Frank Slootman. Snowflake.

Frank Slootman: When you come home on a Friday night and 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, it won't make everybody feel bad because it's so damned 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: 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. My pleasure. 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: It's confrontational, not in the sense that we're always chasing people down, grabbing 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, you know, inspiring and worth getting up for in the morning and 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, you know, are we aiming high enough? And that's not always a rhetorical question.

Nakul: 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: Well, there's also a confrontation around things that are not working, things that are not working well, things that we're hearing, you know, crises that are developing in different parts of the world, you know, relative to the business. And so there's all of that. So where's the urgency in terms of addressing it? Are we just watching it or what? So you're bringing a perspective to us like now is the time.

Nakul: 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 work output is not to the par that you need it to be. That can get personal pretty quickly. So how do you actually manage that conversation?

Frank Slootman: Look, you know, when you're a CEO, you're not managing people like a first level manager, right? We're really trying to bring them along into thinking, get a better understanding of their thinking and sort of let the conversation go. You know, 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, you know, what it's about. Now, most people kind of find out a week later when they're starting to reflect on the conversation that maybe they did get their ass kicked. But it was done in a way that was not, you know, in the way most people would think about it.

Nakul: Do you find that when you're recruiting, you're looking for that ability to take that hard feedback or, you know? Yeah, absolutely.

Frank Slootman: Because good people like getting feedback. Yeah. 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, oh, somebody once came up to me and said, am I supported? And I'm like, you're here, aren't you? Yeah. If you're here, you are, because if you weren't supportive, 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: Yeah. 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? Yeah. What happens if somebody thinks it's going good or great? You think it's a complete disaster? What happens then? Well...

Frank Slootman: And then it's like, we're going to go to the part of the conversation. What about this? What about that? In other words, you start sort of open the aperture on, you know, how it could be better, bigger, more inspiring and all of that. So, but again, you're trying to sort of let people instead of, okay, maybe you were thinking it was great. It's obviously implied that I'm not thinking it's great. Otherwise, I wouldn't be having the conversation, right? But you're not doing it in a way that, you know, Steve Jobs used to say, this is total shit. You know, I mean, that can come later if necessary. But that's not where we start in these conversations. Usually when, you know, when I ask the question, how's it going? They already know, you know, that probably not that well.

Nakul: So it is about bringing people along to the same conclusion as you have, rather than telling them, hey, this is what I feel.

Frank Slootman: Not just the conclusion, it's the way of thinking about it, right? Are we aiming high enough? Are we moving fast enough? Right? Are we settling? You know, how much upside do we have here? And all of that. So it's really a ways of thinking about it. Because, yeah, most of the time, you know, we're... We try to be comfortable rather than incredibly ambitious, you know, about what's going on. And obviously, I want to bring people along to be more ambitious than they otherwise would be, you know.

Nakul: Speaking of comfort, there is a mental energy required for this kind of confrontation day in, day out. How does that not get tiring? You've done this for two plus decades. Does it get tiring? How do you avoid getting tired of that?

Frank Slootman: Yeah, it's literally the opposite for me. This is how I not get tired, you know, by really, you know, injecting myself from the standpoint of can we do better? Can we do faster? that's actually what's energizing. And everybody gets energized about it because the conversation, you know, really starts to really interrogate what we're doing. Can it be better? Can it be faster? And that's energizing for people that are part of that conversation as opposed to, you know, we're sort of doing a rinse and repeat. Yeah, it's kind of okay. Good enough. Yeah, that's exhausting. Now we want to go home and get a cocktail, you know.

Nakul: But actually, so you're saying it's being part of the right team because if you are confronting someone and it's difficult to bring them to the same page that hey this could be going better faster then it can get tiring but if the person well then then we're into a different

Frank Slootman: conversation uh at that point obviously um you know i i find that i can't even help myself i mean even if i want to that's just uh the style there's always this this perspective of what room up do we have here in this conversation When are we at a point where we're excited about the pace at which we're moving, the outcomes we're envisioning? And if we're not, we should be excited. We should drive conviction and excitement all the time. If we don't have it, that feels like death to me.

