❄️ “A stock is worth exactly what somebody wants to pay for it”
Would have been hard to miss this one… but Snowflake’s IPO last week was the largest software IPO ever. The IPO priced at $120, and the stock closed on the first day of trading at $250+, for a market cap of ~$70B!
(as a special DL side note, Snowflake was one of the first investment memos I worked on at Madrona! Nice to know that I peaked early - only downhill from here… 😝)
Generally, investors and executives can’t say much about their companies leading up to and post-IPO, but I loved this comment from CEO Frank Slootman, shortly after he became a billionaire as the stock started trading:
“A stock is worth exactly what somebody wants to pay for it. It’s like talking about the weather, it is what it is. Tomorrow’s another day, we’ll see what it brings.”
By the way, in case you want to get caught up on what Snowflake actually does, here are some great articles:
- Overview - Good summary, with an interesting history on the team and investors
- Product Deep Dive - Very in-depth piece on Snowflake’s product and customer use cases
- S-1 Teardown - Comparing Snowflake’s metrics to other SaaS IPos
- Amp It Up! (highly recommend)- Frank Slootman’s blog post on the “secret sauce” behind his leadership style and company culture