09-10-2026
MEETING WITH BENOÎT DAGEVILLE AND THIERRY CRUANES, CO-FOUNDERS AT SNOWFLAKE
by by French Tech SF
At Snowflake, during a gathering hosted by La French Tech at the company's offices, Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, the company's two co-founders, looked back on the story of the company they built together after leaving Oracle. They were interviewed by investor and French Tech board member Sunil Chhaya (Kearny Jackson), who opened the conversation by noting a valuation in the region of $118 billion. The two engineers detailed the architectural and governance choices that set them apart from Oracle, then from Amazon.
Snowflake: the bet by two French engineers that outmaneuvered Oracle and Amazon
From undervalued engineer in France to a Californian bet
Benoît Dageville moved to the United States in 1996, sent by the French IT group Bull to port Oracle databases. In France, he says, “technology wasn't valued: to succeed, you had to become a manager.” Thierry Cruanes joined Oracle three years later, after a phone interview conducted in French, since the hiring manager couldn't understand his English. The two engineers, who had followed similar academic paths without ever crossing, would go on to spend sixteen and thirteen years there respectively, in what they describe as one of Silicon Valley's most accomplished engineering cultures.
The rise of big data and the cloud in the early 2010s changed everything. Oracle's architecture, they say, couldn't accommodate the new semi-structured data (logs, machine-generated data) that the big data boom was bringing to the fore. “We used to say we were turning into dinosaurs,” Thierry sums up. The two founders are quick to repeat: it wasn't the ambition to build a multibillion-dollar company that made them leave, but the ambition to build a product. “We would have built Snowflake inside Oracle if that had been possible,” Benoît says. Backed by investor Mike Speiser, who gave them their first million dollars, the two men resigned with a clear product ambition but no finished architecture. For five months, they worked out of Benoît's apartment, around a whiteboard, to invent one.
An architectural bet against Amazon
Snowflake's thesis, from 2012 onward: design a data warehouse built natively for the cloud, separating storage from compute power, rather than porting existing architectures over. A choice that put the company in direct competition with Redshift, the equivalent product from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which nonetheless hosts Snowflake.
For Thierry, that positioning worked in their favor: “Redshift was a mistake for AWS. It was software designed for the previous generation, simply ported to the cloud.” Amazon's product, he says, had the paradoxical merit of convincing the market to move its data to the cloud, paving the way for Snowflake. The young company's second selling point: multi-cloud portability, so customers wouldn't be locked into a single provider, AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
Artificial intelligence, a new playing field
For the two founders, AI opens a new chapter in a goal that remains only partly fulfilled: democratizing access to data beyond IT teams, all the way to business users. It also allows, more broadly, unstructured data, documents, images, videos, that had until now been hard to query, to be put to use.
Asked about the threat posed by major AI labs, in theory capable of rebuilding a competitor in a matter of months, Thierry is categorical: “I can tell you Anthropic can't build a Snowflake in two months.” Architecture, governance, trust, integration into companies' processes: all barriers to entry that the sheer power of a model isn't enough to erase, he argues.
"We're still a start-up"
Despite a valuation running into the tens of billions of dollars, the two founders say they still cultivate a start-up mindset: flat hierarchy, accessibility, and an in-house running joke that has become legend, an idea Thierry floated one day to institute an annual strike day after every production release, a joke that eventually leaked onto LinkedIn. “I'm always a step behind the image of Snowflake's success from the outside,” Benoît admits, saying he fears the fate of an IBM, unable to reinvent itself in time.
To the young entrepreneurs in the room, the two men offered a reminder of their own fundamentals: a strong engineering team, passion for the product rather than an obsession with the numbers, and, at the start, nothing to lose.
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