The stock's struggles come as Wall Street shifted its focus to more defensive parts of the market and away from unprofitable, growth-oriented firms like Snowflake. Shares of Snowflake are down roughly 22% year to date, excluding Wednesday's after-hours move. He helped take Snowflake public in September 2020, in what at the time was the largest software IPO ever.

They'll grow up with it, get used to it, I hope,' said Slootman, a tech industry veteran who previously helmed ServiceNow. 'In a consumption model, it's not the same as a model where things are under contract, and it has a very different cadence. Snowflake had 5,944 total customers at the end of its fiscal 2022, up 44% from a year earlier. Snowflake's cloud-based software allows customers to search and analyze large amounts of data, with the ability to scale up capacity as they need. We have tons and tons of customers that we have zero history with that we somehow have to project exactly what they're going to do and how they're going to grow,' he said. 'We report revenue on what people are actually consuming during the quarter. In that quarterly report, Snowflake projected product revenue growth of 82% on a -year-over-year basis. Slootman noted that Snowflake ended up blowing past the fiscal 2022 product revenue forecast the company provided on March 3, 2021. In fiscal 2022, Snowflake's product revenue - which accounts for most of its overall sales - jumped nearly 106%, according to its earnings presentation Wednesday. 'That's not how we do things, so we'd rather come from a conservative posture and be able to walk things up.' We don't put the wet finger in the wind and go, 'Well, we think it's going to be this,'' Slootman said.

'We take a data-driven approach, which you would expect from a data management company. That would represent a sizable slowdown from previous years. Snowflake said it expects product revenue to increase between 65% to 67% in the fiscal year, right around the 66% growth analysts expected, according to FactSet. Investors were processing the company's slowest revenue growth since at least 2019, as well as its guidance for fiscal 2023. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit

Amp It Up by Frank Slootman