20VC: Why Model Providers Will Kill Many Startups Moving into the Application Layer | Why Deepseek is not a Threat to OpenAI & Why OpenAI Beats Anthropic | Apps vs Models vs Infrastructure: Where is Value in AI with Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake CEO

Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO @ Snowflake, the $60BN public company with $3.5BN in revenue growing 30% per year. Sridhar joined Snowflake following his company, Neeva, being acquired by them for $150M. Prior to founding Neeva, Ramaswamy spent 15 years at Google  where he had an integral part in the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion. 

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

1. OpenAI vs Deepseek vs Anthropic:

• Why will OpenAI beat Deepseek? What does no one see with Deepseek that they should see?

• Why has OpenAI beaten Anthropic? What elements turn a model from a commodity into a sustaining product suite?

• Will model providers become application providers?

• Will OpenAI be the biggest killer of startups in the next 10 years?

2. Snowflake vs Nvidia & Databricks:

• To what extent is Sridhar concerned NVIDIA will move into the data layer and compete with Snowflake?

• How does Sridhar view the competition from Databricks? What have they done better than them? What have they done worse than them and lost on?

• Does being private hurt or help Databricks in their fight against Snowflake? 

• If Sridhar could, would he take Snowflake private today?  

3. Leadership, Parenting, Money:

• Do richer leaders make better leaders? How does being rich change the mindset of a leader?

• What are Sridhar’s biggest lessons when it comes to parenting? 

• What about the way that Sridhar was brought up, did he do deliberately differently with his kids?