Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman has advice for young company leaders: Boost the intensity and get used to confrontation.
Slootman is now in his third CEO job, and each time he’s led a company to a blockbuster IPO. That includes data hardware maker Data Domain in 2007, cloud software giant ServiceNow in 2012, and most recently data warehousing company Snowflake in 2020.
One problem he’s seen with young CEOs: “They just think, ‘I hire a bunch of people, and then I sit back and wait for greatness.’ They have no idea that they have to relentlessly drive every second of the day, every interaction, and seek the confrontation,” Slootman told the No Priors podcast in an episode posted Thursday.
Look no further than a DMV office to see a lack of urgency among workers, he suggested. “This is what naturally happens to human beings,” he said. “It’s innate. We slow down to a glacial pace unless there are people who are going to drive tempo and pace and intensity and urgency. That’s what leaders need to do.”
CEOs must constantly “push the urgency,” he said, even though “it’s really hard to have the mental energy to bring that to every single instance of today.”
Another CEO known to up the intensity is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who, after taking over Twitter last October and laying off half the workforce, demanded that remaining employees commit to an “extremely hard-core” company culture involving “long hours at high intensity.”
“Frank Slootman is the Elon Musk of enterprise software,” tweeted Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta in August 2020.
Like Musk, Slootman has courted controversy. In June 2021 the politically conservative CEO drew backlash after telling Bloomberg that when hiring or promoting employees, Snowflake should focus more on merit than diversity goals, a view he said other leaders shared but were reluctant to express publicly. He later apologized to “anyone who may have been hurt or offended by my comments,” which “may have led some to infer that I believe that diversity and merit are mutually exclusive.”
A year earlier he admitted he had little patience for employee activism and “social justice issues,” seeing them as distractions. He compared his leadership style to having a “single-minded focus” akin to that shown by his idol, General George Patton (whom President Dwight Eisenhower relieved of command over inflammatory comments).
This year, Montana-based Snowflake has bucked the trend of tech layoffs, saying in March—when it reported year-over-year revenue growth of 54%— that it planned to hire more than 1,000 employees, having added 2,000 last year. Snowflake shares are up about 30% year to date at $176 but are well below their all-time high in November 2021, when they briefly topped $400.
On the podcast, Slootman described one founder-CEO, whom he didn’t identify, who stayed home when somebody needed to be fired, having his CFO do it instead, “because it’s just so hard, and it’s, like, ‘I don’t have the disposition for it.’ We understand that, but there are people in the enterprise that have to do that stuff,” he said.
He added, “CEO jobs are insanely confrontational, which is not human nature. We don’t like it. We’re not naturally confrontational. We avoid it.”
Asked if he worried about losing talent if his hard-charging culture resulted in people leaving the company, he responded, “Well, if they leave, they should leave. This is the great thing…You attract the right ones, and you start losing the wrong ones, so it’s actually quite perfect.”