"If you tell most people that, they'll be like, 'Wow, that sounds like an amazing company. Why are they only tripling sales? Benoit is a leading expert in parallel execution and self-tuning database systems. That lasted until April this year when he stepped into the chairman and CEO role at Snowflake. He'd stay for 20 or 30 minutes, and the customers' jaws would drop and they'd be on the edge of their seat. And it was the right thing to do," Muglia recently told Forbes. Slootman: Suppose 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. Is there competition there? CNBC Snowflake books its revenue using a "consumption model," Slootman said, rather than a typical subscription . When Slootman attended all-hands meetings, he "would drop f-bombs and s-bombs," the executive said. "Frank said, 'So the IT service managers, those are our homies, right?' My whole career was doing jobs that other people didnt want to take, he says. I exercise executive prerogative, he adds. Companies that stand for something make employees excited to work there, she said. The simplest explanation is that investors wanted someone I dont like there to be too I am truly a hybrid Dutch-American. When Slootman took ServiceNow public in 2012, he rang the NYSE bell in person. The son of a military veteran and an artist, Slootman studied economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands, before moving to the US with a dream of working for IBM, the CEO told Forbes. Otherwise, Im going to go ahead and run the company., When Slootman expressed interest in the Snowflake CEO job, Sequoia and Sutter Hill jumped. Stay up to date with what you want to know. In the past Mr. Slootman occupied the position of Chairman at ServiceNow, Inc., Principal at Compuware Corp., General Manager for Ecosystems SRL, Partner at Greylock Partners LLC, President & Chief Executive Officer at Data Domain, Inc., Senior Vice President-Products at Borland Software Corp., President-Backup Recovery Systems Division at EMC Corp., Principal at Burroughs Corp. and Venture Partner at Greylock Management Corp. this valuation by any means. When Covid-19 hit, Snowflake was prepared, having just raised $479 million from investors, including Salesforce, in early February. . Public asset : 162,785,053 USD. He replaced a number of Snowflake's top executives including Chief Financial Officer Thomas Tuchscherer, Vice President of People Kathy O'Driscoll, and Vice President of Finance Jeff Balaguras with his own trusted lieutenants. I do prefer the earlier stages of growth. the board gives me the chairman title or not does not matter. Mark joined Adobe in 2007 as Executive Vice President and CFO, leading Adobes worldwide finance, operations and corporate development activities, including investor relations, procurement, global supply chain and order management, and corporate strategy and strategic partnerships. He is still on the boards at Pure and Elementum. What did the Snowflake board want from you that they could not get from other potential CEOs and that was lacking in the company at that point? It took on another $450 million, this time at a $4 billion valuation, about nine months later. Published Jul 7, 2022. Teresa Briggs is a senior executive with deep experience in strategy, business transformation, and governance. 10. I hired on with Burroughs instead. The thing I liked about sailing was that if you make a mistake, its obvious within minutes.. We were seen as the The investigation was dropped in February because of a technicality, and Brady was given a warning. In October, Slootman was approved for a 20-year lease at a tiny airport near the home to park a private aircraft. Slootman, who took over Snowflake in April 2019, had been as ruthlessly efficient with the rest of the process. Mark brings nearly 40 years of experience to Snowflake as an executive leader, an expert in accounting and financial management, and a visionary in growing and transforming technology companies. The board was the one telling me to spend money, the board was just as strongly behind this. Chandna mentioned a Greylock startup that planned on tripling sales. Chris serves as Snowflakes Chief Revenue Officer and has been with the company since 2013. I would say, 'We're spending like drunken sailors,' and they would say, 'Yes, keep doing it.' She is a recipient of the SFSU and SCU Distinguished Alumni Awards in 2013 and 2016. With a few million dollars left in the bank, we They were all out there to foul us, to do whatever they can to trip us up. day and we will from here on out. Prior to joining Snowflake, she served as CMO for Apigee, an API platform company that went public in 2015 and Google acquired in 2016. Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski, a distributed systems and organizations scaling expert, is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support at Snowflake. temperament that needs an outlet I guess, but I never really decided to I dont getthat excited, he explains. Subscribe. After telling Bloomberg TV that he can't allow a push for diversity in tech to "override merit," Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman released a statement Monday apologizing for a "lack of clarity" in those comments. After his retirement from ServiceNow, Slootman poured millions into his sailing hobby, people familiar with his sailing operation said. It was founded in July 2012 and was publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode. Slootman: My role ", The post raised collective eyebrows at Snowflake, former employees said. After that it was board membership; Pure Storage, Medallia and Elementum SCM,and more VC investing with his own Invisible Hand Ventures. Snowflake Inc. CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world's most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading Data Domain and ServiceNow to exponential growth and the public market before that. In 2019, during an all-hands meeting at Snowflake, Slootman told the story of how early in his career he was rejected for a job he was well qualified for because the company needed to fill a quota of hiring more minorities, a former senior Snowflake employee said. His first action: reorganizing the sales arm of the business to separate large customers from small, focusing more intently on converting the bigger fish. Inside Snowflake, Slootman reengaged cofounder Dageville, now a billionaire himself, to spearhead the project; outside, analysts trust Slootman to figure it out. "He was the king of the hill. Mark currently serves as Chairman of the board of directors of Qualcomm, Inc. and as a director of Snorkel.AI. While Slootman had success before Snowflake, he reached a new stratosphere after the company's IPO, his net worth skyrocketing to an estimated $2.2 billion. With an exit in his back pocket, Slootman had his pick of companies for his next act, in 2011. Age 64. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bulls parallel systems. Teresa has been a stabilizing force in the C-suite and boardroom of influential companies across the technology, retail, consumer products, and healthcare industries. Slootman hasn't shied away from embracing his right-leaning tendencies in a liberal-dominant industry. He previously served as Senior Vice President of Finance and Business Operations of the Backup Recovery Systems Division at EMC from July 2009 to August 2011, after EMC acquired Data Domain where he served as CFO for three years. Blocks & Files: Which other CEOs do you admire and why? Prior to BMC, John served as Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services with BladeLogic. has extraordinary upside. that outcome could be. Frank has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and executive in the enterprise software industry. The vast majority can already be exercised but the underlying shares vest monthly over four years, beginning . Slootman was winning so often that rumors started swirling that he had to be cheating. I also did not like SaaS that much as a business model, Frank served as President of the Backup Recovery Systems Division at EMC following the acquisition of Data Domain Corporation/Data Domain, Inc., where he served as the Chief Executive Officer and President, leading the company through an IPO to its acquisition by EMC for $2.4B. It sounds like they've got a great product-market fit. Previously, Sunny has held leadership roles at VMWARE, JDSU, Deloitte Consulting and Andersen Consulting. I campaigned our TP52 Invisible Hand for three years. A crewmember said Slootman stopped sailing competitively because "everybody was out to get him.". briefly valued more highly than IBM at one point not long after its IPO, Slootman said of San Diego's laid-backness, valued the company at more than $2 billion. In 2017 and 2018, he donated $10,800 to the congressional campaign of Greg Gianforte, Montana's now governor who made national news in 2017 after body-slamming a reporter and getting elected to Congress the next day. My eyes are on the horizon., Covering venture capital, cloud and startups. As reported by Forbes, the company has been raising billion on the ongoing pandemic and its shares are crossing more than $30 billion. Five lessons in leadership from Snowflake CEO, Frank Slootman. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman has been at the CEO game long enough to learn a few things or two on how to create a successful business. Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories. Mr. Slootman is a billionaire businessman who was born on 3 rd October 1958 in Holland. You constantly live with that terminal fear of not doing enough.". Kate Bullinger, who advises CEOs and companies on corporate culture at Weber Shandwick's United Minds consultancy, told Insider that a CEO dismissing or ignoring social issues could harm the company's ability to attract and retain talent. Buying up cloud storage credits from Amazon and its rivals and reselling them, all while keeping Snowflakes own software running, was costly, especially as Snowflake expanded to new markets such as Australia. Blocks & Files: Are you still involved in regatta racing with your yacht Invisible Hand? "It was not written under the name of Frank, which is telling," the former Snowflake executive said. Publisher (s): Wiley. In 2011, Slootman joined ServiceNow as its CEO. As in sailing, the Doug, thank you for that comment, Slootman replied. He also owned and sailing a boat called Invisible Hand and co-funded the Pac52yachting regatta. CTRL + SPACE for auto-complete. But the question becamehowgreat COVID-19 fundamentally changed the way businesses operate. In his new book . Had they In 2019, before the company went public, Slootman made more than $60 million in total compensation. Teresa previously served as a Vice Chair & West Region and San Francisco Managing Partner of Deloitte, and as Managing Partner, Silicon Valley. and a few units in field test. Just a month later, Snowflake under Slootman had shifted to become a performance-based business. to sell more than all its competitors combined. Frank explained. The eight-year . But sailing couldn't keep him occupied for long. Speaking publicly about his departure for the first time, Muglia tells Forbes that it took him months to get over the shock. And eventually, his journey led him to Data Domain. mean there isnt room for discussion and debate but I will never create or to market this promising. Along the way, investors witnessed his brusque leadership style firsthand when Leone made the mistake of interrupting Slootman with unprompted advice in a board meeting. So after a while Im, like, Instead of bitching about it, Ill just stick to these train wrecks and show you what I can do with them.. Franks wife, Brenda, who is also 61 years old, is the Vice President and Secretary of the Slootman Family Foundation. by Frank Slootman. Key Learnings from: Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality. There is no information on his parents, siblings, or any other family members. "At the end of the day, there is a pretty fierce competition for talent, and people are going to vote with their feet," Bullinger said. can execute, but I cant justify Insider spoke with 15 people who know Slootman, who is 62, including former Snowflake colleagues and those from Slootman's past companies ServiceNow and Data Domain. This article "Frank Slootman" is from Wikipedia. In 2007, he took the data-storage company public, and two years later, he oversaw its $2.4 billion acquisition by EMC, which was later bought by Dell. John was responsible for $1.4B in annual revenue, when he served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services at BMC Software. The Snowflake board member Mike Speiser, who invested in the company through his firm Sutter Hill and served as its first CEO, reached out to Slootman regarding a Snowflake board position, Speiser told Forbes. Prior to working for Snowflake, Frank took the CEO spot at ServiceNow when it had less than $100 million in revenues and took it to $1.4 billion. In addition to her board responsibilities at Deloitte, she has held a number of governance roles with professional and community organizations. She served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Bay Area Council, and the boards of directors for the California Academy of Sciences and the University of Arizona Eller College of Management. #1905 Frank Slootman on the 2023 Billionaires - Frank Slootman is the CEO of Snowflake, a cloud-based database firm he joined in 2019 and took public in . Competitors include Vantage, SAP, Yellowbrick Data, Microsoft Azure and AWS. "It was not the kind of environment that I enjoyed participating in," Haldeman said. [2] [3] The firm offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data-as-a-service". To win over large customers like Johnson & Johnson, he repositioned ServiceNow from a help-desk IT solutionnot exactly something to excite a fellow CEO in a meetingto an all-you-can-eat buffet of tools that could help a needy CIO solve any challenge. When executives at a later company, Compuware, realized in 1995 that an acquisition in Amsterdam was going sideways, its young staffer, a native Dutch speaker, was given a chance to clean up the mess. "I think the moral of that story was don't let failure get you down.". A CEO must lead a board, period. Chief Revenue Officer. Data Domain was running out of money; its technology, while theoretically more powerful than the existing alternatives, ran prohibitively slowly. and six thousand enterprise customers worldwide. Thierry co-founded Snowflake and currently serves as Chief Technical Officer. I learned from that experience that I dont want to be in an elevator thats going down, he says. "Comments