Coda + Snowflake: Democratizing data for everyone

Learn how Coda and Snowflake are partnering to turn data into action across the enterprise.

Shishir Mehrotra

CEO

Coda + Snowflake: Democratizing data for everyone

By Shishir Mehrotra

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I’m extremely excited to announce that Coda has entered a large partnership with Snowflake, the world’s leading Data Cloud company. We’ve been working on this partnership for a few months now, and I’m thrilled about where we’re headed. The partnership is going to roll out in multiple phases: some that I’ll discuss below, and some yet to be announced. And Snowflake Ventures is also leading a large investment in Coda. You can watch Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s Head of Product, and I discuss the partnership here:

Coda + Snowflake: Turning data into action across the enterprise.

 This partnership started a few months back with an unexpected conversation between myself and Christian. As context, Christian and I have worked together several times in the past, including at Microsoft building database technology and then on YouTube at Google. As we were talking about the key initiatives each of our teams was pursuing, we realized that we had a shared view on one of the fundamental challenges in today’s teams. As Christian says in the video above:
The partnership started with a very simple insight that most companies are split-brained: one side is the company’s data, which is more accessible to data professionals. The other side is made up of the team at large and the tools they use that take action. Because the two halves can be divided, there’s a big opportunity to reduce friction and make enterprise data more actionable for every team, regardless of role or technical skillset.
I couldn’t agree more. The divide between data and action is one of the key problems facing modern teams. At Coda, we see this gap all the time. As an all-in-one collaborative workspace, I’ve seen Coda used for millions of use cases—everything from crafting decision memos to running sales teams. A few years back, we shipped one of our most beloved features: Coda Packs, which allow extending Coda to seamlessly connect data into documents. There are now 600+ public Packs (plus thousands more made by teams for internal use), and they are used in incredibly creative ways to fundamentally change how teams operate. As we were about to launch our Snowflake Pack (more on this below), Christian and I chatted again—this time about some of the unique opportunities this could unlock. Snowflake helps companies like Adobe, Mastercard, AT&T, EA, Pfizer, and Canva store, govern, and manage their data. We’re heavy Snowflake users at Coda, and we’ve found that the platform is capable of breath-taking speed and scale, without trading off security or privacy. Like many Snowflake customers, we put all of our data into Snowflake. And our team was very excited to finally connect this data to Coda, the place where we do all our work. We watched closely as these use cases took off, and Christian and I got really excited about a broader partnership.

Our first step: Bringing live data to your team’s workspace with the Snowflake Pack

 The idea behind the Snowflake Pack (which is available today) is simple. You can drag a table that is backed by Snowflake into a Coda doc. And because Packs are building blocks in Coda’s canvas, you can turn Snowflake data into a chart, you can add columns to it, and connect it to a different set of data as well. And by the way, it’s bi-directionally editable as well. Here are three examples of how teams are already putting the Snowflake Pack to integrate data more seamlessly into their workflows.

Coda 4.0 hub

 Last year, we launched Coda 4.0, a release that bundled a year’s worth of work. The whole company worked on it. One of our product managers decided to make the project as metrics-driven as possible. So, on every page, they took each sub-goal and connected it to Snowflake using the Pack. Suddenly, we had stats inline that could directly show the progress of each effort. And because the full data was accessible, we could build workflows on it: e.g. to reach out to customers who were trialing a particular feature. We saw how people brought data right into a collaborative surface where they were making decisions. All of that was orchestrated in this Coda doc, all completely powered by Snowflake in the back end.

Snowflake’s IT tool consolidation hub

 Christian told me about an interesting tool Snowflake’s IT team uses for managing licenses to products they buy. They wanted to make this process as data-driven as possible, so they started ingesting everything about their licenses into Snowflake: from sign-in data via Okta, to information about each contract via Docusign, and even things like support ticket data from ServiceNow. They combined all that information to make a quantitative assessment to inform procurement about how many licenses they need for each application. In basically a one-hour session, the Coda team and Snowflake team together built an amazing Coda doc that runs their procurement workflow. Now they can see their tooling data and make data-driven decisions around their tools, which is incredibly valuable. So when their IT team goes through purchase renewals, it's not just the decision of “What do we do?” Instead, the data is brought into a conversation with a vendor in a meaningful and thoughtful way.

Account planning

 One more that got me really excited about the partnership is watching sales teams use Coda and Snowflake together in account planning. If you're an account executive at a company, you probably have Salesforce pulled up. You have reports coming out of Snowflake, and then you have a whole bunch of documents and spreadsheets and presentations. And then notes from all the different meetings. And the list of people you’re onboarding. And the success plan and all of those different things. All trying to get a comprehensive view of the customer. We’ve seen a few sales teams run those account plans as docs infused with Snowflake data. In a single doc, they can see all of the things I just listed, with live reporting. And it’s actionable: e.g. one of our customers showed me an example of how they took the list of people that have signed up in the last week and added a button column to quickly invite selected users to the next relevant webinar. Truly turning data into action.

What’s next: We’re working on the future of Enterprise AI.

 We’ll have more to say about this next phase of the partnership soon (the team is hard at work!), but it’s probably no surprise that we’re working together on AI, specifically Enterprise AI. We’ve all fallen in love with this idea (inspired by ChatGPT) of being able to converse with an assistant who knows everything on the entire Internet. Christian put the context well: Our view is that enterprises need to choose their AI strategy and data strategy at the same time — they are deeply connected. In fact, we believe there is no AI strategy without a strong data foundation. And I think what we’re going to build next with Coda is going to be a big part of that.
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