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Snowflake, which went public this week under the ticker "SNOW", is now the most valuable software startup ever to IPO and the fifth most valuable tech startup ever, according to Renaissance Capital. On its first day the company opened at $245 a share on the New York Stock Exchange, up from $120 set by its bankers, and closed at $254, valuing the company at $70.4 billion.

Snowflake’s exciting debut is just the beginning of a tech IPO bonanza as Airbnb, DoorDash, Wish, and Palantir are all on track to go public before the end of the year.

The big-data storage company was founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski, and has taken aim at Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure cloud data platforms. Under CEO Frank Slootman, Snowflake has grown rapidly and in the first half of 2020 the company’s revenue surged 133% to $242 million, compared to just $104 million during the same period in 2019.

Slootman, who has now taken three tech companies public , “IPOs for us are milestones along the way. They’re not endpoints. We needed to do this for a number of reasons, especially to raise the stature of the company in the marketplace.”

As Snowflake looks to the future it will rely on some key team members to strengthen its core offering and take it to new heights.

The leadership and experience of Sunny Bedi, the company’s Chief Information Officer, will ensure the late-stage startup can efficiently grow into a corporation. Bedi, who joined Snowflake in 2020, previously held senior Corporate IT and Operations roles at Nvidia and helped the company as it grew its talent pool from less than 2,000 employees to 15,000.

Shelly Begun serves as the Chief Human Resources Officer at Snowflake and will be crucial to maintaining the company’s culture as it scales. To do so she will rely on her more than 35 years of experience operationalizing and engaging employees at the enterprise-level. Begun’s role will continue to be central to Snowflake’s growth as the world adapts to the new normal of entire companies working from their homes and onboarding new hires remotely.

To keep Snowflake on the right track, the company will turn to VP of Sales Strategy & Operations Andrew Straus. He and Chief Revenue Officer Chris Degnan will be central figures in plotting Snowflake’s growth through new deals. The company already can count major brands like Capital One, Sony, Adobe, and McKesson as clients, but now it has the potential to court even more companies that are looking to embrace the cloud as they adapt to remote work and an increasingly decentralized workforce.

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