This CEO Brought Three Companies to IPO
Frank Slootman brought 3 companies to IPO (Snowflake most recently), thanks to his playbook: move faster and focus harder.
I recently encountered this LinkedIn article written in 2018 by Frank Slootman, former CEO of Data Domain, ServiceNow, and more recently, Snowflake1.
He brought all three companies to IPO2.
Slootman is known for his relentless focus on execution, often at the cost of a few hurt feelings.
But if you believe businesses exist to generate value and make money, then this piece will resonate will you. His insights on leadership are gold, especially if you're in a fast-paced business environment.
Two key lessons stood out to me:
The first is about instilling a culture of urgency.
The second about narrowing the focus.
Below are my two favorite excerpts from the article.
Hope you find them as valuable as I did.
Increasing velocity
Without leaders driving the tempo in an organization, it will naturally settle into a lethargic pace. If you have ever worked in or with government, you have seen extreme examples of this. There is no urgency about anything, other than quitting time. It’s suffocating being in such organizations, as if everybody is swimming in glue.
People get visible pep in their step. They exude energy. Somebody would ask me if he could get back to me about something next week, and I would reply “how about tomorrow morning?”. Might be completely unreasonable, did not matter. The point was to change people’s sense of urgency. We were always compressing cycle time on everything. Did we sometimes take it too far? Of course we did. You don't know what's possible until you try. Same thing applies in interactions with other stakeholders, especially customers who all have expectations about reasonable response times. It is easy to differentiate yourself by changing cycle times because few bother to do it.
Stepping up the pace doesn’t just cause people to do things faster. They start doing things differently. They become more demanding of others. This is precisely what we want in an organization. ServiceNow had a relentless ‘get shit done’ culture and they were proud of it. The culture enthusiastically embraced those who got things done, and it repelled those who did not.
[…]
It is not a trivial change. Organizations resist going faster than their natural, quite glacial pace. We had some new hires quit in a matter of weeks, confessing they could not handle the pace and intensity at ServiceNow. Too big a shock to their system.
You need an energetic cast that wants to let it rip. These were exactly the people we wanted to attract and retain. You don’t drive the pace, you start losing the people who need a fast-paced culture. And the best people do.
Quickening the pace also drives a narrower focus. You simply can't move very fast when you are pushing on too many fronts at the same time. More about this further down.
Narrowing the focus
The fastest way to move a dial is narrow the focus. People naturally resist focus because they can’t decide what is important. Therein lies a problem: people can typically tell you after some deliberation what their top three priorities are, but they struggle to decide on just one. They may also be incorrect about their priorities, so there is potential for misallocation of resources. What is too much and what is too little focus? Do you ever even discuss this? Most teams are not focused enough. I rarely encountered a team that employed too narrow an aperture. It goes against our human grain. People like to boil oceans. Just knowing that can be to your advantage.
When you narrow focus, you are increasing the resourcing on the remaining priority. It doesn’t have to time-slice and compete any more with a bunch of other stuff. And then things begin to move, stuff is getting done, and we move to the next thing. Many people and organizations are focused a mile wide and an inch deep. It can’t be a surprise when they progress at snails pace. Log jams get broken when you sift through the reams of activities and you create fewer and clearer objectives. Do less, at a time. I've often felt that providence moves, too, when you un-clutter priorities. Like an Invisible Hand, all of a sudden things are on the move.
It’s not just an effectiveness problem. We need to sort out what is truly important, and what isn’t, and when. We procrastinate on that by declaring multiple priorities. Makes us sound thoughtful and comprehensive, but it completely lacks punch and impact. Pointed, critical thinking is rare. I have been in board meetings where CEOs would declare as many as ten priorities. Reminds us of Mark Twain who wrote us a long letter because he had no time for a short one.
At the company level and as a CEO, I worked to create blinding clarity and singularity of purpose. My job as a CEO was to increase the value of the franchise. That’s because I was appointed to work for the investors (which included our employees). I only did things and applied resources that had a compelling line-of-sight relationship with that goal. In tech, value is a function of growth, so we ran our companies for growth, period. It was an easy call when spending proposals came forward that had no discernible relationship with the mission. Investors were obviously in violent agreement.
This is a premise in his article, but I believe it works well as a conclusion here:
Bottom line: There is room up in organizations to boost performance by amping up the pace and intensity. Considerable slack naturally exists in organizations to perform at much higher levels. The role of leadership is to convert that lingering potential into superlative results. The opportunity is right under our noses but for some reason it does not enter the consciousness. This notion is not limited to business enterprises. We see in professional sports all the time how teams go almost overnight from losing to winning with basically the same roster, but different leadership. Call it what you want, the X factor, whatever, it is real. Anybody can dial into this, but not many do.
It is not easy because you will drive people out of their comfort zones. There will be resistance. Change is hard. Some will vote with their feet. If you want to be popular as a leader, this may not be for you. The role of a leader is to change the status quo, step up the pace, and increase the intensity. Leaders are the energy bunnies and pacemakers of the organization. Some people drain energy from organizations; not leaders, they engulf organizations with energy.
If you want to read more on how to get better at work, check these posts.
See you all next Sunday 🗓️
Thanks,
Giacomo
Snowflake reported revenues for $2.8B in 2024. Frank Slootman now serves as Chairman of the Board.
An IPO, or initial public offering, is the term for the first time that a private company sells shares of its stock to the public on a stock exchange. (Investopedia)
I agree with urgency and narrowing the focus, but it also requires the right capacity and capability, and sometimes slow is pace.