Three Billion-Dollar Companies, One Brutal Truth: 'OK' is the Enemy

Three billion-dollar companies. One CEO. What's the secret that everyone's asking about?

Frank Slootman has built not one, not two, but three companies that reached billion-dollar valuations: Data Domain, ServiceNow, and now Snowflake. As the current CEO of Snowflake—the fastest company in history to grow from zero to $1 billion in revenue—he's become the gold standard for scaling enterprise software companies.

In this candid interview, Slootman reveals why "OK" is the enemy of greatness, how to choose the right elevator before it's too late, and why failure at 32 might be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Frank Slootman: I'm Frank Slootman. I'm the chairman and CEO of Snowflake. Snowflake is a data management platform that was completely redesigned and reimagined for cloud computing. First of all, Snowflake grew from 0 to $1 billion in revenue faster than any company in history. I've been here almost exactly 4 years. Before that, I was the CEO of ServiceNow.

I've been doing 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 the Netherlands in Europe. I'm a native Dutch speaker. I was educated there as well. I came to the United States 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 decline of that industry happening in real time and people getting laid off and I'm like this is not the future, you know.

Frank Slootman: I learned from that experience is that you wanna step into an elevator that goes up. You don't wanna step in an elevator that goes down because the elevator is gonna either go up, it's gonna go down, or it's not gonna move and you can't do anything about it. So you need to choose very carefully what kind of an industry you're getting into.

You wanna be in a growing, expanding industry because that's where the opportunities are. If you're good and you pick the wrong elevator, nothing will happen. I knew that even in the mid 80s, we all knew that computers were the thing of the future. IBM was sort of the gold standard at the time. They rejected me like 10 or 12 times. I finally gave up. It's taken me years to realize they did me a favor by not hiring me.

Frank Slootman: 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 much better opportunities, 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 play them because the cards are no good, but if you have good cards and you know how to play them, that's the perfect combination.

Frank Slootman: 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.

I still remember signing the first contract ever for that company. It's like $5000.

Frank Slootman: '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. I wrote the book really to answer a question that people are always asking us, and they say, 'Hey, you know, you've had 3 really successful companies. There must be a secret here or a playbook or something.'

The premise of the book is this: There's opportunity for organizations to amp 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 opportunities.

Frank Slootman: The first area 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 OK, or is it something that everybody is incredibly excited about and is just blown away by? It's a different standard, and it doesn't take that much more mental energy to do something great than to do something passable.

In other words, OK, good enough, check the box—and that requires a lot of mental energy because 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, OK. OK is terrible. You want great, you want fantastic, you want wow. Everybody is just excited about it. This is how you create energy in organizations.

Frank Slootman: The same is true with alignment and it's really important that we bring everybody in alignment to the mission because now we're all working together for real. We're all in the same boat. We're all pulling on the same oar. Now we feel like we're together in the mission as opposed to everybody's 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. But why not? They have to be at the office 8 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. There's going to be pace. There's going to be fast follow-up. It's going to be lots of questions. There's going to be intensity behind it.

Frank Slootman: 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, and much better outcome. When you want to have good people, they really crave an environment that is energized, that has high standards, that's impatient.

If you and I are having a meeting and we need to have a follow-up because it's like, OK, you're going to say, 'All right, I'm going to come back to you in 2 weeks.' And I'm like, 'No, how about tomorrow morning or the next day? What are you gonna do over 2 weeks? I'm losing interest in the topic over 2 weeks. OK? 2 weeks is way too long, 2 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. 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. The leadership does is they get them there.

Frank Slootman: Snowflake's mission, and we've set this since the IPO, is we are here to mobilize the world's data, and when we say mobilize is to extract maximum value from data, and we do that through the data cloud. That's our strategy. Data cloud means there is an orbit of data. It's unfettered access. 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. The Snowflake is a data strategy for large institutions, large enterprises.

The point 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 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. 'We are going to take that hill'—it's very, very precise. They know it when they do it.

Frank Slootman: In business, we often have beautiful flowery language about things we wanna do, but how do you even know you're achieving it? So then the second thing is you want a mission to be relatively narrow because you can't do a lot of things at the same time. What you can do, you need to 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 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 vaguer and vaguer. You wanna keep it very tight. 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 and mobilize organizations against objectives. Otherwise, we're just a group of people running around doing stuff, hoping for the best.

Frank Slootman: Conviction. Half conviction—you cannot be halfhearted. If the answer is not hell yes, it's hell no. So conviction number 1, number 2 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 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 got to bring great clarity to situations, how to think about things, what is going on, because everybody gets confused because conflicting information, what does it mean? How do I think about it? Leaders explain things in terms that people understand. That's what I mean by clarity, courage, clarity, conviction. If you do all these 3, you're well on your way to being a great leader.

Frank Slootman: What'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 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, I'm no good at this. I should go do something else.' No, you should use it as a learning experience because that's really what it is.

I had somebody the other day who wrote me an email and he was fired from his CEO job and he's 32 years old, so he was devastated. 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 that. 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.'

Frank Slootman: And 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 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.