Brad Gerstner: commitment

Transcript context

…And there are a zillion things in your life telling you, you should be uncomfortable or in pain when you're doing something non-consensus because you got all these smart people telling you you're wrong. Correct. If you're a founder of an investment firm, those are oftentimes career-ending decisions. Think about this. This is kind of fun one and we're doing something that's somewhat orthogonal to what the other folks are doing. I won't mention the firm but probably one of the best-known firms in Silicon Valley who passed on that round in Snowflake. The partner said to me, I wouldn't do it and here's why, but we ended up doing it. By the way, his argument was a good one. It was pretty compelling at the time. One of the things we did in that story was over Christmas that year, we actually were aggregating a lot of data for our own hedge fund. We were crawling web pages. We were buying data. We had a data warehouse. Kevin, who's my partner and was kind of a young analyst at the time, a computer scientist out of MIT, said, how about if over Christmas, I'll replace our data warehouse with Snowflake? Which was non-GA at the time. It was in beta with a couple companies. We did that and he's like, this is going to win. This is the winning Ark. This is good stuff. But he also wrote a bug report of the 10 bugs he found. He sent this bug bashing report to the founders, Benoit and Thierry. This isn't the dictionary under how to win a deal.…

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