Published August 20
Snowflake was only in its fourth year (and second year out of stealth mode) when Denise Persson joined the data powerhouse as CMO. Ten years later, she’s become one of the longest-tenured marketing executives in tech, leading the company into its AI-fueled future.
Persson spoke with The Current’s Zac Wang about her early impressions of Snowflake, the data infrastructure needed to actually scale AI and her secrets to success.
Take it back to the beginning. I know you were employee number 120 at Snowflake. Snowflake now is a massive company that the biggest companies in the world count on. What did you see back then?
For me, as a marketer, data was my biggest challenge. At my previous job, I had to knock on the CEO’s door asking for different datasets. I got it, but it was three weeks later.
Data was the missing part from a marketing perspective. Everything in marketing had gone digital, but all the data was sitting in different silos. It was super hard to work with it. So again, I had to knock on the door of the CEO. I got the data, and then on the market side, we had to try to stitch all this data together. It was great data. We got to know when it was too late.
When I started conversations with Snowflake and learned about the vision for the company, I thought that if this company is going to do what they say that they’re going to do, it’s going to change the world. It’s going to change the world of marketing, as well. And that’s what happened.
It’s very almost forward-looking back then, thinking we need data at such a higher speed to be effective.
Today, it’s about the real-time aspect. In marketing, if you get campaign data in real time and if you can reallocate your resources faster, you’re going to get a greater return on your investment.
In the past, you got the data when a campaign was over. If you had a six-month campaign going and then you knew a month after that did it work or not.
There’s so much money in marketing that is being wasted because you didn’t know what was really working and wasn’t there an ability to really make those changes in real time. That has really been the game changer of data.
Seems like there’s going to be an explosion of ads. It’s faster to make them, and obviously you have to react faster. Do you think that’s going to make it harder to utilize the data more effectively? Because more ads, more data.
Data is truly the foundation for AI today.
Now you’re talking about these agentic workflows being developed. The data is at the center of that. If you’re not unifying your data — if you don’t have a governance and privacy policy in place — you can’t do anything with AI. So data is truly the foundation for that.
We’re just seeing an explosion in customers now that really want to build out their data infrastructure, because you cannot have an AI strategy if you don’t have a data strategy first.
You’re one of the longest-serving CMOs in tech. What’s the secret?
The secret, I would say, is that in such a fast-growing space, every six months, maybe even every three months now, it feels like you’re working at a completely new company. We’re innovating at a breakneck pace.
There’s so much change happening all the time. And for you as a marketer today, you need to innovate yourself. I feel challenged every day to innovate myself in a way, the way we are doing marketing. You have to learn every single day to stay current in today’s world. That’s the challenge.
We’re not in any industry standing still. It’s a big challenge for me personally just to continue to reinvent myself.
