Invest Like The Best
Episode 265 Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality
Invest Like The Best

Episode 265: Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality

Invest Like The Best

Episode 265

Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality

Frank Slootman is the chairman and CEO of Snowflake. We cover the ways he evaluates teams, why he hates incrementalism, and the importance of narrowing your focus.

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[00:02:33] - [First question] - How he evaluates the team of a company he’s working with

[00:04:48] - The pace of decisions made around changing team members

[00:06:10] - Understanding the potential quality of outside leaders being brought into the company

[00:08:13] - How he characterizes great and constructive confrontation

[00:09:53] - What he’s found to be most effective in convincing senior talent to join a team

[00:11:36] - Ways he personally generates energy to sustain himself in this pace of business

[00:14:17] - How he fosters and nurtures healthy communication pathways

[00:15:36] - Narrowing the focus when evaluating a new product

[00:17:58] - Is it possible for a focus to be too narrow?

[00:19:31] - An example of a dazzling customer that he’s worked with

[00:21:04] - Working backwards from a problem and building something that solves it

[00:23:03] - Building trust between a company and its customers over time

[00:25:37] - Overview of the base layer ingredients of trust

[00:28:12] - Sequential versus parallel processing and how they affect building trust

[00:30:22] - Lessons in successfully translating between engineers and business people

[00:32:58] - Crossing the chasm and effective sales organizations

[00:35:17] - Working compensation into getting more out of an organization

[00:38:45] - How much a sales organization needs to work backwards to serve their product

[00:41:40] - Great questions for board members to ask their executive team

[00:46:07] - Where the analogy of ‘business as war’ falls down and defining the highlander concept

[00:48:01] - What he feels he could still hone in his skillset

[00:49:16] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality

Introduction

Patrick
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 Service Now, and most recently, Snowflake. And led them across the chasm into large billion dollar businesses. Please enjoy this great discussion with Frank Slootman.

Evaluating and Building a Team

Patrick
So Frank, I think I first came across your thinking in your work reading Tape Sucks very early in my career and loved some of the lessons from there. And then when Amp It Up came out, the origin 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 compliment the ones that you've done and sort of go through the life cycle, since you've done this at least three times with Service Now, 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 are 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?

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