“在获得新一轮的融资后，Snowflake市值将高达124亿美元，成为科技界最有价值的初创公司之一。”
亚历克斯，福布斯杂志，2020年2月7日
2020年2月11日，Snowflake宣布完成新一轮融资，估值124亿美元，由Dragoneer Investment Group领投。作为公司的A轮领投方，红点创投的Satish Dharmaraj 决定公开在2014年投资Snowflake时的交易备忘录及细节，复盘当时的投资思考。
编译：红点中国团队
Satish Dharmaraj, Redpoint Ventures, 2020
祝贺Snowflake完成最新一轮融资，本轮融资投后估值124亿美元。这让我们回忆起6年前*次见到Snowflake创始团队时，公司还没有产品，也没有收入，但是我们依然对公司抱有很大期望。团队凭借强大的执行力、前瞻性的战略布局，在行业内实现了最快的收入增速，发展速度远超预期，甚至超过了一些我们已经上市的企业服务类公司。所以我们决定公开当初的交易备忘录，回溯是什么原因促成了那次投资。
以下是我们的交易备忘录及结论的摘要。
Excerpt from Deal Memo-March 2, 2014:
交易备忘录节选- 2014年3月2日
Reasons to be interested: Very strong team with highly relevant domain expertise. Team is the #1 reason to do this deal; Huge multi-billion dollar market; Very high technical barrier to entry and unique IP.
感兴趣的原因：非常强大的团队，拥有高度相关的专业领域知识。团队是完成交易的首要原因；数十亿美元的巨大市场；非常高的技术壁垒和专有IP。
Risks:AMZN Redshift is going to offer significant competition; Pre-revenue and pre-product company (product in alpha) in what will be a super competitive market; Price is super high relative to stage ($60M pre) and even at this level there is significant competition from our peers.
风险：AMZN Redshift是该领域强有力的竞争者；初创公司目前只有Alpha版本的产品，它将进入一个超级竞争的市场环境；在这个阶段，投前6000万美金的估值也相对较贵。所以，即便是这个价钱，我们也要面临同行的激烈竞争。
Our partnership voted to do the deal after much discussion. It wasn’t a controversial vote, but it’s such a good throwback to think that $60M pre was a barrier back in the day. Why did we do this deal despite the huge price (relative to those days) and the significant risks involved from an incumbent AMZN? It was a 100 percent bet on the people and the team more than anything else, and the belief that they will build something faster, more scalable and easier to use than the incumbent. Benoit, Thierry, and Marcin were — and are — special. And when we met them we knew it. Spending time with them made it clear to us that we had to back them.
经多次讨论，红点的合伙人投票决定支持这次投资。这次投票并没有太大争议，但当时我们对投前6000万美元估值也的确有顾虑。可是，即便价格高，并且AMZN已经入场，我们为什么仍要进行投资？最关键的是，我们百分之百信任这个团队，并相信他们能够搭建比竞争对手更快、更方便扩展、更易用的产品。*次遇到Benoit, Thierry和Marcin三位初创成员时，我们就认为他们非常特别。相处一段时间后，我们决定必须支持这个团队。
Below are some references on the architecture they had built and what we heard about the founders; this helped seal the deal for us to bet on this pre-product company. This team was going to do special things and we could feel it. I’m thrilled we didn’t talk ourselves out of this one based on incumbent competition. It’s also exciting to see the amazing progress and this huge milestone for a seminal company. So many more great milestones to come.
下面是一些关于他们的产品架构，以及创始团队的参考信息。在刚认识团队的时候，我们就能感到这个团队要做一些颠覆式的事情。我很庆幸当时没有因为竞争环境而放弃投资，也很高兴看到他们逐步取得的巨大成绩。我们对Snowflake的未来很有信心，期待他们未来更多的伟大时刻。
恭喜Snowflake!
红点创投投资组合中*内容/媒体平台
“Took one month of ad platform data and did an A/B test against Redshift. Redshift took an entire day to load compared to Snowflake’s alpha product at 12 minutes. Had some SQL issues but they will solve that. Think Benoit and Thierry are amazing technical guys. Good mix of cloud and DB expertise. Think they have the opportunity to destroy Redshift.”
“我们用了一个月时间做了Redshift和Snowflake之间的A/B测试。两个产品相比，Redshift下载需要一天，而Snowflake的Alpha版产品只需要12分钟。虽然期间有一些SQL问题，但他们可以解决。团队的Benoit、Thierry都是非常棒的技术专家，有很强的云计算和数据库的交叉背景，他们有机会击败Redshift。”
关于Benoit
“Very few architects in Oracle and Benoit is top 1% among them. Very few architects who can design, then code a prototype and then code it for production. Goes all the way. Great design/arch skills in performance and scalability.”
“Benoit是Oracle里为极少数的*架构师，可以说是top1%。很少有架构师能够完成设计、原代码编写、产品化等整个链条。他在设计和架构上有很强的能力，使得产品在性能和可扩展性方面表现出色。”
关于Thierry
“Thierry was very well versed in Systems, Sync, Query Optimization and Massive Parallelization. Was a great mentor and a manager. People loved to work for him and learn from him.”
“Thierry非常精通系统、查询优化和大规模并行计算。同时，他是一位优秀的导师和管理者，人们喜欢同他工作，向他学习。”
红点创投创始人
“All-star team. Marcin authored a seminal DB paper. This team can execute on this architecture.”
“全明星团队。Marcin曾发表过一篇数据库领域开创性的文章。团队现在的架构组成可以完全胜任。
参考资料
