The Saga of Snowflake: Can AI and a New CEO Save the Company?

Sridhar Ramaswamy seldom takes a day off. He prefers to work seven days a week, putting in a “non-small number of hours” on the weekend, he said, usually in the morning before his wife, a dentist, wakes up and then again in the afternoon.

“Listen, I’m from India: We’re always very insecure. I can’t sit around and not do anything,” he said. “I like to work.”

As the new CEO of Snowflake, a struggling data and software company that epitomized the last tech era’s cloud boom, he has sought to shake up the place and has dispensed with some parts of the looser management style favored by his predecessor, Frank Slootman. One basic change: Slootman preferred to operate from his Montana house. Ramaswamy has a fourth-floor desk next to other engineers in the company’s San Mateo, Calif., office.