525: Frank Slootman (CEO of Snowflake) - Raising Your Standards, Pushing The Pace, Hiring Ahead Of The Curve, & Amping It Up
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
The Negative Role Model
CEOs get drunk under their own power all the time and CEOs have an enormous amount of power, but not everybody can handle it. Some people have enormous need for having company around and they get lonely very quickly. Other people far less. That's just my psychology. You know, I'm very good at being alone. That makes me more suitable for the role as well because it doesn't phase me. But I know a lot of other people, they just have a tremendous need. And that probably makes them less suitable for these roles. If you're not a CEO tomorrow, who would you be? Is it lonely?
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Speaker 2
You know, what are some of the things you learned from those negative role models, those CEOs, what are, what are like actual behaviors, things they said, things they did that you wrote down in your journal or you put it away in your mind, I will never do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. What are some of those few things?
Speaker 1
Well, you know, exhibits of lifestyle, you know, thinking they're sort of, you know, above everybody else and, you know, the way they talk to people, it's just, it's just a callousness. I can't be touched. CEOs get drunk under their own power all the time and CEOs have an enormous amount of power, but not everybody can handle it. Actually, CEOs are way more power than they realize. That's another thing that I talk about often. Because again, they come from another job when they wanted to see where they had far less power. There's an enormous gap, you know, between a senior executive and being a CEO. They just think that it's a small incremental thing. It's not. It's ginormous. So, you know, once they start to embrace that enormity, sometimes the behavior, you know, does not, you know, improve and I guess it gets worse, especially when they've had success. It's now they think they can afford whatever. You can't, you know, you know, it is important. It's just a job, man. It's just a role. If you're not a CEO tomorrow, who would you
Speaker 2
be? Is it lonely?
Speaker 1
Look, you know, some people have enormous need for having company around and they get lonely very quickly. Other people far less. I don't. You know, I'm very good at, you know, being alone. That's just my psychology. That makes me more suitable for the role as well because it doesn't phase me. But I know a lot of other people, they just have a tremendous need. And that probably makes them less suitable for these roles. And that's why, you know, I've been involved in a lot of CEO searches for other companies and everybody is always lamenting the fact that my gatherers are dearth of talent out there and it's like, well, and it's not so much that they don't have the material skills. It's that the psychology is very difficult to acquire. And you know, you could argue, you know, that CEOs are a little bit dysfunctional in their psychology, that's a subjective, you know, assessment, but it's different that I will tell
Speaker 2
you how to being rejected by IBM earlier.
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Frank Slootman is the CEO at Snowflake. Frank has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and executive in the enterprise software industry. Frank served as CEO of ServiceNow from 2011 to 2017, taking the organization from $100M in revenue, through an IPO, to $1.4B. Prior to that, Frank served as President at EMC following an acquisition of Data Domain Corporation, where he served as the CEO, leading the company through an IPO to its acquisition by EMC for $2.4B. He's also the best-selling author of Amp It Up.
Notes:
- Frank's work ethic was developed as a child in the Netherlands. In his teens, he had summer jobs harvesting tulip bulbs and walking behind a tractor ten hours a day. He also cleaned factory toilets one summer in the plant where his dad worked.
- “The Man In The Arena” Theodore Roosevelt – Frank put this at the beginning of Amp It Up.
- After retiring from ServiceNow in 2017, Frank had no intention of taking another CEO role, but people like him “have a hard time leaving the arena.” It’s exciting to be back in a CEO role with Snowflake.
- Hiring -- “Hire people ahead of their own curve.” Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime.
- NO MBO -- “Another source of misalignment is management by objective (MBO). Which I have eliminated at every company I’ve joined in the last 20 years.”
- Push the pace -- Leaders set the pace. “Instead of getting back to me in a week, I asked, “Why not tomorrow?” Change the cadence. Push the pace.
- The leadership "must-have" qualities:
- A need to prove something
- Unbalanced
- They want to show the world something... They have passion
- High trust
- Need some ego, but it has to be in check
- Legacy? "I don't think about legacy much. When you're dead, you're dead."
- Frank's leadership team:
- We are not balanced, we are available to each other 24/7.
- Drivers vs. Passengers -- “Passengers are people who don’t mind simply being carried along by the company’s momentum …They are often pleasant, get along with everyone, attend meetings promptly, and generally do not stand out as troublemakers … While passengers can often diagnose and articulate a problem quite well, they have no investment in solving it.” Frank wants front-seat drivers who’ll take ownership, make trouble, and help navigate.
- Raise Your Standards -- Push for insanely great. A leader must always push the standard higher.
- Focus -- “Founders don’t have a mindset around operating companies. Focus is one of our number one things. You need to learn to have extreme, machine focus, and most people don’t even know the beginning of what that means. They think they do, and they don’t.”
- “I’m more of a Patton than an Eisenhower,” he says, known for constantly driving the troops forward.
- Sequoia’s Carl Eschenbach remembers, “When we brought Frank into Snowflake, at our first board meeting he said, ‘Let me tell you how I’m running the board meetings and how you’re going to participate. We’re going to keep this very simple. I’m not even gonna tell you anything about the good stuff that’s happening because you already know that—I’m going to dive into the shit that’s broken and how we’re going to fix it.'”
- Very Brief Retirement -- In 2017, Frank spent time regatta sailing, winning the iconic ocean race, Transpac. Race from Los Angeles to Oahu. (To win, “We focused on recruiting talent”).
- Put The Success of The Company Ahead of Your Own – If you want to build a Snowflake-sized company, you can’t be about the celeb-CEO lifestyle.
- “That’s not real life. Real life is you’re terrorized and uncomfortable every day of the week. People always ask me, ‘Is this normal?’ I’m like, yep.”
- Snowflake - Hit the ground running on April 26, 2019.
- Good news: They were on already on a tear.
- The bad news: “The company was quite impressed with itself.”
- Growth in all areas (revenue, retention rate, total customers, $1m Customers, Forbes Global 2000 Customers, Customer Satisfaction).
- The first 90 days as a new leader. It’s a combat zone. You must quickly assess what’s working, and what’s not. Who should stay on the bus, and who should get off?
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