Now, tape technologies go all the way back to the early days of computing, because that was the form of magnetic storage that we had. It was small, it was slow. Prior to joining Snowflake, Frank served as the CEO of ServiceNow and that's NYSE ticker symbol, NOW and Data Domain, leading both of those firms successfully through their IPOs. Meaning that we would run something like Tableau on top of Salesforce or whatever. Our guest was Frank Slootman, the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake. The question is, what are you going to do? Here's why this makes sense while looking at some options. It is data operations from the most transactional to the most analytical and everything in between, so. So, understanding that is really important because obviously, you can't fight it off unless you understand where it's coming from. We had this very high profile bidding war between the EMC and NetApp at that time. That was career death for people, so it was just the least flattering place in the entire IT operation was backup and recovery based on tape, very logistically, intense. The scramble isnt over, and many who missed the opening also missed on the double growth just off the gate. I mean, I still remember that we were in countries like France, where we had like a $10-million business, which was very small. They're kind of like-. And that really allowed me to do this at 6:00 AM on weekdays and weekends and the holidays. They also appreciate it. And, likewise, when I go to Holland and I meet Dutch customers there, they kind of look at me with a smirk, like, "Yeah, I can tell you're Dutch. They only learn from consequences, so you got to create consequences, good and bad when things happen and things happen all day long. He says, "If I have a problem in a state like Florida, where bodily injury claims are disproportionate to surrounding states, what explains that? And if you've got a comment or a question if you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [emailprotected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Tell me about sailing, first of all. Frank Slootman Chairman and CEO at Snowflake Bozeman, Montana, United States 32K followers 500+ connections Join to follow Snowflake Erasmus University Rotterdam Articles by Frank Drivers vs.. And by the way, data is going to, some people have referred to it as a new currency to new oil, whatever you want to call it, but. In short, money talks, and Slootmans got it in his hands and in his mouth. Today, Slootmans net worth shot up to $1.8 billion because of the Snowflake IPO. He said, "Because you guys are indicting everything I've done." And essentially, he defends. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange. And it wasn't charged for, so companies just couldn't build software because it was just given away. Before that, he spent his life in Netherlands, where he was also born. By the close of. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources, and not independently verified. 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. I always tell my own people, "Look, I'm a piece on the chessboard, okay? It is hard when you lose your sense of mission, when you lose your desire and your boldness and your aggression in the marketplace and want to go after competition. And Mike was still the CEO at ServiceNow at that time. So, the earlier you show up, the better off you are. It's just our nature to talk about problems." Over his distinguished career, Frank has mastered the process of fundraising scaling and building young companies into unicorns with the run ending eventually way back here at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets with an initial public offering. Snowflake CEO Slootman Scores IPO Hat Trick With Big Bet on Data Software company aims to benefit from companies increasingly storing information in multiple clouds Big tech firms are investing. Right, you got a good point. That's a running joke that we always have. It is a future state that we're all working on right now. In May 2019, Frank Slootman, the retired former CEO of ServiceNow, joined Snowflake as its CEO and Michael Scarpelli, the former CFO of ServiceNow joined the company as CFO. Articles taken from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be accessed on Wikipedia's Draft Namespace. Slootman recently spoke at the CNBC. [22] In September 2019, it was ranked first on LinkedIn 's 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups. And it was one, and we were better known as the tape sucks company than we were by our own company name at one point. Given his accolades, Slootman gets invited to speak at many events. I often refer to those people as passengers and then, they're the drivers. We cannot just read our emails and have a few phone conversations and know what's going on. Frank Slootman is the CEO of Snowflake, a cloud-based dataset organization he helped build in 2019. And you got to go back to the early days of Steve Jobs, who always had this glimmer of, "I'm going to do something insanely great." The ecommerce industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors, and at the moment, it features several players. