View through the Montana Ranch entrance to the pastureland with a view of the snow-capped Crazy Mountains in central Montana in the background. The Crazy Mountains reach a height of over 300 meters and are located north of Interstate-90 between Billings and Bozeman Montana. They can be seen for many miles along this stretch of the interstate. (Photo by: Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Educational images | Universal Images Group | Getty Images
Snowflake, the cloud data analytics company that carried out the largest US software IPO last year, is the latest tech company to throw California overboard.
In Wednesday’s earnings press release, Snowflake’s data line was shown as “No-Headquarters / BOZEMAN, Mont”. As of May 3, when the company announced the date of its first quarter earnings report, the same line read “SAN MATEO, California”.
Snowflake’s SEC filing on Wednesday revealed an address in Bozeman for the executive office. The company explained in a footnote why:
“We are a Delaware corporation with a globally distributed workforce and no corporate office. The Securities and Exchange Commission rules require us to designate a ‘head office’. For the purposes of this report, we have designated our Bozeman, Montana office as the main office because our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer are based there. “
Snowflake will continue to have a large operation in Silicon Valley and even recently underwent a massive redesign of its San Mateo office in preparation for the eventual return of the staff.
“While San Mateo continues to be an important location for us, we don’t have a single office that is at the center of Snowflake’s operations,” a spokesman said in an email.
The company’s move to withdraw its California headquarters follows a trend that began in the middle of the pandemic last year.
Palantir moved to Colorado. Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise left for Texas. Numerous companies consolidated offices and withdrew from leases in the Bay Area to allow their employees to work from anywhere. Corporations have broken up for a number of reasons, including the excessive cost of living in California, high taxes, and an environment that is increasingly viewed as unfriendly to businesses.
Snowflake with around 2,500 employees has been moving towards remote work for months. CEO Frank Slootman told CNBC in January that after the Covid-19 outbreak, people were forced to work from home, it became clear that the old way of working was not going to return.
The pandemic has proven “almost like a wake-up call that just opens our eyes to the opportunity,” Slootman said at the time. “It will really reduce the real estate footprint of businesses.”
The address that Snowflake lists as an office in Bozeman, a town with fewer than 50,000 residents, is downtown near a post office, bowling alley, and coffee shop, according to Google Maps.
Slootman has spent a lot of time and money in Montana over the past several years.
As CEO of ServiceNow prior to joining Snowflake, Slootman paid the maximum amount allowed for Republican Greg Gianforte, who until that year was Montana’s representative in the US House of Representatives, Federal Election Commission records show. Gianforte is now the governor of the state.
At the end of 2020, according to the minutes of the Madison County Airport Board meeting, Slootman applied for a lease for a 20-year flight time at Twin Bridges Airport in Montana from October last year.
– CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report
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