Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman Wrote the Playbook on How to Amp It Up

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange, at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on Markets, Leadership and Vision in Global Business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism.
Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ISIS exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome, Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.

**Josh King** (0:45)
The New York Stock Exchange sits at the southern tip of Manhattan on the corner of Wall and Broad streets. These days, a lot of folks take it for granted, but Wall Street has a fascinating history. The eight blocks of the street run from Broadway in the West to the East River in the East. It was originally known in Dutch as de Wallstraat when it was part of New Amsterdam in the 17th century. An actual wall existed on the street from 1685 to 1699, protecting the early entrepreneurs and fur traders of Fort Amsterdam from encroachment from the North. The Dutch have always been enterprising. Now, as the story goes, England followed the Netherlands in control of Manhattan, and then George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States just a few feet from the front door of the NYSE on April 30th, 1789 But 233 years later, American, Dutch and British interests are inexorably intertwined. Take our own company, Intercontinental Exchange, for example. I'm in New York, our headquarters is in Atlanta, Georgia. Our European Futures operation is based in London, England, and a big part of that operation is futures trading for Dutch natural gas at the Title Transfer Facility, or TTF, virtual trading point in Amsterdam.
What goes around comes around, and the Dutch get around the world. In a few weeks, when the 2022 Winter Olympics get underway in Beijing, I'll have my eyes peeled for 22-year-old Ute Lierdam, the reigning World Speed Skating Champion with over 800,000 followers on Instagram, who's proven herself a trendsetter on and off the ice.
Another Dutch trendsetter with a Winfrey title is Frank Slootman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake. That's N-Y-S-E, took a symbol, S-N-O-W, or Snow. Who like the immigrant inhabitants of New Amsterdam more than two centuries ago, has proven himself a master entrepreneur and visionary leader, able to take a great idea and scale it massively, and then apply the same playbook again and again. Let me bring you back 10 years to 2012
Benoit Degevel, Thierry Cruanez, and Marcin Zyrkowski selected Snowflake as the secret name of the startup they were working on during that particularly hot summer. The name is also fitting because a few years later, Snowflake burst onto the tech scene with a one-of-a-kind, groundbreaking cloud data warehouse product that revolutionized how companies could manage their data.
As Snowflake got bigger in 2019, the company knew it was time for leadership to take it to the next level and brought in today's guest, Frank Slootman as CEO. Over his distinguished career, Frank has mastered the process of fundraising, scaling, and building young companies into unicorns with the run ending, eventually way back here at the corner of Wall and Broad streets with an initial public offering. As I said, what comes around goes around. Our conversation with Frank Slootman on how he amped up his career, scaled three companies and the lessons he wants to now share with the world is coming up right after this.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:04)
There's the gold auction and also the Albemay gold price. It's the world's price for gold, particularly gold which is delivered in London. Four banks would travel to a room next to the Bank of England twice a day in order to run an auction verbally. And it worked like that for about a hundred years. When some of these firms moved out to Canary Wharf, they decided that actually it was too much to be sending people to the room.
So they moved it to a phone call to buy and sell and establishing a price.
IBA took over the auction in 2015 and we moved it to an electronic auction on the Web ICE platform. So it's fully audited. It's a proper electronic liquidity window, a market.
Buyers and sellers can come together. It's still run as an auction in rounds of 30 seconds.
And the final price we use as the benchmark for the entire gold market. It's been extremely successful since we took over. Volumes have increased. They've pretty much more than doubled. We've actually nearly tripled the number of participants that we have as well. And we publish the data transparently on our website so anyone can come and see what actually happened in the auction. We introduced a centrally cleared model with ICE as the central counterparty because that makes it much easier for new firms to join.