Snowflake, the cloud data analytics provider that held the largest US initial public offering of software last year, has become the latest tech company to ditch California.
In its earnings press release on Wednesday, Snowflake’s deadline was listed as “No-Headquarters / BOZEMAN, Mont.” As recently as May 3, when the company announced the date for its first quarter earnings report, that same line read “SAN MATEO, California.”
Snowflake’s filing with the SEC on Wednesday showed a Bozeman address for his executive office. The company explained why in a footnote:
“We are a Delaware corporation with a globally distributed workforce and no corporate headquarters. Under the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, we are required to designate a ‘chief executive office’. For the purposes of this report, we have designated our office in Bozeman, Montana, as our main executive office, as this is where our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer are located. “
Snowflake will continue to have a large Silicon Valley operation, and even went through a recent massive redesign of its San Mateo office to prepare for the eventual return of employees.
“While San Mateo remains an important location for us, we do not have a single office that is at the center of Snowflake’s operations,” a spokesperson said in an email.
The company’s decision to withdraw its corporate headquarters from California follows a trend that began amid the pandemic last year.
Palantir moved to Colorado. Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise went to Texas. Numerous companies consolidated offices and pulled out of Bay Area leases, giving their employees the option to work from wherever they wanted. Businesses have left for a combination of reasons, including California’s inflated cost of living, high taxes, and an environment that is seen as increasingly hostile to business.
Snowflake, which has about 2,500 employees, has been moving in the direction of remote and distributed work for months. CEO Frank Slootman told CNBC in January that after the Covid-19 outbreak forced people to work from home, it became clear that the old way of working was not going to return.
The pandemic has proven to be “almost like a wake-up call that is opening our eyes to opportunity,” Slootman said at the time. “It’s really going to reduce the real estate footprint that companies have.”
The Snowflake address lists how its office in Bozeman, a city with fewer than 50,000 residents, is located downtown, near a post office branch, a bowling alley and a coffee shop, according to Google Maps.
Slootman has spent a lot of time and money in Montana in recent years.
While he was CEO of ServiceNow before joining Snowflake, Slootman contributed the maximum amount allowed to Republican Greg Gianforte, who was Montana’s representative in the United States House of Representatives until this year, Federal Commission records show. of Elections. Gianforte is now the governor of the state.
In late 2020, Slootman applied for a 20-year aviation land lease at Montana’s Twin Bridges Airport beginning last October, according to the minutes of the Madison County Airport Board meeting.
– CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report
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