Snowflake share price falls after revenue forecasts dip below expectations

The value of cloud-based data warehouse vendor Snowflake plunged 24 percent in extended trading in the US last night after it announced lower-than-expected forecasts for product revenue as well as the departure of CEO Frank Slootman. Overall results for the financial year 2024 showed product revenue climbing 38 percent to $2. …

[Headley_Grange]

FCTLOT

The forecast wasn't "well below analysts' estimates", it was 2% below the analysts estimates. The bad people here are the analysts and the investors, not Snowlflake*. The analysts, because they've got some God complex and think that if the future in the real world is 2% off from their guess then it's the real world that's bad. The investors because they base their whole business plan on the analysts and chuck people and companies under buses based on their guesses. Fucking cunts the lot of them.

*Full disclosure - I'd never heard of Snowflake before this article. I've got no skin in the game other than a hatred of any system which sets so much store on people guessing what might happen and then making it so important that it's better to fuck other people's lives up than admit they got it wrong. My life as an engineer and project manager was a nightmare of trying to live up to other people's stupid cost and schedule guesses** and now my pension is in the same boat. Fucking cunts the lot of them.

/end rant (for a while)

**"guess" == "estimate" in my thesaurus. I once told my CFO this when discussing the cost to complete of a project and it didn't calm him down at all.

[Andy Mac]

Re: FCTLOT

I live for the day when the headline reads “Analysts fired for making wrong revenue predictions”

[Bitsminer]

Re: FCTLOT

In my former $LIFE I used to do reliability and availability calculations for government and big commercial clients.

You know, things like "meets 0.997 availability". "Repairable within 6 hours 95% of the time excluding unspared items." And so on.

After a couple of bad experiences, I always added a disclaimer to the design or calculation document: "This is a forecast not a promise."

The noise died down a little after that.

[captain veg]

Re: FCTLOT

Snowflake was born on a wave of hype and unfeasible valuation. Smart money is now cashing out. I imagine.

-A.

[doublerot13]

Re: FCTLOT

It's been a long time since I set foot in a bank, but analysts were generally the dumbest people in the building. Or absolutely hot.. Go figure.

[captain veg]

music stops, grab a chair

Customers have experienced unexpected bills with Snowflake, making enterprise users wary of shifting their workloads from incumbent platforms.

[T]he "unpredictability of the costs" was a big shock to people using Snowflake because "not only can they not explain this month's bill, they've no idea what the next month's bill will be."

My employers moved to Snowflake -- at some considerable inconvenience to us employees -- largely because of similar complaints from the accountants about Amazon Redshift.

Before that we had a Netezza box on premises. Of course that wasn't nearly cloudy enough.

Round we go again.

-A.

[Michael Wojcik]

Meet the new boss...

His challenge will be to lay off a bunch of employees, presumably, as that is every tech CEO's answer to a drop in market cap.

[Noodle]

Unexpected bills are nothing new, have these people never been through an Oracle audit before?

"Well Mr Customer, I realize you have paid an eye watering sum of money to have our supposed "Enterprise" edition, but it looks to me like you've used advanced compression on those indexes, so you better dig deep and hand over some more cash!"