00:01:32 · S5, S6, S7
Ad[00:01:32] S5: I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about blinds.com. Ad[00:01:38] S6: Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Customers who shop at blinds.com experience excellent customer service from consultation to installation. Side effects include increased privacy and better sleep. Talk to your partner today and see if blinds.com is right for you. Ad[00:01:55] S7: Shop Black Friday all month long at blinds.com. Don't miss huge deals dropping every week.
00:02:00 · Frank Slootman
[00:02:00] S8: People were always asking us and they say, hey, you know, you've had three, really successful companies. There must be a secret here. Okay is terrible. You want great. You want fantastic. You want wow. Everybody is just excited about it. This is how you create energy in an organization. So leadership is about, no, we're not going to go slow. We are going to go as fast. This is not a popularity contest. Struggle and failure is not just normal, it's the norm. I mean, and struggle are very, very common. Successes are rare. 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 scale computing. First of all, Snowflake grew from zero to $1,000,000,000 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 kind of work for the last twenty 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. 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 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. 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, you know 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 taken me years to realize they did me a favor by not hiring me.
00:04:31 · 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 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. 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. If you don't have good cards, it doesn't matter how well 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. I still remember signing the first contract ever 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
00:06:01 · S0, S9, S1, S10, S3
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00:07:00 · S3, S4, S5, S6, S7
Ad[00:07:00] S3: When you shop Kroger delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. Our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right, carefully selecting and packing your order with care. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply. Seasight for details. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Ad[00:07:30] S4: We just moved into our new house, Ad[00:07:32] S5: and I didn't realize just how close we were to the neighbors. That's when my friend told me about blinds.com. Ad[00:07:38] S6: Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Customers who shop at blinds.com experience excellent customer service from consultation to installation. Side effects include increased privacy and better sleep. Talk to your partner today and see if blinds.com is right for you. Ad[00:07:55] S7: Shop Black Friday all month long at blinds.com. Don't miss huge deals dropping every week.
00:08:00 · Frank Slootman
[00:08:00] S8: 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 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 opportunities. The first place 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 this 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, you know, to do something great than to do something passable. In other words, okay, good enough, you know, 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 okay. Okay is terrible. Okay? You want great. You want fantastic. You want wow. Everybody is just excited about it. This is how you create energy in organizations. The same is true, you know, we just talked about alignment. 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 eight hours a day, so why go any faster? So people become lethargic if you let them.