Nakul: And so I want to talk about recruiting. As you know, at Audacious, our entire philosophy is about recruiting A-plus teams around our founders. And I know team and culture are close to your heart. So we'll dive deeper into both these topics. Let's start with your overarching philosophy on teams. Do you have a mental checklist you go through when you're putting together teams when you're recruiting? Yeah.

Frank Slootman: Well, you know, I'm not a guy with, you know, checklists and, you know, game plans and all this kind of stuff. You know, I'm trying to, you know, find really, really good people, you know, for the roles, obviously, that we're looking for. I mean, one thing that we did for years and years in our companies is psychographic profiling. And, you know, they do that through taking the test. So there's a whole bunch of criteria. And people really get plotted on the spectrum and then compare it to the rest of the team because good teams, they tend to cluster, you know, around these criteria in the same way. You know, some people, for example, have, you know, they're not very happy with the status quo, generally speaking. And then there's people who are very easily and they are really content with the way things are. Those people in the same room are not going to do well, right? So it's that sort of thing. that we wanted to have, you know, levels of compatibility on certain criteria. Other criteria is actually okay, you know, to have, you know, confrontation, constructive confrontation and all of that. But there are things that, like, you're not going to do well on this team because of the way you score because these guys are going to drive you nuts. They're going to drive you out of your model, right? And it's like that's not it. You won't fit well into this company and this group.

Nakul: Were you looking for different psychographic profiles for different teams, engineering versus product versus sales? They are different.

Frank Slootman: I'm not talking about, you know, management team and below, you know, because we were very change oriented company. You were satisfied with the status quo. That probably wasn't going to go well because we were always looking to be better and faster. So if you're comfortable with that, you're in the right place.

Nakul: You also have this framework that I love about drivers versus passengers. How do you identify a driver versus the people who are just good at interviewing as

Frank Slootman: high agency people? I had somebody ask me that once in an all-hands meeting, an engineer. He said, how do I know I'm a driver or a passenger? And I said, tongue in cheek, I said, you better find out before I do. So, but I was only half kidding because, you know, when you come home on a Friday night and look in the mirror, did it matter I was here? Where did I move the dials, right? And that's, it may be unfair, like it's only one week, but why not? I still look at myself that way. What did I do this week that's worth a damn? That's very useful because, you know, when people feel like they're drivers and they're moving the dial and they're very necessary and essential, During the week, whatever it was, the context, right? They start to feel good about themselves. They start to feel secure in their roles. And that's what we want. It's not just that we need drivers to drive the business. It's also, you know, for them to become the persons that they should become, right? So it's a very easy question, you know, to ask. But, you know, the reality is, you know, if you're not certain you're a driver, you're probably a passenger. Yeah.

Nakul: This is similar to the Elon, you know, the famous quote from Elon where he says, what did you get done today? Yeah. Kind of a similar philosophy.

Frank Slootman: For sure.

Nakul: Yeah. But going back to the interviewing part, are there hacks you found or recruiting questions you found to dig deeper into this?

Frank Slootman: It's like, tell me how you were a driver, you know, in your previous company. Tell me about key episodes, key situations, key projects. Well, they usually have to think about that. You know, it's like, geez, right? But that's the whole point of it. And by the way, that says a lot about how a person think of themselves. I had an opinion in a meeting is not necessarily being a driver because, you know, passengers are people that often are articulate. They get along. They don't stand out in a negative way.

Nakul: And that's exactly the problem.

