The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) · Monday, August 31, 2026
Aaron Katz draws parallels between ClickHouse's sales approach and those of DataDog and Snowflake. He initially favored DataDog's product-led growth (PLG) but now recognizes the need to layer in an enterprise sales motion, learning from his Salesforce experience.
“I looked at the two most popular infrastructure software companies over the last 10 years, and I distill that down to DataDog and Snowflake.”
“DataDog had this PLG, self-service, developer-led motion. So you could get started, deploy agent, instrument your application, never talked to anybody in sales. Snowflake went heavy after the enterprise through, you know, very expensive sales and marketing.”
“But at some point, you need to layer in an enterprise sales motion on top of some sort of PLG distribution.”