I made during a media interview last week may have led some to infer that I believe that diversity and merit are . Frank took us from a very large startup and made us into a very large, well-oiled machine, Luddy told Forbes in 2018. However, the details of his conjugal life are known to few. Denise Persson. Mike joined Sutter Hill Ventures in 2008 from Yahoo!, where he was Vice President of Community products. I never worked in Holland, but was born, raised and educated there. In July 2017, two years before he took over as the chief executive of Snowflake, Frank Slootman raced 2,225 miles across the Pacific Ocean, from the California coast to the Hawaiian island of Oahu . asked a year earlier, I likely would not have bit down on this. Jeremy also served as Veritas Executive Vice President of Data Management Group and Chief Marketing Officer. Experts say Snowflake, which today has a market valuation of nearly $77 billion, has been bolstered by therise of remote work during the pandemic. Frank Slootman is the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake. Kramer has extensive experience in financial planning and analysis, profit-and-loss leadership, and mergers and acquisitions. In 2011, after the founder of ServiceNow Fred Luddy stepped down, ServiceNow announced appointment of Frank Slootman as CEO. Frank Slootman received an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree from Erasmus University Rotterdam. He barely slept, said Ruben Gabriel, one of the crew. Amp It Up. Slootman knows exactly what he's doing. character and had an email interview opportunity. To his relief, Begun told him a few weeks later that the new CEO valued his hustle and loyalty to the product. ", "You know, he's this very formal, educated, Dutch, driven, business executive, right?" "Everybody was out to get him," Gabriel said. Dominic Ruso, ServiceNow's former vice president of finance, replaced Balaguras. He holds a BA from the University of Delaware. Slootman's investor friend Chandna recalled when the CEO stopped by his home recently. I was rejected at least a dozen times by IBM. A 20-year veteran of the IT industry, Jeremy joined EMC from Serena Software, where he was President and CEO. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bulls parallel systems. However, at the age of 26, Frank moved to the USA in 1984 to work for Burroughs. Following the sale, he became Senior Vice President and CFO of EMCs Software Group. Also, they havent shared any details on their parenthood, but we believe that the two have a son together. The board, including Doug Leonean investor on Forbes Midas List and Sequoias coleader at the timetasked Slootman with doing for ServiceNow what he had just done for Data Domain. Sylvia was previously Vice President, HR Technology and Digital Experience at Snowflake. The beloved chocolate snacks disappeared, and daily catered lunches were replaced by an in-house cafeteria that was still free but seen by some as a downgrade. from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a J.D. He owns 5.9% of Snowflake. Snowflake is a special company, they just dont They obviously felt they would materialize more of Prior to that, Mark served in several roles at VeriSign, including as Executive Vice President, Products and Marketing. many layers between me and the action. In early 2018, just over a year before his dismissal, Muglia met Forbes for breakfast at a New York hotel. Slootman likes to say that he doesnt have a formula, even after having pulled off similar magic at both Data Domain and ServiceNow. were months away from running out of money. I was rejected at least a dozen times by IBM. This stock is being completely driven by the Robinhood crowd.. Some employees were irked when the CEO shut down a leased WeWork office in San Francisco and instead rented a new office space in the East Bay area that happened to be a 10-minute drive from Slootman's home, one former executive said. Forbes reports that Slootman turned into a very rich person with a net worth of $1.8 billion in September 2020 as Snowflake shares took off 115% in the IPO. Prior to Snowflake, Chris served in Sales leadership roles at EMC and Aveksa, and worked in enterprise sales at Informatica and Covalent Technologies (acquired by VMware). Slootmans my-way-or-the-highway attitude caused a stir when he arrived at Snowflake on April 26, 2019, hours after cofounders Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes informed well-liked CEO Bob Muglia, a Microsoft veteran, that his services were no longer required. In 1982, after a number of rejections from Big Blue, he crawled ashore with $100 in my pocket (a phrase he repeats so often his employees know it by heart) in South Bend, Indiana, with a job as an intern in the seemingly dead-end fake-leather industry. Before Oracle, he spent seven years at the IBM European Center of Applied Mathematics working on data mining technologies.