In 'TAPE SUCKS', Frank Slootman shares his journey as CEO of Data Domain, detailing how the company transformed the data storage industry with innovative disk-based backup solutions. The book offers insights into entrepreneurship, leadership, and strategic business decisions that contributed to Data Domain's remarkable growth and eventual acquisition by EMC.
This book explores the fundamental causes of team failure and organizational politics through a narrative about a fictional company, DecisionTech, Inc. It outlines five dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. The book provides practical advice and real-world examples to help teams overcome these dysfunctions and become high-performing teams.
In 'Amp It Up,' Frank Slootman shares his leadership approach for achieving hypergrowth. The book emphasizes the importance of raising standards, aligning teams, sharpening focus, picking up the pace, and transforming strategy. Slootman argues that most leaders can significantly improve their organization's performance without expensive changes to talent, structure, or the business model. He stresses the need for execution, a strong team culture, and a relentless focus on the mission. The book provides practical advice on making conflicted choices, promoting collaboration, and maintaining high standards to avoid mediocrity[2][3][5].
My guest today is Frank Slootman, Chairman and CEO of cloud platform Snowflake. Frank has become one of the most revered CEOs in business. Over the past twenty years, he has three times taken over emerging enterprise software businesses – first Data Domain, then ServiceNow, and most recently Snowflake - and led them across the chasm into large, billion-dollar businesses. Please enjoy this great discussion with Frank Slootman.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:02:33] - [First question] - How he evaluates the team of a company he’s working with
[00:04:48] - The pace of decisions made around changing team members
[00:06:10] - Understanding the potential quality of outside leaders being brought into the company
[00:08:13] - How he characterizes great and constructive confrontation
[00:09:53] - What he’s found to be most effective in convincing senior talent to join a team
[00:11:36] - Ways he personally generates energy to sustain himself in this pace of business
[00:14:17] - How he fosters and nurtures healthy communication pathways
[00:15:36] - Narrowing the focus when evaluating a new product
[00:17:58] - Is it possible for a focus to be too narrow?
[00:19:31] - An example of a dazzling customer that he’s worked with
[00:21:04] - Working backwards from a problem and building something that solves it
[00:23:03] - Building trust between a company and its customers over time
[00:25:37] - Overview of the base layer ingredients of trust
[00:28:12] - Sequential versus parallel processing and how they affect building trust
[00:30:22] - Lessons in successfully translating between engineers and business people
[00:32:58] - Crossing the chasm and effective sales organizations
[00:35:17] - Working compensation into getting more out of an organization
[00:38:45] - How much a sales organization needs to work backwards to serve their product
[00:41:40] - Great questions for board members to ask their executive team
[00:46:07] - Where the analogy of ‘business as war’ falls down and defining the highlander concept
[00:48:01] - What he feels he could still hone in his skillset
[00:49:16] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy 
