Snowflake said Wednesday that CEO Frank Slootman, 65, is retiring, and will be replaced by former Google ad chief Sridhar Ramaswamy. The shares plunged 20% in extended trading.
Ramaswamy, 57, spent 15 years at Google, most recently leading Ads and Commerce until 2018. He then left to co-found Neeva in 2019, a consumer search engine he hoped to rival Google until last year, when he announced he was shutting it down.
Snowflake acquired Neeva in June for $185 million, according to a filing.
“There is no better person than Sridhar to lead Snowflake into this next phase of growth and deliver on the opportunity ahead in AI and machine learning,” Slootman said in a statement. “He is a visionary technologist with a proven track record of running and scaling successful businesses.”
Snowflake also released its fourth-quarter financial results, in which sales grew 32% year-over-year to $774.7 million in the period. Product revenue for the fourth quarter was $738.1 million, which was a 33% increase from the previous year.
Operating losses for the fourth quarter were $275.5 million, up from $239.8 million during the fourth quarter of the previous year.
The company said that guidance for product revenue in the first quarter would come in between $745 million to $750 million, lower than the $759 million that analysts were expecting. Additionally, Snowflake said that first-quarter adjusted operating margin would be 3%, topping analyst estimates of 7.2%.
Slootman’s total compensation in 2023 amounted to $23.7 million, almost entirely from stock and option awards. As of the company’s last proxy filing in 2023, he owned almost 13 million Snowflake shares, or 3.8% of the stock outstanding. At Wednesday’s close that stake would be worth about $3 billion.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
Jennifer Elias and Jordan Novet contributed reporting
Read the full article here
