Frank Slootman - Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:44)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:09)
My guest today is Frank Slootman, Chairman and CEO of Cloud Platform Snowflake. Frank has become one of the most revered CEOs in business.
Over the past 20 years, he has three times taken over emerging enterprise software businesses, first Data Domain, then ServiceNow and most recently Snowflake, and led them across the chasm into large billion dollar businesses.
Please enjoy this great discussion with Frank Slootman.
So Frank, I think I first came across your thinking and your work reading Tapes Sucks very early in my career and loved some of the lessons from there. And then when Amp It Up came out, the original LinkedIn post and now book, it became kind of one of my Bibles that I hand out. And so I figured now that you've done a few interviews, I'd try to do something a little bit different to complement the ones that you've done and sort of go through the life cycle since you've done this at least three times with ServiceNow, Data Domain and now Snowflake. Go through the episode of you coming into a company and applying some of these principles that you've written about. And I'd love to start with people. So when you're orienting yourself day one in a new company, how do you go about or suggest others go about evaluating the team that you have so that you can begin to get the right team in place?

**Frank Slootman** (3:21)
The obvious answer to that question is you're not so much inspecting the people, you're inspecting the work. That may sound like an obvious distinction.
But if I don't know the people, obviously I can't tell. But I can certainly look at what they're responsible for is functioning or not. And on the basis of that, I'm going to make decisions really, really quickly. I'm not going to go wait this out. I mean, somebody is running HR and HR is not functioning worth a damn. That's enough. On the other hand, the opposite is also true on something that's working really, really well. That would be a reason to really embrace the people that are there. Again, I'm stating the obvious here, but that is how it is. Certainly when I was a younger man, I used to wait things out even in spite of the evidence because it seemed like the reasonable thing to do.
But it was stupid. I just avoided what I already knew. I avoided the inevitable, lost a lot of time. And by the way, your whole leadership mojo is being tested because when you're parachuting into quackmire and sometimes even a crisis situation, you need to move. Okay, this is not like, oh, let's take six months here to see what's going on.