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Selling Samooha to Snowflake + the advantages of a second time founder with Kamakshi, Sivaramakrishnan, CEO of Samooha

We did the counter of what other founders would do. We bet exclusively on Snowflake and that bore fruits in terms of how the Snowflakek ecosystem and customers benefited from it. We were able to compress product market fit cycle and leverage a lot of the ecosystem dynamics that Snowflake offers to be able to go to market much easier and much faster.

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Episode Description

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO and Co founder of Samooha (acq'd by Snowflake), joins the show to talk about

- how she built two companies that helped customers "bring data to life", selling DrawBridge to LinkedIn and Samooha to Snowflake.

- Kamakshi's advantages as a second time founder.

- How Kamakshi knew it was the right time to sell Samooha and the process she went through in the acquisition with Snowflake.

- Leadership differences between the leaders of the companies that Kamakshi sold to, most notably, Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Frank Slootman (Snowflake)

- Betting on the Snowflake platform, the importance of partnerships and dating before marriage, and the pros and cons of a single platform approach.

Episode Transcript

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan

Co founder and CEO of Samooha

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan is the founder and CEO of Samooha, a secure data collaboration application that enables businesses and enterprises to securely share, collaborate and garner insights from their own data as well as the data of their partner ecosystems. A repeat founder, her previous company Drawbridge, Inc., was acquired by LinkedIn in 2019. Before starting Drawbridge, Sivaramakrishnan was part of the early team at AdMob, which was acquired by Google in 2009 for $750 million. Kamakshi received her Ph.D. in Information Theory and algorithms from Stanford.

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