Brown CS PhD Alum Sridhar Ramaswamy Has Been Named CEO Of Snowflake
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on May 16, 2024
Brown CS PhD alum Sridhar Ramaswamy has recently been named Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake, an American cloud computing–based data cloud company with headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. Snowflake is a scalable data cloud platform that allows organizations to store, analyze, collaborate and build applications on top of data efficiently. Snowflake was ranked first on the Forbes Cloud 100 in 2019 and its initial public offering raised $3.4 billion in 2020, one of the largest software IPOs in history. Previously, Sridhar held the position of Snowflake’s Senior Vice President of AI.
Sridhar received his PhD in Computer Science in 1995 but continues to contribute to Brown CS, serving in the inaugural cohort of the Department's Advisory Board and delivering the department’s most prestigious talk, the Paris C. Kanellakis Memorial Lecture, as well as the inaugural lecture in the IT Leaders Lecture Series. He’s also the recipient of Brown’s Horace Mann Medal, which recognizes a Brown University Graduate School alum who has made significant contributions to their field.
“I am honored,” Sridhar says, “to have been chosen to lead the company into this next chapter of growth. We have an enormous opportunity ahead to help all customers leverage AI to deliver massive business value. My focus will be on accelerating our ability to bring innovation to our customers and partners.”
Since joining Snowflake in May 2023 in connection with the company’s acquisition of Neeva, the world’s first private AI powered search engine, Sridhar has been spearheading Snowflake’s AI strategy. He led the launch of Snowflake Cortex, Snowflake’s new fully managed service that makes AI simple and secure for all users to quickly drive business value. Prior to joining Snowflake, Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva in 2019.
Previously, Ramaswamy led all of Google’s Advertising products, which included search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. During his fifteen years at Google he was an integral part of the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion. Ramaswamy also held research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). Ramaswamy was a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners from October 2018 until recently, and he sits on the board of trustees at Brown University.
In comments from a decade ago that preceded his inaugural IT Leaders Lecture, Sridhar spoke presciently about today’s computing environment: “People don’t even realize what we can do with simple models and massive amounts of data. You might think that spelling correction uses fancy logic about sentence structure or phonemes, but it’s purely a statistical algorithm based on a dataset of errors and corrections. The whole field of deep learning is young, and it’ll solve problems that look quite beyond our capacity right now.”
“What excites me,” he said, “is that computing itself is very young. It’s only begun to touch numerous aspects of our life. I can point kids to so many different areas and tell them that there are thousands of possible futures there, just waiting!”
Brown CS regularly publishes news articles about our pioneering and innovative alums. We have no financial involvement in any of the companies mentioned above and have not been compensated in any way for this story.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
