What was that? Frank Slootman (born 1958) is a billionaire businessman, and the chairman and CEO at Snowflake Inc., a cloud data-warehousing company. So, they looked around and they found the guy with a passport to Dutch language proficiency like. They sold the living hell out of that product. They're very safe. And you can't play chess pieces in a million different ways, right? He's like, "How do we run a supply chain?" Early days of ServiceNow was just jungle fighting. The name was also fitting because a few years later, Snowflake burst onto the tech scene with a one of a time groundbreaking Cloud data warehouse product that revolutionized how companies could manage their data. I'm a miserable golfer, but somewhere along, the 18 holes, he's like, "I'll do it, but don't leave me again." And by the way, for most people, that's a very difficult question. Can you explain how you overcame both to lead the company through its 2012 IPO? Our guest today, Frank Slootman is chairman and CEO of Snowflake. It's like it's full of feedback. And if I can't predict it, I can't change my policy, I can't change my pricing." You got to catch people doing things the right way and then amplify that and praise it and reward it and so on because people are like pets and children. Okay. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange. Frank has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and executive in the enterprise software industry. It's just, it's hard not to be acquainted at some level with that culture. IBA took over the auction in 2015 and we moved it to an electronic auction and on the web ICE platform, so it's fully audited to proper electronic liquidity window of market. We now use consumption models instead of subscription models. I mean, they had graphical user interfaces that were completely proprietary to that company. So, you need to create a platform that allows data to be enriched and be joined and be blended and be overlaid in ways that data scientist only have insight into. Photo by Christie Hemm Klok/The Forbes Collection. They also appreciate it. 5.9% of any company is a huge deal. Career In 2011, after the founder of ServiceNow Fred Luddy stepped down, ServiceNow announced appointment of Frank Slootman as CEO. Yacht Racing is incredibly exciting and then it has a lot of corollaries to business because it's this multidimensional game of weather and competition, and what happens on the race course and reacting to it. Well, building culture is a very forceful thing. Data has no opinion. Not all people are created equal in terms of their roles and their contributions in companies. Let's go." Listen to this episode from This Week in Startups on Spotify. And we were babes in the wood back then. I don't know if you've watched any of the first couple seasons of Ted Lasso, but on a team of great characters, the Dutchman is the one guy, straight faced, no bullshit throughout the whole game. We're driving change. And then George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States, just a few feet from the front door of the NYSE on April 30th 1789. So, I ended up going back to, I really didn't want to. And after a while it's like, "Look, I can't do one-on-one meetings with a million people. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing, Learn how and when to remove this template message, https://xconomy.com/san-diego/2011/04/26/service-now-names-software-industry-veteran-frank-slootman-as-ceo/, https://www.businessinsider.com/servicenow-frank-slootman-interview-2012-8, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2019/06/05/snowflake-the-ai-force-multiplier/amp/, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/snowflake-snow-opening-trading-on-the-nyse.html, article "Frank Slootman" is from Wikipedia, https://wikitia.com/index.php?title=Frank_Slootman&oldid=81954. Investors know this about us. I mean, anecdotal observation has pretty much run its course. Now, for us, it's a data Cloud. People were looking at my credentials. I'm on the phone with customers every day. Things will change in ways you cannot even imagine the ideas that happen. And when the whole world goes direct to consumer and it becomes disintermediated and goes wholly digital, the role of data obviously becomes insanely important. I mean, the results speak for themselves. All of us, no exceptions." Yeah. Then, they discuss Frank's hiring philosophy and how to create a winning relationship between an executive and their direct reports . I mean, if you look historically at what platforms like ours have done, there is no relationship to the past with what Snowflake is doing now. He knows what problems exist in his field today, and he knows how to address them as well. It's like, "That's not exciting." You come with aptitude. A compensation package he received upon joining Snowflake in April 2019 awards him a. It was just like Formula 1 of sailboat racing. The San Francsico 49ers admitted that they might be forced to go quarterback hunting this offseason. And you had literally physical media that could logistically manage. In the Dutchman Frank Slootman, a non-coddling, no-nonsense executive who had taken Data Domain public before selling it to EMC, Leone saw "a match made . But that is what digital transformation is. It's a small country, obviously, which is why they sort of veer far and wide. You're finding the best sailors in the world and all of that. