regularly convening with his core teams has clearly paid off. After pulling off the biggest initial public offering ever by a software maker in September 2020, Snowflake’s share price started free-falling in late 2021—that was until Ramaswamy took its helm in February 2024. Things have looked different since then; Snowflake shares skyrocketed 32% at the end of last year, and the company’s revenue jumped 28% between October 2023 to the same time in 2024. It’s since received a flurry of favorable reports from the likes of Jefferies, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and more. One Wall Street analyst has even predicted that Snowflake stock is going to $235.
While Snowflake was already a frontrunner in the highly competitive $196 billion AI market when Ramaswamy stepped into the top job, he sought to make the company’s winning strategy airtight.
For the CEO, that meant clarifying key priorities: building great products, making sure the world knows they exist, popularizing the logo and brand, and driving volume. Ramaswamy said that if executed, the revenue will follow suit.
“One of the biggest changes is how we get to be a more iterative company,” Ramaswamy said. “That doesn’t mean release half-baked products, that means pay extra attention to what are the components we need to build right now, release, get feedback on, make sure they are rock-solid before we build the next one.”
Beyond the war room, the Snowflake CEO welcomes push-and-pull. Ramaswamy and his peers frequently get into quarrels over creating the most innovative products.
Team “squabbles” over ambitious AI products
Before Ramaswamy stepped into the limelight as Snowflake’s CEO last year, he had a 15-year stint at Google. Leading the engineering, ads and commerce teams for the tech giant, he picked up on one powerful philosophy—“strategy without execution means nothing,” Ramaswamy said in the interview.
The AI leader explained that his workers are held to a high standard—the same caliber that his search-ads staffers held at Google. He witnessed how strong that department was, and brought that same energy to Snowflake as CEO.
“[The search-ads team was] driven to excellence every single day. It’s part of what I ask people at Snowflake now,” Ramaswamy said. “That excellence is a way of living, it’s not some milestone that you get to. And in a competitive market, you always have to drive yourself to excel.”
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And if Ramaswamy doesn’t think his employees are pushing the envelope, he calls them out on it.
“I routinely have squabbles with teams about whether something is ambitious or not. You gotta play the game of averages—if you try enough ambitious things, a bunch of them will work out,” he said. “Those are the things that I carry from place to place in terms of being strategic, but also relentless at execution day in and day out.”
War rooms of the $196 billion AI industry
Snowflake isn’t the first AI company to batten down the hatches and brace for the battle. Meta established several command centers after Deepseek’s breakout success rocked the industry.
The Information reported that Mark Zuckerberg set up four war rooms stocked with engineers to determine how the $1 billion Chinese AI underdog created rivaling products. Deepseek’s AI chatbot R1 is on par with competing models like ChatGPT—but was produced with far less money. This has left other tech companies like Meta sleeping with one eye open; Zuckerberg announced the company would shell out $65 billion on AI-related products in 2025.
In high-stakes situations and competitive industries, war rooms prove to be a valuable asset.
During the 2008 financial crisis, Jamie Dimon met with his risk committee every day to deal with the situation. Earlier this month, he revealed that they would be strategizing until 10 p.m. Or 5 a.m., calling clients from all around the world, making “battlefield decisions.” While he was facing a major recession, and not cutthroat industry competitors, it proved to be a guiding force in surviving the economic crunch.