It’s been a wild few years for Snowflake, from a record-breaking IPO to a plummeting stock price to a data-breach scandal. Sridhar Ramaswamy took over in the heat of the turmoil and helped steady the ship, in part by betting big on AI. Ramaswamy shares lessons from the company’s turnaround including insights behind high profile partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, how Snowflake embraced China’s Deepseek early, and why Ramaswamy calls Snowflake the most consequential AI-data company in the world. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I had a guest on the show recently who confided that a lot of CEOs are kind of paralyzed right now by sort of external uncertainties in the world, shifting tariffs, and regulations, and executive orders. How do you deal with, and think about, the environment and all the changes relative to the things that you can control yourself? One of my firm beliefs in life is that you need to focus on the things that you are going to have an impact on. There are many things that, let’s face it, we are simply not going to have any impact on. Obsessing about unchangeable things in the short term is the recipe for being uncertain about life.  There is a lot of macro uncertainty. Businesses will react, and we will have to worry. For example, if the stock market keeps going down, or if the business climate gets worse, it’ll have an impact on Snowflake, but so far, it’s been heads down, get great product work done, get great customer deployments done. You recently said that Snowflake is the most consequential data and AI company in the world. That is an ambitious assertion, especially for a business that, at least previously, was known as a data storage company. How do you back up that claim? The most important data for the most important enterprises in the world is already stored on Snowflake. Snowflake is the gold standard for analytics. We have something like 700-odd Global 2000 companies that are on Snowflake, and if you exclude the folks from China that we are not even going after, that is 700-something out of 1,600.  They all put their most important prized information on top of Snowflake. Large public companies close their books every month on top of Snowflake. Financial institutions share data with each other. Snowflake is the beating heart of at least the U.S. financial system in terms of how data moves from place to place. I mentioned at the beginning that Snowflake was one of the first U.S. companies to adopt DeepSeek. You’re also the only data platform, big one, to offer models from both OpenAI and Anthropic. What did you see in DeepSeek, and second, why have you leaned into having multiple models available? Our strength is as a data platform. We are not a foundation model company, and honestly, most companies have no business of pretending that they are foundation model companies. It takes very specialized expertise, incredible talent density, and a very, very big wallet.  And so for this, we decided to go the way of partnerships. We collaborate with a lot of folks. We focus on developing data products, which, in my mind, is the place where value is going to be realized. When people think about OpenAI, they think, “Ah. These are the people that make the foundation models.” No, no, no. OpenAI is an amazing product company. ChatGPT is a legitimate product. It is going to approach the pantheon of the greats, the products that have a billion-plus users, and so helping people get value from models and the data that Snowflake has is what we are about.  Hence the leaning into heavy partnerships. Things like hosting DeepSeek quickly, that’s just a little bit of making sure that you can still run the hundred-meter sprint in 10 seconds. It was a challenge. It was an amazing model. We had it out in two days flat. There was a lot of anxiety about DeepSeek. You don’t necessarily feel that same kind of anxiety, or even if you do, you feel like you have to have it available. Let’s break that anxiety down. There are many parts of DeepSeek. One is the open-source model. DeepSeek also offers services on servers that are hosted in China, where if you use their app, for example, everything that you are typing in is getting sent to China.  Now, without getting too much into geopolitics, people will rightfully say that sending business data to China is a bad idea. It’s the same kind of fear that we have about TikTok. Hosting the DeepSeek model does not introduce any kind of security compromise. We host it. We take security and risk management very seriously. Us hosting DeepSeek did not cause issues like tha