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman made headlines with controversial comments about diversity in the workplace. Fred Luddy, the founder of ServiceNow, I mean, super talented guy, obviously. I mean, it's like when people start to roll their eyes. So in hindsight, I understood that I was just burned out, classic burned out. So, this is not data warehousing, it's just one use case. Well, that's because historically all we did was we did analytics in silo. Let me bring you back 10 years to 2012, Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin ukowski started Snowflake as the secret name of the startup they were working on during that particularly hot summer. So, I just had some peripheral view of the company, as well as its strategic challenges, by the way. You relate well to that way of thinking. No, we're talking about stuff that's not working well. And by the way, data platforms have been extremely fragmented historically. And, how do you design single best data operations platform you possibly can?". They did not try to carry technology or ways of thinking forward. I don't think about what's next. Snowflake, a cloud-based data-warehousing company, went public at $120 a share, and has since seen shares trade as high as $328 per share. You have served, as I intimated in the introduction, as the CEO of companies in Silicon Valley and now, Montana, but your story really begins 5,500 miles away from the West Coast. I'm curious, how that opportunity at Data Domain came to you? Insurance companies historically have not been because they are data companies by their essence, right? Because they can't understand how spending categories can just explode overnight like that. I mean, Dutch people are incredibly hard driving, no nonsense, can't suffer bullshit type of people. Before becoming President and CEO, Mark served as Tableaus Executive Vice President of Product Development, coordinating the, Read More 10 Things You Didnt Know about Mark NelsonContinue. And Frank, while you were getting your degree from the Netherland School of Economics, you came to the US for an internship with UN Royal and returned after graduating to get a job at Burroughs, which is now Unysis and ticker symbol, UIS. And are there any particular secrets to building a consensus around the idea of change? So, it's the story, what goes around, comes around, as I said at the beginning. Right? As we're recording this in early 2022, the competition for talent has reached a boiling point. I mean, it gets rid of you. That's NYSE ticker symbol S-N-O-W or snow who, like the immigrant inhabitants of New Amsterdam more than two centuries ago, has proven himself a master entrepreneur and visionary leader, able to take a great idea and scale it massively, and then apply the same playbook again and again. What was that? Software was barely an industry. It's a transformation that is still going on. But backup recovery still largely dependent on tape and tape automation technology, so we created a tape. Our show is produced by Pete Asch, with assistance from Stephan Capriles, Ian Wolf, and Ken Abel. I'm a miserable golfer, but somewhere along, the 18 holes, he's like, "I'll do it, but don't leave me again." But I was now really primed at that point, in terms of, I knew a lot more, about what it was like to be in the US. 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. That's where we're at right now. Give me that train wreck. [2], In May 2019, Frank Slootman joined Snowflake Inc. as its CEO. I mean, truly retire. Volumes have increased and they've pretty much more than doubled, and we've actually nearly tripled the number of participants that we have as well. He spends more time than is perhaps wise with his eyes fixed on a screen either reading history books, keeping up with international news, or playing the latest releases on the Steam platform, which serve as the subject matter for much of his writing output. And the EMC came in and within a quarter, it was up to a $100 million because they had channels and customers and everything primed and ready, right? They knew exactly what we meant. I mean, it's hard to believe at this day and age that things were that way back then, but they were. In the book, I go on and on about what some of those issues are. Who can solve what set of issues, right? Once you start doing that, you need to take yourself out of the game. I always become the CEO that the situation mandates and dictates. Engineers should have a very easy time discerning the talent, so. Slootman previously served as CEO for Data Domain and for ServiceNow, which he both took public. Obviously, that industry had moved on to all kinds of different disk space technologies. So, we won a lot of outraces. And I look at what the situation requires of me, not what I want to bring to it per se, based on my own background. They're very well dialed into it. So in other words, I did not accept the Snowflake role until, Mike said, "I'm coming along.". The company, which prides itself as the leading customer success, Read More 10 Things You Didnt Know About Guy NirpazContinue, Medical marijuana is increasingly becoming a popular trend in the treatment and management of different diseases including chronic and fatal ones such as Alzheimers disease, brain tumors, cancer, HIV/AIDS, chronic pain, and multiple sclerosis. They just have such a hard time doing it because that's who they are, that's what they live for. Not exactly like a year and a half, he'd been there for seven years. Did you always have your eyes set on a career in the US? By the way, everything he did had to be insanely great because he just couldn't get out of bed if it wasn't insanely great. You just get into this cycle where all you want to do is leave. The IPO was the third for Dutch-born Slootman,. 5. Slootman is going to take Snowflake for quite the ride, and you have to decide whether youre getting in his car or not. ICE is home to global natural gas markets benchmarks in Henry Hub, MBP, TTF, and JKM. 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. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. And eventually, we totally crushed that market because we could address any and all use cases that were out there. Tour Hours: 10 am - 4 pm daily; 10 am - 3 pm in January and February. I mean, we were crawling the bottom in the early days, so we had a product that had marginal product market fit. I'm a proud US citizen, but at the same time, there's no negating my Dutch roots. Now, we're going to go move the pieces and I'm just a piece on the chessboard." We'll do something good with it. Data has no opinion. And you can take it or leave it and try it on for size and see if you like it." That's really what you want to preserve rather than layers and layers and layers and channels of communication. When you run companies, you need to narrow the plane of attack very, very quickly. And that's our conversation for this week. I mean, the results speak for themselves. But in the end, it's like we have to get into backup software in which we tried. So, we came up with this war cry that said, "Tape sucks, move on." Slootman has become somewhat of a business hero for many people, myself included. We tried to, we wanted to get into primary storage. 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. So after a while, it's like, "Okay, we've done enough of this." It's always hard when you come in as a CEO and you have to follow a founder because the founder almost has mythical status in the organization. Those are all disciplines that leverage where they are, right at the headwaters off the entire European continent. Early days of ServiceNow was just jungle fighting. The improvement in technology is one of the main reasons that this commercial scene is flourishing by the, Read More 10 Things You Didnt Know about Loggi CEO Fabien MendezContinue, Tableau Softwares President and CEO Mark Nelson defines Tableaus vision and supervises the companys business operations and procedures. This is a very buoyant country. 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. And it worked like that for about a hundred years. So like, "Look, I'm not going to be doing the same races over and over again." 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. [23] But the problem with tape was, I mean, tape got lost, tape became unreadable. Slootman knows exactly what hes doing. But the issue with the acquisition, by the way, I've never sold a company in my life other than that one, so I'm not prone to selling at all. 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. Cloud-data warehouse Snowflake has been the talk of the town since it announced its intention of going public. So not only is this CEO a winner on land; he also dominates the sea with his sailboatpretty impressive on any measure. Yeah. Leaders such as Slootman, Scott McNealy , Jayshree Ullal and my old boss Pat McGovern have inspired me over the. Let's go." Different technologies, different markets, different competitors, different eras, different cultural times that we live in, you need to become, what that situation requires off you. In Amp It Up, Frank, you say that a company's mission really has to be weaponized. Read More 10 Things You Didnt Know About Paul StovellContinue. 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. Most people just preside over culture. It's not that easy. I need to know what that is. The. BUILDINGS. We're going to nuke an entire industry out of existence. Some of Wikitia's pages are sourced from Wikipedia.org's Mainspace and Draftspace. And people that know the Dutch, and you seem to know to Dutch people, it's, fairly recognizable what the Dutch attributes are that are at play here. Our headquarters is in Atlanta, Georgia. The interesting thing about data domain was it was very, very slow going. But it's not what it really is, so it wasn't an enormous surprise to me to come here. Everyone's watching. He's a Dutchman Slootman moved to Silicon Valley in 1997. By the close of. This boat actually won Slootman the 2017 Transpac Honolulu Race in 2017. Museum Shop Hours: 9:30 am - 5 pm daily; 9:30 am - 4 pm in January and February. In 2003, he became CEO of storage startup Data Domain, taking it public in 2007 and selling it to EMC in 2009 for $1.8 billion. Now, what that does the weaponizing, what that does is we block everything else out. Right? SAN FRANCISCO, March 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Instacart, the leading online grocery platform in North America, today announced that Frank Slootman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of . And the term BI had not even been invented back then. Company still around, by the way. I mean, it's a hell of a cash burner as well. That's why they're big in banking and insurance and distribution and logistics. We were entertainment for Wall Street for a six-week period. The book accounts his time in Data Domain and so much more. The IPO was the third for Slootman, who moved to California for a job at Compuware in the dot-com boom, then worked at Borland Software. Property details for 3001 W Ruby Hill Dr, located in Pleasanton, California. I think EMC was exactly the right acquirer because they just sort of had the orientation and the scale and the intensity culturally. Because he was still smarting from the fact that I left ServiceNow and he felt I left him stranded. That is how you energize companies. Yeah, yeah. You hit a mark, you have to do two 360s. 951 Chicago Ave., Oak Park, IL 60302. Things will change in ways you cannot even imagine the ideas that happen. People that the company really, really runs on. They just said, "Look, let's re-envision, re-imagine based on the platform realities that we now have, which was the Public Cloud. While that is probably not, my temperament is not terribly well-suited for those types of jobs. And if I can't predict it, I can't change my policy, I can't change my pricing." New competitors, new partner ecosystems, so it was like, "Wow, this is the future." So, what are things that we should absolutely not ask you to do ever? And I said, "Why not?" Somebody who I had known for many, many years, so at Sutter Hill Mike Speiser. So, we were just picking over use cases here and there to sort of stay alive in the early days. I mean, that's how I felt at that time, like I had no more to give. 