NVIDIA + Snowflake | The journey is the reward

When I was 6 months in at my job at NVIDIA, one of my favorite sales professionals came to me with a clear message. He told me that Snowflake was coming up in all of his customer conversations. And that we at NVIDIA didn't really have a story with Snowflake to enable customers using both of our products together. The customers were right. And so the hard work began.?

After 3 years of a lot of hustling and encouragement from my CEO, that narrative has now fundamentally changed.

Snowflake now natively supports GPUs as a compute option inside their environment. In addition, we announced several integrations related to Large Language Models, Generative AI, RAPIDS (our accelerated Python framework) and Enterprise software. And we have a lot more cooking in the oven.

And the cherry on top is our very own CEO Jensen Huang came to Snowflake Summit in Vegas this year to join Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman in a fireside chat.?

This experience taught me a few things:

1. Be aware of the hype, but follow the ground truth. Customers don't lie and over and over again we saw them using Snowflake and getting real value out of the product. I didn't read some analyst report or online blog. We just talked to customers and learned. And boy were they right.?

2. Don't stick to the boundaries. Working on Snowflake was never in my job description or scope. I saw a problem, realized nobody in the company was working on it and went after it. I let everything else sort itself out and this never would have happened if I had been in the state of suspended animation pondering why nobody is solving it. If you see something, go do something about it. In large companies, there are few people who have this mentality. Be one of them and you will immediately stand out from the herd.

3. Build real relationships that have a connection. There are 4 people who this never would happened without:?

- Nick Becker - my NVIDIA partner in crime who saw the vision and dedicated himself and substantive engineering resources. We were each others support system in making this happen from inside NVIDIA.

- Moselle F. - my Snowflake Alliances Champion who is one of the kindest and hardest working professionals I have come across. In fact, I learned how to do my own job better watching her. Thanks Moselle!

- Miles Adkins - Nick's counterpart and our technical Champion at Snowflake. Miles saw the future and has been called the "GPU Whisperer" at Snowflake because he is constantly providing help and support to anyone trying to use our tech there.

- Oh and yours truly!?

This quartet built a real bond that transcended the ups and downs. Even when things weren't going our way, the 4 of us always wanted to work together and eventually the payoff was very real.?

* And I would be remiss to not thank Tarik Dwiek . I still have no idea how we got both of our CEOs on stage together, but through a lot of ups and downs in a very short timeframe we made it happen. And we're going to take this NVIDIA - Snowflake partnership to the max!

4. I knocked on Snowflake's door for years. And I did it because I believed this was a company that mattered. Last year, I personally attended Snowflake Summit as the sole NVIDIA employee. One of my Snowflake champions said to me something along the lines "Subhan: why are you here? We have nothing to offer you. Oh I get it. You're playing the long game. You're going to be the guy that gets Snowflake to start using GPUs". You dam right I am! Oh and I was far from the only NVIDIA employee this year. I brought a lot of us including my CEO :-)

5. Everyone wants to chase the shiny object, but very few people want to put in the work to take a regular object and make it shiny. The thing is that the real work happens in making a regular object shiny. It's easy to chase something when you know everyone else is doing the same. But putting in that early effort with no payoff or reward is called conviction. And you need to have a lot of conviction to win.

Building this relationship between NVIDIA and Snowflake has been the most challenging and most rewarding accomplishment of my career so far. I am so grateful to have played a part here and to have been at NVIDIA to make this happen.?

I look forward to continuing our great work together and using the many lessons I learned here for the rest of my career! To the future!

Hat tip to many others who were also a great help recently and over the years:

Jensen Huang , Frank Slootman , Manuvir Das , Jim Scott , Colleen Kapase , Joshua Patterson , Justin Langseth , Christian Kleinerman , Jeff Hollan , Muzz Imam , Elise Bergeron , Torsten Grabs , Mike Thomas , Mike K. , Ayush Dattagupta , Sophie Watson , Joseph Fu , John Zedlewski , Sean Asplund , Zoe Filippenko , Mauricio Sousa , Brian Pickering , Kari Ann Briski , Justin Boitano , Sumit Das , Nikolay Sakharnykh , Tim Kaldewey , Nanthini B. , Rajan Arora, Ph.D. , Karthikeyan R. , Jonathan Cohen , Joey C. , Kevin Levitt , Pahal Patangia , Robert Fehrmann , Alexandra Gutow , Felipe Hoffa , Dash DesAI , Ahmad Raza Khan , Waqas Makhdum , Evan Blake , Prash Medirattaa , Nanthini B. , Sarah Guo