Frank Slootman on what most CEOs get wrong

**Frank Slootman** (0:00)
When you come home on a Friday night, look in the mirror. Did it matter I was here? Where did I move the dials? The mission is not making everybody feel good. Hell, we'll make everybody feel bad because it's so damn uncomfortable being in a high growth operation. People have a tendency to kind of make things safe, but in business, we can't be safe and comfortable.

**Nakul Mandan** (0:17)
Frank Slootman is the only CEO to have taken three enterprise companies public. He also led the largest software IPO in history with Snowflake in 2020 The combined market cap of companies he's led is more than $200 billion. But all of that still doesn't fully capture the impact he's had on Silicon Valley. Frank's playbook on scaling high-performance companies as captured in his book, Amp It Up, is one that every top CEO borrows from, and one that we'll unpack today.
Frank, welcome to the show.

**Frank Slootman** (0:51)
My pleasure.

**Nakul Mandan** (0:52)
I want to start at one of the key pillars of your operating philosophy. You've said many times, being a CEO is a confrontational job. Why is it a confrontational job?

**Frank Slootman** (1:02)
It's confrontational, not in the sense that we're always chasing people down, grabbing them by the lapels and telling them they're doing a shitty job. It's more that we're always trying to compress timeframes, really envisioning outcomes and goals that are inspiring and worth getting up for in the morning.
It's really hard because every moment of the day, every interaction that you're having with people, whether it's in a meeting or a hallway conversation or whatever it is, you have an opportunity to change the intensity, the urgency, the pace, as well as, are we aiming high enough? And that's not always a rhetorical question. Yeah. So.

**Nakul Mandan** (1:42)
Is it more about the quality of output, the pace? Do you find that there's a theme amongst what are the typical confrontational issues?

**Frank Slootman** (1:50)
Well, there's also a confrontation around things that are not working, things that are not working well, things that we're hearing, crises that are developing in different parts of the world, relative to the business. So there's all of that. So what's the urgency in terms of addressing it? Are we just watching it or what?
So you're bringing a perspective to it as like, now is the time.

**Nakul Mandan** (2:16)
You've clarified that it's not about grabbing people by the lapels, but let's get real, right? Like if somebody is not doing a great job, you're telling them you're not doing a great job, their output is not to the power that you need it to be. That can get personal pretty quickly. So how do you actually manage that conversation?

**Frank Slootman** (2:33)
Look, when you're a CEO, you're not managing people like a first-level manager, right? We're really trying to bring them along in the thinking, get a better understanding of their thinking, and let the conversation go to a place where we can get people there without getting sort of in their face, if you will. Because once you do that, it's sort of the beginning of the end, and what you really want to do is change their perspective. That's really what it's about. Now, most people kind of find out a week later when they're starting to reflect on the conversation, and maybe they did get their ass kicked.
But it was done in a way that was not in the way most people would think about it.

**Nakul Mandan** (3:16)
Do you find that when you're recruiting, people are looking for that ability to take that hard feedback or, you know?

**Frank Slootman** (3:22)
Yeah, absolutely, because good people like getting feedback. Not just hard feedback, any feedback. They want to be better. You know, what am I not doing? What am I not thinking about? Am I thinking hard enough about this? I think people are hungry for that kind of interaction, rather than, you know, somebody once came up to me and said, am I supported? You know, and I'm like, you're here, aren't you?
If you're here, you are, because if you weren't supported, you wouldn't be here. So stop worrying, stop thinking about stuff like that. That's really, it was also a wake up call for me, because that's really not what I want to hear, that people spend their days worrying about stupid stuff like that. Worry about what you're doing.

**Nakul Mandan** (4:13)
Let's keep going deeper. So one of the things I've heard you say is, the way you start these conversations with your execs is, how do you think it's going?
What happens if somebody thinks it's going good or great? You think it's a complete disaster. What happens then?