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. Frank Slootman added: " I'm excited to advise Blackstone. When I in Ohio, I joined copy ware in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and I had not even been there a few month and they acquired a sizable company in Holland, a company called Uniface. Of these, six were built: the Imperial Hotel and Annex, the Jiyu Gakuen School, the Aisaku Hayashi . I'm trying to get into markets, not get out of them, but strategically we had a dilemma and others that we were, what I would call landlocked, maybe another nautical Dutch type of term, because we couldn't get beyond our core business of backup and recovery. [23] As I said, what comes around, goes around. I don't care for any of that. Strong personalities will just dictate culture in certain business units, in certain geographies and so on. People that the company really, really runs on. And by the way, insurance companies are already pretty data savvy, but every single industry is experiencing these kinds of questions. But for many, many other enterprises, including a lot of banks actually in the world of financial services, because they operate through branches and very conventional brick and mortar ways of interacting with customers, all of a sudden, it has to change rapidly. Somebody who I had known for many, many years, so at Sutter Hill Mike Speiser. And that's all coming up right after this. Yeah. 5. Collaboration between companies also offers significant opportunities to create value, and Frank Slootman - Chairman and CEO of data cloud pioneer Snowflake - believes it has never been more important for organizations to be able to mobilize their data and share it with ecosystem partners. [1] In June 2012, ServiceNow became a publicly-traded company as Frank Slootman led the company through a $210 million IPO. It has certainly worked well for himself, for the companies hes worked under, the many investors that have poured money in his name, and so forth. But you think that your upbringing in the Netherlands gave you a unique perspective on business and success, that's helped you throughout your career? How does that work at Snowflake? So, I ended up in odd places because they didn't know what to do with me. It's hard to get off of that. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. His company's listing here at the NYC in September 2020 was the largest software IPO in the history of the US capital markets. Hes quite knowledgeable in the market industry, and he doesnt confuse with unnecessary jargon. In 2011, after the founder of ServiceNow Fred Luddy stepped down, ServiceNow announced appointment of Frank Slootman as CEO. But one day, and this was in March of 2019 and he said, "What would it take for you to take the helm?" When I was considering Snowflake, I told Snowflake, "I will not do this if Mike doesn't come along." And it's very rare to create that kind of value. But he had also been the CEO of ServiceNow for seven years. Some of Wikitia's pages are sourced from Wikipedia.org's Mainspace and Draftspace. But this whole Snowflake exercise could have turned out dramatically different, the CEO says, if the founders had pursued their original premise for what the company should be. The scramble isnt over, and many who missed the opening also missed on the double growth just off the gate. Your mission is you're pursuing an end state or at least the closest thing to what you can envision, to what you want to realize as a couple. And over time, we overcame that because we were laser focused on making the product bigger and faster every year. And that really allowed me to do this at 6:00 AM on weekdays and weekends and the holidays. The liberalization of LNG is creating a global natural gas market, with freight acting as a virtual pipeline between continents. I mean, I was just in my way of life and I was going to stay there till the end of time. Architecturally, just damn near perfect, so. The question is though, for investors, for others, for employees, how do you keep momentum going now as a public company and how does the future look for Snowflake? And the product was insanely fast, completely automated. You want to be the playmaker and the people that they're going to pass the ball to when we have two seconds left in the quarter, that kind of thing. And then, I had another internship after that. You can only sail so much, [crosstalk 00:31:19]. So, it sort of lit a fire under me, just the prospect of doing that, it just kind of brought me back from my burned out state in 2017 to two years, feeling incredibly challenged, energized, and sort of having a new leash on life, if you will take on something like that. He published a book in 2011 called Tape Sucks. Mike is a really good example of that because what he's really good at, I'm not, and I always use the, the analogy of he plays defense, I play offense. These days, a lot of folks take it for granted, but Wall Street has a fascinating history. It was super interesting to me, sort of my first encounter with American management. And in other words, I was already negotiating Mike's package before I had joined ServiceNow. Slootman is the CEO of Snowflake, a cloud-based database firm he joined in 2019 and took public in September 2020 in a blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). There's new business models. 