Snowflake CEO says there’s a big myth at the heart of every org chart

In today’s CEO Daily: Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy on building a team in the AI era.

The big leadership story: How to justify SpaceX’s expected market cap.

The markets: Down big in Asia as the Iran ceasefire frays.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. What does it mean to be a “tech worker” in the AI age? I had a conversation with Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy while moderating at the Snowflake Summit last week that got me thinking about that. His AI data cloud company recently reported what my colleague Sebastian Herrera described as a “blowout first quarter” that sent its stock price up more than 50%. Ramaswamy became CEO of Snowflake in 2024, several months after it acquired his search company Neeva that he’d formed as an alternative to Google’s advertising business that he’d helped build over 15 years. At Google, he saw how a singular focus on product could come at a cost to not only customers but employees.

“Google had at various times described itself as an engineering company or a product company and I felt that belittled and alienated a lot of people unnecessarily,” Ramaswamy told me. “One of the things that I try to do here is to make sure that everyone feels that they’re here for a reason, that the work that they do is valued and respected … We succeed by working well with each other.”

For a man who holds a PhD in computer........

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