6/16/25-❄️Snowflake Summit, GOOG's Sundar🎧, Super Power Stalemate
The science fiction of the past is already reality in the present.
Welcome back. In a busy world we can be distracted with the trivial many things or we can focus on The Vital Few.
Something that I am thinking about
❄️Snowflake 2025 Summit Conference…. thoughts
My summary of Snowflake’s revised thesis under CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy is they want to be at the center of DATA. Experts strongly believe that AI is advanced by two things.✌🏾 1. Compute and 2. Data. Unique > proprietary > clean > connected > enriched DATA is a differentiated advantage for each and every Snowflake customer.
Keep that thesis in the back of your mind as I walk through a few of the new announcements and features from the June conference. You will see a theme.
Apache Iceberg innovations- This means Snowflake customers can accelerate their open lakehouse strategies, unlocking data access and analysis across open and managed environments to build, scale, and share advanced insights and AI-powered apps faster.
Adaptive Compute- It automatically selects the appropriate cluster size, the number of clusters, and auto-suspend/resume duration for jobs on your behalf to minimize required configurations. Query routing is even done intelligently to the right-sized clusters without any user action. Better performance and utilization.
Simplified Ingest Pricing Model resulting in ~50% better “economics.”
Snowflake Openflow is an open, extensible, managed service for multimodal data integration that makes data movement between data sources – structured and unstructured – and destinations effortless. With Openflow, customers can more easily manage unstructured data movement and build data products with the same methods as structured data.
Snowflake Postgres- announced acquisition of Crunchy Data (PostgreSQL) and rebrand to Snowflake Postgres. (This is rumored to cost Snow ~$250M. Weeks earlier Databricks acquired the serverless Postgres database company, Neon, for $1 billion). Snowflake Postgres an enterprise-ready PostgreSQL solution combining open source flexibility with secure scale. Snowflake, originally an analytical database, is now fully entering the transactional database market with this acquisition. It’s another step toward Snowflake’s mission to become the ultimate destination for enterprise data workloads and accelerate innovation for… you guessed it… AI.
Cortex Agents- Agents use Cortex Analyst (structured) and Cortex Search (unstructured) as tools, along with LLMs, to analyze data. Cortex Search extracts insights from unstructured sources, while Cortex Analyst generates SQL to process structured data.
Snowflake Intelligence- a business user can query the data using NLP to get insights and analysis faster. And, not only can it surface insights – it can then spin up an email to your exec team explaining the insights and sharing where it found them.
Data is the theme. Analytical, Hybrid, Transactional databases. Structured and Unstructured data. Multi-Cloud (AWS, MSFT, GCP) hosted and connected. Data stored inside Snowflake or Apache Iceberg format elsewhere. No matter where or what kind of data, Snow wants to put itself at the center. For who? Data engineers, Data scientists and Business/Enterprise users. SNOW 0.00%↑
Investing, Companies, Market Past/Future
(I invest in Companies, not in stocks.)
Interesting companies that hosted earnings results or information sessions since my last edition that I reviewed-
Technology- ORCL 0.00%↑ , AVGO 0.00%↑ , CRWD 0.00%↑ , MDB 0.00%↑
Others- COST 0.00%↑
(With data and charts it is not what you look at, it is what you see that matters.) Click on any of the images below to see a larger view.
Do Teslas have too few sensors? Do Waymos have too many? Waymo clearly has the “belt and suspenders” approach to safety.
Podcast
Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471
Sundar Pichai is CEO of Google and Alphabet. 2+ hrs, you can also find the show on your favorite podcast platform. GOOG 0.00%↑ Sundar says around mark 20:26-
We're at the early stages of vibe coding. You know, I've been amazed at what people have put out online with Veo 3. But it takes a bit of work, right, you have to stitch together a set of prompts. But all this is gonna get better.
The thing I always think about → THIS is the worst it will ever be. 😲🤯Right, like at any given moment in time. (It will always be improving from this point.)
Lex- Yeah, it's interesting you went there as kind of a first thought. So an exponential increase☝🏾 of access to creativity.
Sundar- Software creation, a piece of content to be shared with others, Games, down the line. All of that like just becomes infinitely more possible.
Video
24 Min, Bloomberg Wealth w David Rubenstein: Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn
Greenlight Capital Founder and President David Einhorn discusses the challenges of value investing in the current market environment, his investment approach, and the performance of his fund over the years. Einhorn expresses concern about the US government's fiscal and monetary policies, which he believes are fundamentally inflationary.
David Einhorn is one of my favorite finance people and I always learn from him.
Books and Articles since my last edition
(Reading Great books is like a conversation with the finest minds of the past.- Descartes. If I get bored of a book I quit and move on.)
Doom Guy: Life in First Person by John Romero Autobiography. Partnered with the legendary John Carmack. John Romero, gaming’s original rock star, is the cocreator of DOOM, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3-D, some of the biggest video games of all time. Considered the godfather of the first-person shooter, a genre that continues to dominate the market today, he holds a unique place in gaming history.
[If you love😍 the Legend John Carmack, or don’t know who he is and want to learn more about him, I wrote about Carmack in my very first post 1M years ago. There is a video of an amazing speech he gave also (Link here. 12/2022)
Trust by Hernan Diaz Historical Fiction.
Warcross by Marie Lu Science Fiction.
Here is a link to many of the books I have read and my 1-5 star rating- Goodreads Books Read
Wild Card🃏
World Wars with Super Powers are Extremely Low Probability
The global population lives in fear of a future world war, or a hot ♨️🔥war between two or more super powers. I am willing to confidently say that the probability of this is very very low. It is not going to happen for at least the next 100 years and maybe longer.
First of all, super powers possess nuclear weapons. The use of nuclear weapons causes mutual assured Nuclear⚛️ destruction. So, “you don’t use nukes on me and I won’t use nukes on you. Fair enough!”
I know what you are thinking. “Nick, what about weapons less than nukes.” Armed infantry combat. Aircraft carries, battleships, fighter jets, bombers, tanks and submarines. Nope. You are not thinking hard enough. These are symbols. The time for these weapons is over. Put these weapons in the history books along with horses, spears, shields and swords.
Modern day weapons include- Cyberwarfare, Drones (land, air, sea) (Small & Large Drones), Laser & Microwave weapons, robotics, laser guided missiles, autonomous weapons with sub-second response rates, Space based options (WHAT? I know!) Use your imagination or watch this 8 minute video below. The science fiction of the past is already reality in the present.
What I have described above leads me to the conclusion that super powers will not engage in wars with one another. The table is set and balanced at a stalemate. Not quite mutual assured destruction, but something close to it. Something like a stable equilibrium.
So, world peace! Everything is great. Puppies🐶🐱 and rainbows🌈…… NO! Super Powers will engage in indirect wars with one another. This might present itself as smaller regional wars between neighbors, and nonstate guerilla wars within a country or region. It could also express itself as Expansionary conflicts like-
Russia 🐻 into Ukraine.
Or potentially China🐼 into Taiwan.
Or the USA🦅 into Greenland and Canada.
The next 100 years of war rather is going to be a strategy/game of geopolitics, diplomacy, economic chess, soft conflict, cyberwar, currency war, proxy war and essentially ongoing Cold War.
If you liked this post from Nick, why not share it and subscribe?
Disclaimer: All of my posts are for informational purposes only. I might own some of the companies discussed in these posts. This is NOT a recommendation to buy or sell securities discussed. Please do your own work before investing your money.