Frank Slootman (FS)
Snowflake is his 3rd company to go public
What’s secret sauce / playbook? Wrote Amp It Up to address this
“Mission driven”
Strong mission posture – sense of what we’re here to do together, create something special
eg, military has precisely defined missions
Why are we here?
Don’t want mission creep, frequent changes
Filter every conversation, is it getting us closer to our mission
How do new leaders / hired leaders drive mission?
Insert yourself, connect it to big opportunities
“Align your people”
Hard to do nowadays when employees have more leverage
Direct connection to strong mission posture
Don’t pander to people
People must opt-in, signup for mission
Right people resonate with it
People wanna join a cause, not a company
“Drivers versus passengers”
Ask yourself, how important are you to the team and mission?
If you don’t know it – that’s your answer
How to recognize them? They’re wild horses, chip on shoulder, they wanna make dent in universe
Max empowerment + enablement
Influence > title + rank
Environment of hard debate and honest talk
When you hire a lot of people quickly, you risk importing culture instead of creating internally
People don’t look at your expressed values, but look at when you deviate from them – your behaviors
When you have trouble on sales side, knee jerk is getting new sales leader
A lot of these problems – esp in Silicon Valley – is product related
Easier to swap VP Sales instead of improving core product
First principles – try not to let past / what you already know to overly influence the future
esp common in VCs – too much pattern matching
“let’s try to be five year olds”
“how do you win if you do the same things as everyone else”
How to not lose focus after IPO?
Again the importance of mission posture
The only stock price that matters is the price you sell it
Short-term it’s a voting machine, long-term market gets it right
Sends Monday morning all company email – great way to have direct relationship with entire company
Quite accessible – anyone can email him, frequent direct contact with field teams and all layers of company
People don’t like an environment that’s too guarded and scripted and rehearsed
Moving to 4-day workweek?
No I’m closer to 7-day workweek – doesn’t demand from his team, but the right people will. Culture sorts like-minded
Burnout driven by lack of focus, energy, intensity
Amp up energy – that’s what people want
Faster is better – send an email and get a reply back in 2 minutes
Take every opportunity to increase energy, increase focus – every meeting, every email is a chance
Everyone – not just execs – can do this
You can either take or bring energy – be the latter
Strategy is force multiplier of execution
Most leaders will have to face company transformation
Do you recognize it in time, and can you execute on the necessary change?
All noise until you hear it more and more frequently – relies on good management team, highly intuitive elements, signal versus noise
How do you incentivize bad news?
“I can handle bad news, but what I can’t handle is no news”
Current state of American business culture
New business leaders are the same, same concerns and issues and aspirations – very inspiring
In general the founders / CEOs are younger though
Importance of social issues / ESG
Don’t like outrage culture
Examine like a business problem if you really wanna solve it
eg, more diverse candidates – examine the hiring supply chain and how to improve it
Wealth creation in SV is profound – and the wonderful distributed effects to their families, communities, etc
We’re REALLY in digital transformation now
Software instead of people
Direct to consumer
Operational disciplines become data and software driven
Importance of data science
Only limits now are budget and imagination – no longer limited by the technology