2023 Forbes Media LLC. So it's a very important question because if I hire you, I can get you experience every day at the week. We were going to do the world of favor.". All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. That's actually another important bit of learning with a lot of people take on CEO roles and they keep doing their last job because that's familiar to them and they love it and they keep doing it. I mean, it was a super crowded field, but we just crushed that entire field. On stacking, all of a sudden, your boat left behind and you go like, "Oh, my God," so because it's very hard to get ahead on an upwind leg, right? I mean, it's a hell of a cash burner as well. So, one of the things that, that our founders did really, really well and it's a very important lesson here for anybody that's watching Snowflake and trying to understand is that they took a clean sheet of paper. But if you're performing at Tom Brady's level, you have no reason to step aside. We are people that basically see everything that's wrong all day, and we always see a room up from where things are. CEO Frank Slootman (second row, fourth from left) and the Snowflake team virtually rang the opening . So, it's the story, what goes around, comes around, as I said at the beginning. And today, there's an endless bank of software company elevators, but when you joined Comshare, it was in the nascent days of the tech world. That's NYSE ticker symbol, S-N-O-W. His book from John Wiley and Sons, Amp It Up: Leading For Hypergrowth By Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity is in bookstores and online now. Today, Slootmans net worth shot up to $1.8 billion because of the Snowflake IPO. Paul Stovell is an Australian businessman and entrepreneur who serves as the current CEO of Octopus Deploy. That's where we're at right now. Those are the people that are right there, where the people that bring home the bacon, there when the shit hits the fan. For example, he made a few changes at Snowflake when he became CEO. Okay? And we feel the consequences of our actions every minute of the day. So, we're going to be in the middle of that. The nascent liquidity of spot LNG freight markets, and the volatility of time charter rates has boosted demand for risk management tools. Frank Lloyd Wright designed some 14 buildings for Japan: an embassy, a school, two hotels and a temporary hotel annex, a commercial-residential complex, a theater, an official residence for the prime minister and six private residences. Wikitia is not affiliated to Wikimedia Foundation. And now, welcome inside the ICE House. And that's exactly what we did. It's just that there is a spirit here that always believes that it can do things that other countries don't believe about themselves. So, I just had some peripheral view of the company, as well as its strategic challenges, by the way. But yeah, where the inspiration comes from, we've had three very successful companies in a row, so you get barraged by requests for, "Hey, can you explain to us what the secret sauce is? Presiding is the worst word. So, we won a lot of outraces. Frank, how did those early experiences rising through the ranks and being sent from problem to problem help you establish the principles for success that your career would see? Windows 3.1 didn't even exist. But you dont achieve a $1.8 billion net worth by being a spendthrift. The former Frank CEO said JP Morgan had full knowledge of Franks customer data before the acquisitionand Chairman Jamie Dimon personally pushed for it to happen. Before the break, Snowflake's CEO, Frank Slootman and I were discussing his career. From the library of the New York Stock Exchange, at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business. They only learn from consequences, so you got to create consequences, good and bad when things happen and things happen all day long. Our show is produced by Pete Asch, with assistance from Stephan Capriles, Ian Wolf, and Ken Abel. You ever noticed that NFL quarterbacks just can't leave the stage. It takes nothing. I'm a proud US citizen, but at the same time, there's no negating my Dutch roots. If you want to know more about this CEO, this might be the book to read. Software was barely an industry. It becomes the beating heart of a modern enterprise. It still runs as an auction in rounds of 30 seconds and final price were used as the benchmark for the entire gold market. We actually won everything that we wanted to win. Who can solve what set of issues, right? I was a huge fan coming here. Scale is definitely a problem because you get layers and layers and you got the problem of having tons of passengers on the boat, all these types of issues. Fred Luddy, the founder of ServiceNow, I mean, super talented guy, obviously. Better, better all the time. It was small, it was slow. But . They were all special purpose for this thing and that thing and that has really created a lot of problems for data center operations, because they just had a Frankenstein architecture out there and people are sick of that. I mean, the only thing that energizes people and teams and organizations and companies as a whole is the mission. And you mentioned several times in the book that you look for aptitude over experience, does that focus help snowflake identify young talent and how do you measure aptitude? I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Frank's new book, Amp It Up: Leading For Hyper Growth By Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency and Elevating Intensity, still is the leadership principles he's developed over his long career. Between 2011 and 2017, Slootman was Chairman and CEO of ServiceNow - one of the world's leading SaaS . This is very much a country that believes things that other countries don't believe. I mean, the problem with backup and recovery is, yeah, you can do backups, but the point of backup is recovery because if I can't find or read tapes, I'm still up the creek without a paddle. Tour Hours: 10 am - 4 pm daily; 10 am - 3 pm in January and February. And also in sailing, you're always looking for new adventures, different platforms and things of that sort to sort of keep it interesting, continual learning experience and so on, rather than rinse and repeat. I only think about now and what I'm doing today. The IPO was the third for Dutch-born Slootman,. Here's why this makes sense while looking at some options. That takes very different approaches, orientation, skill sets, and so on what you do.