Frank Slootman: Because they're right there under your nose, but you don't realize that you're carrying dead weight now because they're not moving the dials. And that happens to every company. In bigger companies, it becomes like a disease. So you really fight that. And then the hard thing is when you sort of become really aware of what you have, You know, people start doing layoffs. Now, layoff is often the strategy to go and deal with that on a, you know, on a much larger scale than a single individual, right? Because they're like, yeah, we have this disease and we're going to, you know, we're going to cut it,

Nakul: you know. I've also heard you say that you rely a lot on reference checks and specifically back channel reference checks. Correct me if I'm wrong here. You'd like to do a lot more digging around the candidate. Yeah,

Frank Slootman: I mean, look, you know, what you're getting from an interview is a vibe, which is a word we use a lot lately, you know, with AI. But a vibe is just a feeling, an impression, a sense of, And it matters, you know, it's just the same way two dogs get to know each other, whether they can, you know, have chemistry of some sort and all of that. But you can only find out about people for real is by, you know, talking to superiors Dave Hatt, subordinates Dave Hatt, and peers Dave Hatt. One of my favorite questions is that, you know, most people in their careers have had trouble with either superiors, subordinates, or peers. So which one does you have?

Nakul: You could be one or more, by the way.

Frank Slootman: But, you know, not everybody deals equally well with all three of these categories, and there's reasons for that. And people sometimes ask me, you know, what about you? What did you have trouble with? I had trouble with Pierce. No. Never had trouble with superiors or with subordinates. And the reason that happens is, you know, ambitious people will start to clash because, you know, everybody has their own sandbox and all that kind of stuff. And you assume great ownership, which, you know, often people in the organization don't like it when you do that. So that's actually an answer that I like when I hear that. But, you know, your trouble with subordinates, that's usually not what you want to hear. But you can talk to people who overlap with these people and companies. And when you talk to enough people, the pictures start to really solidify and crystallize. You really get a good sense of what you're dealing with. And by the way, people don't invest. They shouldn't invest 90% of their time in that part of the process rather than I have somebody interviewed by 15 people.

Nakul: Actually, can you quantify that? Let's say you're hiring for a head of sales, CRO. How many references would you feel? Okay, I've done enough work.

Frank Slootman: Well, I mean, I would go back certainly to the last five years or where they've been at least. And if things are kind of crystallizing at that point, you know, otherwise I'd keep going. Or I'd try to find, you know, more people that overlapped in that period of time. Because you can go inside your own company and find people that overlapped with them and say, hey, do you know so-and-so at this company? And they go, oh, yeah. Oh, who else should I talk to? I mean, it's actually not that hard to do, but I find that people, they think it's a checkbox process. I think it's absolutely not that. It's really the crux of trying to understand how people perform. And also to find out, you know, what makes this person better versus what's really not good for this person. What do they struggle, right? So just everybody has puts and takes. So finding that out, people have history. It's about finding out about it. Yeah.

Nakul: Okay, so that's pretty comprehensive. Did that go down all the way to your organization where you're not hiring, but the hiring manager is somebody else, a VP of sales, hiring sales reps or sales managers? Did you kind of superimpose that throughout your organizations where they're doing

Frank Slootman: a lot of back-channel references? Recruiting is a massive operation in companies, right? Because if you hire 100 people, I mean, how many thousands of people are you considering in that process? So, yeah. And that's also the reason, you know, why we sort of, you know, try to drive conclusions too quickly. And then you get turnover because, you know, we didn't do all our homework that we could have done. We didn't have high conviction. Having high conviction about it. Hiring is really important, you know, because, you know, when there's doubt, there's no doubt. That was our tiebreaker. And we needed to feel really strongly about that. That's how you do good hiring. But again, it's painful. It's hard. It's slower, right? What's really painful is having to part ways with people, you know, and then have to start it again, the process, you know.

Nakul: This is one of your mantras that you just said, so I want to double click on it. When there's doubt, there's no doubt. Is that specific to recruiting that you had across your organization? No, it's not just about recruiting.

Frank Slootman: It's absolutely everything because we need to get to high conviction when there's doubt and we have mixed feelings. That's not a starting point.

Nakul: How soon would you realize that you've made a hiring mistake?

