How I Built Three Billion-dollar CompaniesㅣFrank Slootman, CEO at SnowFlake

In this interview, Frank Slootman explains why choosing a growing industry matters more than individual talent, and outlines his "Amp It Up" philosophy of compressing timeframes and raising standards. He argues a narrow, precise mission focuses resources better than broad ambition. He closes with his three Cs of leadership, conviction, courage, and clarity and advice to treat failure as formative, not a verdict on ability.

I'm Frank Slootman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake Snowflake, is a data management platform that was completely redesigned and reimagined for cloud scale computing. First of all, you know, Snowflake grew from 0 to $1 billion in revenue faster than any company in history. I've been here almost exactly four years. Before that. I was the CEO of ServiceNow. I've been doing this this kind of work for the last 20 years. So it'll be time to hang it up one day. But not now.

I was born and raised in in Netherlands in Europe. So I'm a native Dutch speaker. I was educated there as well. I came to the United States at at a relatively young age. Almost all my work experience is US based. I had an internship when I was still in school with a company called Uniroyal. They made artificial leather for automotive applications, car seating. I just saw the the decline of that industry happening in real time.

And it's, you know, people getting laid off. And I'm like, this is not the future. You know, I learned from that experience is that you want to step into an elevator that goes up. You don't want to step in an elevator that goes down because the elevator is going to either go up, it's going to go down or it's not going to move, and you can't do anything about it.

So you need to choose very carefully, you know, what kind of an industry you're getting into. You want to be in a growing, expanding industry because that's where the opportunities will be. If you're good and you pick the wrong elevator, nothing will happen. I knew that, you know, even in the mid 80s, you know, we all knew that computers were the thing of the future. You know, IBM was sort of the gold standard at the time.

They rejected me like 10 or 12 times. I finally gave up. It's taking me years to realize that did me a favor by not hiring me. I certainly had a number of experiences that were hard because I was a foreigner in this country. I took a lot of jobs that other people wouldn't take. Broken products, failing businesses.

But, you know, the irony is you learn a great deal from having to run things that are not in good shape, that have problems because, you know, in the fullness of time when you get to run, you know, much better opportunities, you know, you'll know what to look for, things that are right with businesses, things that are not right. You know, in tech, it's a little bit like playing cards.

You need a good hand and you need to know how to play the cards. You need both. I mean, if you don't have good cards, it doesn't matter how well, you know, you play them because the cards are no good, but you have good cards and you know how to play them. That's the perfect combination.

ServiceNow and Snowflake had product market fit, but they had to be massively expanded. We couldn't stay where we are. For data domain, it was about figuring out product market fit. How do you get that? That was my first CEO role and it was a startup. It had 15 people. It had no revenue, no customers. It was unproven. We didn't know whether it was going to be a viable opportunity.

You know, I still remember signing the first contract ever, you know, for that company. It's like $5,000. AMP it Up is the title of the book. People ask me, What's the message of the book? I said, The message of the book is the title. You know, I wrote the book really to answer a question that people were always asking us. And they say, Hey, you know, you've had three really successful companies.

There must be a secret here or a playbook or something. The premise of the book is this okay, there's opportunity for organizations to take up in almost every realm, every conversation that you and I have, every email that we write, we have a chance to focus, intensify and raise the quality and the speed and the intensity and the urgency behind it.

It's an opportunity that you have, but not necessarily an opportunity that everybody takes because people get tired. They just want to check a box. They want to move it off their desk, they want to go home. They want to have a drink. So they're not concentrating hard enough on the on the opportunities. You know, the first place you know, where you can amp things up is really raise the quality of what you're doing.

Are you doing something that's just good enough and it's kind of okay? Or is it something that everybody is incredibly excited about and it's just blown away by? That's a different standard and it doesn't take that much more mental energy, you know, to do something great than to do something possible. 

Okay, good enough, you know, check the box and that requires a lot of mental energy because, you know, if you present something to me and I'm bored by it, I'm not energized and excited. I'm not going to want to do what you do because I'm just not interested or excited because it's kind of like okay. Okay is terrible. You want great, You want fantastic, you want wow.

Everybody is just excited about this is how you create energy in organizations. The same is true. You know, we just talked about alignment. Really important that we bring everybody in alignment to the mission because now we're all working together for real. You know, we're all in the same boat. We're all pulling on the same org right?

