#56, Bob Muglia, Former CEO of Snowflake — Having a values-based vs. performance-based company, rooting out dysfunction, and getting fired by Steve Balmer twice
Dec 5, 2023
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Former CEO of Snowflake, Bob Muglia, shares his experiences at Microsoft, including being fired by Steve Ballmer twice. He discusses his playbook for taking Snowflake from 0 revenue to $100M. Topics include values vs. performance, scaling a company, and the impact of AI and human values.
Building a strong leadership team and cohesive culture is crucial for company success.
Addressing systemic problems and investing in diverse leadership fosters a inclusive work environment.
Understanding customers, implementing effective pricing strategies, and holding individuals accountable are key to successful product development.
Deep dives
Building a Strong Leadership Team
Bob Munglia, former CEO of Snowflake, emphasizes the importance of building a strong leadership team and creating a cohesive culture. He shares his experience at Microsoft, where he had to make tough decisions, like replacing senior leaders to create cohesive and high-performing teams. Bob also highlights the significance of values in building a company that customers love, citing examples like Amazon and Nordstrom. He believes in focusing on systemic problems, managing people conflicts, and investing in hiring diverse leaders to foster a diverse and inclusive work environment.
Navigating Challenges in Hypergrowth
During his time at Snowflake, Bob faced the challenge of scaling the company rapidly from 30 to over 1,200 employees. He explains that under hypergrowth, everything breaks, including people, systems, and processes. Bob's approach was to listen to the feedback from his team, identify systemic issues, and make transitional investments to address them. He believes in being hands-on and getting personally involved, whether it's going on customer calls or drilling deep into the challenges faced by the organization. He acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining high performance amidst fast growth but emphasizes the importance of balancing a performance-driven approach with giving people a chance to grow and improve.
Effective Hiring Strategies
Bob shares his insights on hiring strategies, emphasizing the importance of gathering data and conducting thorough reference checks. He suggests doing blind references to get unbiased feedback about candidates. Trusting one's gut instinct is also valuable in hiring decisions, but Bob cautions against hiring people who are too similar to oneself. Instead, he advocates for building diverse teams by intentionally hiring leaders with different backgrounds. According to Bob, hiring diverse leaders is the key to fostering diversity and inclusion within an organization.
Building a Pricing Model and Ensuring Accountability
In this podcast episode, Bob shares his experience of working on a pricing model in a Texas-based company, which is still being used by Snowflake today. He emphasizes the importance of understanding customers and implementing effective pricing strategies. Additionally, Bob discusses the challenges he faced with product development and how he took control to ensure the team met their milestones. By creating a project review discussion during team meetings, he held individuals accountable for their tasks and successfully shipped the product in June 2015.
The Significance of Values in Technology Companies
In the second part of the podcast, Bob delves into the importance of values in driving technology companies. He draws from his experience at Microsoft and Snowflake to demonstrate how values are reflected in the products created. Bob explains the correlation between performance-oriented cultures and values-oriented cultures, stating that as companies become more successful, their values hold greater impact at a global level. He discusses the Amazon leadership principles and emphasizes the need for companies to have clear values that guide decision-making and product development.
What is the real impact of one bad apple on your team?
What’s it like to work directly with Bill Gates? What’s your playbook for coming in as CEO of a promising company - like Snowflake - and taking them from 0 revenue to $100M in 5 years?
On this episode of From Start-Up to Grown-Up, Bob Muglia, the former CEO of Snowflake and author of The Datapreneurs: The Promise of AI and the Creators Building Our Future, answers all of these and more.
You’ll learn about his time at Microsoft, including getting fired by Steve Ballmer not just once, but twice, the good and bad lessons he learned from Microsoft in how to lead people. You’ll hear his exact playbook when he came into Snowflake, a company with 0 revenue. And you’ll learn key leadership lessons like how he builds a values-based company and how he holds people accountable without making them feel bad.
Bob Muglia is a data technology investor and business executive, former CEO of Snowflake and past President of Microsoft's Server and Tools Division. As a leader, Bob focuses on how innovation and ethical values can merge to shape the Data Economy's future in the era of AI. He serves as a board director for emerging companies that seek to maximize the power of data to help solve some of the world's most challenging problems.
Learn more about his book, The Datapreneurs | Website thedatapreneurs.com
