#113 - From Furniture Store to Water Delivery: The Millions in Boring Businesses

**Sam Parr** (0:18)
Sam Parr.

**Shaan Patel** (0:19)
What's going on?

**Sam Parr** (0:21)
You know, it's another day, another, another, I don't know, what's the phrase? Another day, another dollar, something like that? Yeah, I don't know what it means. It's another day, that's kind of the end of the phrase for me.
I have some stuff I wanted to talk to you about. Did you see there's this blog post, maybe a Linkedin post by this guy, by the guy Frank Slootman, the guy we were talking about, the CEO of Snowflake. Did you read this blog post?

**Shaan Patel** (0:45)
I saw you linked to it and I hadn't read it yet. What's the summary?

**Sam Parr** (0:49)
It's amazing. So this guy, Frank Slootman, who's the CEO of Snowflake now, but he was the CEO of ServiceNow, which is a public enterprise company and Data Domain, which is another one.
He put this thing on Linkedin, which, you know, Linkedin content, not usually the best, but he just wrote like kind of his philosophy on building a company and building it. Like he's like, he was basically like, look, a lot of people ask, okay, what did we get right? What do we do differently? Is there some silver bullet? And he's like, no, not really. He's like, but he's like, I think in most organizations, there's basically like slack in the rope.
And he's like, if we did anything, it was that we took all the slack out. And he calls that amping it up. He's like, I just think you can amp up the pace and intensity in a company. And here's how we did it. Here's how we thought about it.

**Shaan Patel** (1:39)
Wow, this is long.

**Sam Parr** (1:40)
I loved this blog post. It was like, by the end of it, I was like, all right, I want to work 10 times as hard.
And I'm in on this guy, you know, I'm all in on this guy. So I really liked it. If you didn't read it, you know, hard to talk too much about it. But a couple of the things that he talked about, which I think were good was, I guess there was a couple of things that he talked about that were obvious, but he said it in a good way. And then there's some things that he said that most people don't say. Like for example, he talks about diversity and inclusion.
And let me-

**Shaan Patel** (2:12)
He says, well, he previously, he goes, he said something like, if you're on our ship, you're included.
He has a few more great lines. It says, organizations are not getting killed by sea players. Everyone knows who they are.
And the performance is eventually addressed. The people who kill organizations are your B players. It's a scourge of the enterprise because there are many and they are generally accepted. Often they're seen not as bad enough to fire, but not good enough to keep. They are the ultimate passengers.

**Sam Parr** (2:40)
Yes, exactly. And he was basically just like, a passenger is dead weight along for the ride and we shed that dead weight.
He talks about like, for A players, he talks about how they compensated the whole ServiceNow exec team on one metric. And it was the pure like kind of the performance metric of a cloud software company. And he's like, the board fought me on this. They were convinced that a grown up company had to have a balanced scorecard. He's like, and this is arguably the worst idea ever to come out of academia.

**Shaan Patel** (3:08)
Which was, say it again, I didn't quite understand it. Can you say it again? By the way, look, where I'm sitting, I'm in an Airbnb.
Look at the award that is on the Snowflake award.

**Sam Parr** (3:19)
Nice.

**Shaan Patel** (3:19)
It's like some ballet thing. I don't know.

**Sam Parr** (3:22)
It's not like a mock award. Okay, that's great.
So a balanced scorecard would be like, oh, you know, we're not just concerned about revenue. We're also concerned about net promoter score. And we're also concerned about user growth, right? All three things are super important. We have three top level metrics. And he's basically saying, we had one metric that mattered. Everybody got compensated on that. Like in most companies, sales team will get compensated on sales. Maybe the safety team will get compensated on it, will assess their performance on a different thing altogether. And you want to have balance between growth and revenue and maybe like customer satisfaction or whatever.
And so he's like, the board fought me on this. They were convinced a grown up team had to have a balanced scorecard, which arguably the worst idea to ever come out of academia. People say they want focus, but their actions do not bear it out. Quite the opposite. Focus is hard once you understand what it really means. It means, what are you not going to do?