How to Amp It Up (Frank Slootman, Chairman & CEO, Snowflake)

**Frank Slootman** (0:00)
There's a lot of, by the way, and this thing that bothers me greatly, people copy each other mindlessly. They're like, well, customer success, everybody has one, I better have one too.
Stop being mindless, be inquisitive, be a critical thinker. It's almost like we have lost that ability to look at things like, does this really make sense?
Why are we doing this? They're just doing it because they think like, well, I'm not a good person if I don't have customer success. Of course, we have customer success. The whole company is based on customer success. Are you kidding me?

**Ashu Garg** (0:42)
From Foundation Capital, this is B2B a CEO, a podcast about the startup journey, about going from idea to IPO, and growing from a founder into a CEO. On each episode, I speak with notable CEOs and founders and get their stories about what it took to build a company of scale and become a leader in the enterprise. I'm Ashu Garg, a general partner at Foundation Capital. This episode, my guest is the one and only Frank Slootman. Frank is a chairman and CEO of Snowflake Computing, which he took public in a blockbuster IPO in 2020 Frank is also the author of the new book, Amp It Up. Whereas most leadership books written by high-profile CEOs seem like a collection of feel-good abstractions and inspirational quotes, Amp It Up digs into the nuts and bolts and the blood and guts of what it takes to build a great company. It reads like it's written by and written for someone who's fought in the enterprise arena. I love the book and I'm recommending it to all of my CEOs. In this episode of the podcast, I grill Frank about all the lessons learned in the book and beyond.
From building a high-performance culture, to hiring and firing, to trends in the enterprise that drive him nuts. True to form, the always unfiltered Mr. Slootman doesn't hold back. This is a fun one.
Before we dive into specific parts, is there a quick overview that you can do for us and tell us a little bit more about why you chose the title Amp It Up?

**Frank Slootman** (2:24)
I wrote an article on LinkedIn in March of 2018, and that was titled Amp It Up. The whole premise of that article and also of the book is that organizations, generally speaking, have a huge amount of slack in them. Just being aware that and being able to transform the slack into superlative performance is a real opportunity. I mean, obviously, amping it up means you take up the energy level, you raise the standards, you raise the intensity, you narrow the focus, you pick up the pace. Urgency is a big part of it.
Instead of revisiting strategy and second guessing who's doing what, you just run what you have, but much more aggressively, with much more purpose, mission posture, high mission awareness.
That tends to just completely bust loose the dynamic and just sort of infuse the organization with a ton more fortitude. And the byproducts of that process is that all of a sudden, you start to develop clarity around a lot of other things that all of a sudden become apparent that need to be done. Talent issues that needed to be addressed, talent gaps that need to be addressed, kind of strategic problems that we have not been willing to face up to. When you get to this heightened level of high functioning in an organization, the level of clarity that becomes apparent starts to force and drive these issues. And we're in football season and I'm always amazed. When I'm watching a football game, I watch for the energy, I watch for the intensity. Are they inspired or are they just going through the motions? The exact same thing you see in sports, you see in business. Some teams are incredibly switched on and in sports, they have a fraction of a second higher intensity and speed, and all of a sudden, they get to the quarterback. One fraction of a second faster, you disrupt their play, all of a sudden, they become rattles. You start sacking the passer and before you know it, the momentum is torn. Football is very much a momentum game, right?
So these analogies are, in other words, this is not just a business thing. This is kind of any walk of life has these dynamics embedded in them, and you can use them or you can suffer from them.

**Ashu Garg** (4:44)
And it can go both ways. You're absolutely right.
So Frank, you alluded to this even in the last minute or so, and you talk about it a lot in the book, this notion that you should always put execution ahead of strategy. And you started to talk about it, but can you elaborate a little bit because it's somewhat counterintuitive for a lot of people.