Now we feel like we're together in the mission as opposed to everybody is kind of doing their own thing. That's an opportunity. Tempo and pace is an opportunity. Organizations move very, very slowly if you let them because people go slower and slower and slower because why not? They have to be at the office eight hours a day. So why go any faster? So people become lethargic if you let them.

So leadership is about, no, we're not going to go slow. We are going to go as fast as we know how it's going to be. Tempo, pace. They're going to be fast follow up. It's going to be lots of questions. It's going to be intensity behind it.

So it brings up the level of energy, the level of focus, and we're going to get to a much quicker result, quicker outcome, a much better outcome, right? When you want to have good people, they really crave an environment that is energized, that has high standards. You know, that's impatient.

You know, you and I are having a meeting and we need to have a follow up because it's like, okay, you're going to say, all right, I'm going to come back to you in two weeks. And I'm like, No, how about tomorrow morning or the next day? What are you going to do over two weeks? I'm losing interest in the topic over two weeks. Okay? Two weeks is way too long.

Two days max. I prefer actually tomorrow morning. So why don't you go figure out what you can between now and tomorrow morning, and maybe it's too soon. Well, then we'll do it the next day. Okay? You keep compressing the time frames because people can move much faster than they think they're capable of, and they can do much better than they think they're capable of. But the leadership does is they get them there.

The Snowflake's mission and we set this since the IPO is, we are here to mobilize the world's data and we say mobilize is to extract maximum value from data. We do that through the data cloud. That's our strategy. Data cloud means there is an orbit of data, it's unfettered access.

You know, I can overlay, blend and join data from unlimited numbers of sources, different data types, and I can extract the maximum potential out of data science and data analytics. That's really what we're doing. So Snowflake is a data strategy, you know, for large institutions, large enterprises. The point of a of a mission is that you have a precise definition about what you're doing because if it's not precise, then it's vague.

That means you're going to be wasting a lot of resources because you don't really know what you're aiming for because it's just too vague and too general. Like in the military, they have very, very precise missions. Right? We are going to take that hill. It's very, very precise. They know it when they do it. In business, you know, we often have beautiful, flowery language about things we want to do.

But how do you even know you're you're achieving it, right? So the second thing is you want a mission to be relatively narrow, right? Because you can't do a lot of things at the same time. But you can do you concentrate all your resources on a very, very specific thing.

You have really the opportunity to achieve that and relatively quickly because the narrower the plane of attack and the more resources applied to it, the more likelihood, you know, that it actually is going to happen. So this notion of mission posture also protects you against what we call mission creep, where the mission is creeping, it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. You want to keep it very tight.

You know, we are going to do this thing and just this thing. So I think it's a useful way of thinking about purpose and how to provision mobilize organizations against objectives. Otherwise, we're just a group of people running around doing stuff, hoping for the best.

Conviction. Have a conviction. You cannot be half hearted. If the answer is not hell yes, it's hell no. So conviction number one. Number two is courage. As a leader, you have to have courage because you'll be doing things that people may not like and you're not here to please or appease. You're here to lead. You've got to bring people along even when you're doing things that are not popular.

This is not a popularity contest. And then the third C is really clarity. You've got to bring great clarity to situations, how to think about things, what is going on. Right. Because everybody gets confused, you know, because conflicting information, What does it mean? How do I think about it? Leaders explain things in terms that people can understand. That's what I mean by clarity, courage, clarity, conviction.

If you do all these three, you're well on your way to being a great leader. It's really important for entrepreneurs is, struggle and failure is not just normal, it's the norm. I mean, failure and struggle are very, very common. Successes are rare. Here's the important thing. Failure and struggle are formative. They teach. They they make you become the person that you need to become.

So in other words, you need to embrace struggle and failure as opposed to, well, you know, I'm no good at this. I should go do something else. No, you should use it as a as a learning experience, because that's really what it is. That's somebody the other day who wrote me an email and he was fired from his CEO job and he's 32 years old. He was devastated. And I'm like, this is just learning.

You know, you're 32. You know, you're a baby. So and he felt much better when I said it. I said when I was 32, I was nowhere. I'm like, really? I'm like, it takes time, you know? So you need to be patient. You know, there's some people, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and famous entrepreneurs, they're very successful at a young age. That's not the norm. That should never be your expectation.

Those are exceptional situations. So struggle is is formative and embrace it rather than I hate my life because I'm not being successful. I mean, not being successful is actually you will realize later on how formative and educational that was. You just can't see it right now. That's really very important advice. When you fail, it's not a signal that you're no good. It just means that you need to learn. And now you are.