Warren Buffett almost never buys IPOs. He bought Snowflake. Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce each agreed to put $250 million into the data company at its offering price. Snowflake ran a data warehouse in the cloud. Companies loaded their sales records, logs, and customer data into it and paid for the computing they used. Storage and computing were split, so a team could scale either one up in seconds. When it filed in August 2020, much of the world was working from home.

Three Engineers From Oracle

Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes spent years building databases at Oracle. Marcin Żukowski had co-founded a database startup in the Netherlands. In July 2012 the three founded Snowflake in San Mateo. They built for the cloud from the first line of code, on top of Amazon's storage. Old warehouses had to be sized and tuned by experts. Snowflake ran itself. Frank Slootman, who had taken ServiceNow public, became CEO in May 2019.

Double by the Close

Snowflake priced its IPO at $120 a share on September 15, 2020, and raised about $3.4 billion. It opened at $245 the next day on the NYSE and closed at $253.93, more than double the offering price. It ranked among the largest software IPOs ever. Sridhar Ramaswamy replaced Slootman as CEO in February 2024. Product revenue reached $4.72 billion in the fiscal year that ended January 2026. Snowflake still trades as SNOW.

Cover: Matsuchi Hill after Snowfall, Torii Kiyonaga. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a hill after snowfall (snowflake).