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. We just never backed off of it. I'm on the phone with customers every day. I hate to break it to the audience, but that is the way that it is. Because, and this is another important observation, I think. Whatever he learned from school is probably what we should all learn. Mar 11, 2021, 11:30 ET. It's very hard. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes, so other folks know where to find us. Good sales people have a track record. CEO Frank Slootman (second row, fourth from left) and the Snowflake team virtually rang the opening . I mean, the only thing that energizes people and teams and organizations and companies as a whole is the mission. You cannot sell your way through a crappy product, okay? I mean, it was doing well. You come with aptitude. 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. Because if I sailed before, I always felt guilty because I was doing something that wasn't the company and now, I was completely free of guilt because it was my own time, my own money, et cetera and it was great. What did that initial scaling up to that point and then the public exit experience teach you about why being acquired was the right choice for Data Domain? That takes very different approaches, orientation, skill sets, and so on what you do. Having run a number of global software companies, I appreciate the scope of resources that Blackstone can bring to high-growth . But that is what digital transformation is. I mean, one of my favorite, interview questions has always been, "What kind of people succeed here? We're two sides of a coin, which is a reason why we've shown up in so many companies together. People naturally become very unfocused, very, very easily. So, we're going to be in the middle of that. And then being able to talk about it in an intelligent, really rich-considered manner. We will talk to you next week. So, it was an incredible trial by fire. And Americans always think that there's an easy answer to these questions. As cool as it may sound, Slootman doesnt actually have a literal invisible hand. Data Domain was really an interesting company. I mean, we had like 15X, the X of the next nearest competitor. It's really a company production, by the way. And people really want to be led in that manner. Including his options, Slootman owns about 10% of Snowflake. Listen to this episode from This Week in Startups on Spotify. One company that embodies this vision is ThoughtSpot, an analytics company. Basically, we had to solve our enormous problems that we have while the company was doubling in size, more than doubling its size every year. Welcome, Frank, inside the Ice House. Slootman moved to Silicon Valley in 1997. right? Strong personalities will just dictate culture in certain business units, in certain geographies and so on. I don't have to go work on Monday. I hate that. Frank Slootman (born 1958) is a billionaire businessman, and the chairman and CEO at Snowflake Inc., a cloud data-warehousing company. Snowflake, while not yet generating $1 billion in annual revenue, leaped into the Cloud Wars Top 10 several months ago and . What goes around, comes around and the Dutch get around the world. If there were one person you could sit and learn from today, who would it be? All Rights Reserved. Because now, now you're going to look people in the eye, and say, "Look, this is the way we're going to be. I'm buying aptitude and then I'm going to develop that with experience, right? But with three IPOs in your rear view mirror and one attempt at retirement already failing to stick, what do you see as the next chapter in Frank Slootman's journey? He published a book in 2011 called Tape Sucks. And everybody was like, "Who's Data Domain? That is the X factor in companies, but it starts with weaponizing the mission. He was saying during the pandemic, he's like demand was up 60% over here, down 100% over there. The liberalization of LNG is creating a global natural gas market, with freight acting as a virtual pipeline between continents. Frank Slootman is the CEO of Snowflake, a cloud-based database firm he joined in 2019 and took public in September 2020 in a blockbuster IPO. And he always talked about Snowflake because it was a very exciting company to him and I didn't know that much about it, but enough to have a conversation. The 61-year old Dutch executive's first CEO job was at an early-stage startup called Data Domain that made specialized storage hardware. When I'm on offense out there, I don't worry about what's going on at home at the farm because that is in a very, very tight control mode. 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? I mean, we have bumper stickers and people would at trade shows would stick them on tape libraries. Paul Stovell is an Australian businessman and entrepreneur who serves as the current CEO of Octopus Deploy. In other words, wants to call it out, wants to prosecute it because you can see good behavior, bad behavior around you all day long. The company is a fintech firm that helps companies automate their deployments with unique software solutions for business. And that's exactly what we did. It was sort of an adjunct to what they called the computer industry back then.