Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, advocates for embracing challenges before feeling fully prepared. He urges young professionals to volunteer for tasks and pursue opportunities, even without complete qualifications, as a key strategy for career and personal growth
In a recent interview with LinkedIn’s “This Is Working” series, he shared, “All of my success in my life has come from people giving me jobs that I didn’t think I deserved or qualified for.” He emphasized that taking responsibility and adopting a broad definition of ‘team’ and ‘success’ increases the likelihood of being chosen to lead higher levels of an organization.
An alumnus of IIT Madras and Brown University, Mr Ramaswamy was instrumental in developing Google Search, joining the company in 2003 as a software engineer. Within eight years, he advanced to the position of Senior Vice President. In 2019, he co-founded Neeva, an AI-driven search engine designed to compete with Google. Following Snowflake’s acquisition of Neeva in May 2023, Mr Ramaswamy joined the company as Senior Vice President of AI and was promoted to CEO in February 2024.
Reflecting on his journey, Mr Ramaswamy credited his achievements to consistently accepting unfamiliar roles and responsibilities. He noted that while thinking ambitiously doesn’t always lead to success, attempting enough bold endeavours increases the chances of favourable outcomes. He stated, “Sometimes you can say: ‘Think ridiculously ambitious.’ It doesn’t work everywhere, and sometimes you fall flat on your face. You’ve got to play the game of averages. If you try enough ambitious things, many of them work out.”
Under Mr Ramaswamy’s leadership, Snowflake has focused on integrating AI technologies to enhance its cloud-based data warehousing solutions. This strategic direction aims to position the company at the forefront of data and AI innovation.
