Snowflake

[weighingmachine]

well that did not work out too well for BRK, at least Todd gave some losses to absorb some of the Apple gains.

 

Their dalliance looks pretty bad from an investment point of view, but more worrisome from a tech operations point of view:

 

 

 

 

 

[gfp]

Oh wow - that snowflake stuff is hilarious!  Yikes Todd

[sleepydragon]

snowflake is actually pretty useful. It's essentially a modern day Excel with machine learning tools, and is extremely fast. Geico is probably trying to use machine learning to help insurance policy. 

 

When I went to geico's website, it says you could get those "boxes" in your car to monitor your driving. But somehow I couldn't find how to get those for my area. They seems to be slow in rolling this out. 

[Whensthepaintdry?]

Didn’t they invest pre ipo under 100 with Salesforce?

[weighingmachine]

reported at 260 buy and looks like the sell would have been low 100s

 

https://www.dataroma.com/m/hist/hist.php?f=BRK&s=SNOW

 

the more worrisome thing is operational, if you read the tech threads above. Geico fell so far behind in tech by sticking w old school Nicely management  for too long gave Progressive room to eat their lunch. now playing catchup and got sucked in by flavor of the month. looks like a mess.

[gfp]

1 hour ago, weighingmachine said:

reported at 260 buy and looks like the sell would have been low 100s

 

https://www.dataroma.com/m/hist/hist.php?f=BRK&s=SNOW

 

the more worrisome thing is operational, if you read the tech threads above. Geico fell so far behind in tech by sticking w old school Nicely management  for too long gave Progressive room to eat their lunch. now playing catchup and got sucked in by flavor of the month. looks like a mess.

 

Dataroma doesn't work for prices paid or sold at.  Berkshire bought Snowflake at the IPO price.  I believe it was $120 / share.

 

edit:  I just checked inside Columbia Insurance Co, where Todd owned the stock.  Snowflake was sold for $131.90 / share in Q2 so that was actually a small profit (terrible investment outcome).

Edited August 16 by gfp

[Spekulatius]

Interesting $SNOW revenues increase by 30% and net retention  rate is 127% . That means growth comes from existing customer basically.
If true, what are they spending  ~$400M on sales and marketing for?  That’s 46% of revenues. Makes no sense to me.
 

Anyone has any idea what’s going on? I think I want a job in S&M at this outfit working remotely.

[rogermunibond]

There's quite a lot of scuttlebut on the reddit r\geico board specifically around the IT turnaround at Geico.  

 

Seems like the new CIO is going in a different direction from SNOW.

[gfp]

Yeah between reddit and Lauren Balik's twitter feed there has been a ton of gossip on this stuff.  Sort of entertaining!

 

Maybe all of Snowflake's growth is just Linda Apsley moving from job to job