Frank Slootman: Usually when I start asking the team, you know, how's so-and-so doing? And then, you know, what happens in organizations, people either get, you know, embraced, right? And everybody is thrilled they're there, or it's the opposite. You know, everybody's like, what the hell is this all about? So it's not in a gray zone typically. It's either, you know, strong adoption or the inverse, you know, of that. And in other words, it's not even what I think. It's, you know, when I ask 10, 15 people, a picture starts to emerge. And I don't ask it one time. I ask it all the time. So I can follow the – so it's not like, you know, okay, we can, you know, we're coming to – that's not how it is. But it can start the trend. What signals tell you, though, when to coach versus when to fire? You always start off, and actually, you always start off, you know, to see if you can do an intervention, which is really what, you know, what coaching is. You know, I've learned over the years, that's often a fool's errand that you're, I mean, you're already down the path. You just don't want to believe it yet. And I've learned over the years, you should pull the trigger away quicker when you sort of find yourself in these in these situations um and that that's just from experience because you know we start coaching and in the end we have to separate anyway so all we have is lost

Nakul: time and effort you know is your belief that superstars show up on day one as superstars

Frank Slootman: Well, you typically recognize them as superstars very, very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. Absolutely.

Nakul: It's almost apparent immediately. You know, one of the other things you've talked about over the years is you feel like CEOs tolerate too much mediocrity. But, you know, CEOs are ambitious, they're outcome-oriented people. Why do they tolerate mediocrity for so long when they can see it?

Frank Slootman: Well, the biggest reason is they don't want to, you know, fess up to a bad decision because they now think that makes them look badly. So I always campaigned against it. I said, look, you know, Scott McNeely used to say, fail fast. And I've often repeated that. You know, once you realize, you know, you're in a bad place, now is the time to move on it. Having nobody is better than having somebody who's not the right person. Because people don't just watch what you do, they watch what you don't do. It becomes a leadership, you know, challenge where people are wondering, like,

Nakul: why is he not moving, you know? And maybe some of this is actually going back to the confrontation topic. You have to also be comfortable confronting yourself.

Frank Slootman: Yeah, look, I always, you know, when I made these mistakes, and I made plenty, you know, I was very public about moving on, you know, from one person. Sometimes I had to shift gears several times on the same role. You know, in the relations service now, we have to hire You know, somebody that was going to run our clout. You know, back then, you know, that was not an established thing. There were very few people that had any clue about it. And the ones who did have a clue about it wasn't much, right? So we went through a few people, believe me, before we kind of settled in. And that was painful to publicly acknowledge that we screwed it up, not just once, but several times. But I'm like, you know, guys, we're going to keep doing this until we get it right. And that's how I want you to think about it as well. You keep doing it until you get it right. And people that start to basically justify their bad decisions, that's bad culture, obviously. It's not what you want, you know.

Nakul: So I'd love to shift gears towards your operating cadence. What did a Monday for Frank Slootman look like as a CEO? What does the week look like? Did you have weekly one-on-ones with your execs? Walk us through your operating cadence.

Frank Slootman: Yeah, we usually had a Tuesday morning meeting, which... Not everybody was always there in person. Most people were or they dialed in, you know, but that was sort of a lightning round connecting the dots. What's going on? What should the team know about? And, you know, we go around the room. And anybody, it didn't matter whether you were the head of sales or the head of HR, you know, you could bring up things that you felt people, but we asked people, why does the team have to know about that? Because sometimes it's just kind of a bilateral issue. We don't have to have that in full form. You can just go to the person and deal with it. You know, we're not like, you know, throw it in the group kind of a thing, but you need to have connective tissue in an organization where everybody has a sense of what's going on. And then everybody is, they're running the company together, right? So they need to hear and sort of appreciate the issues. And then oftentimes people come back next week because they need to report back. We need to do more research and answer specific questions, you know, about what's going on. And it could go on for several weeks, those kinds of things. You know, and sometimes there were crises, you know, that we had to get on. And especially things that were super urgent at the beginning of the week is a good time to get visibility to, hey, you know, something is brewing. Organizations, left to their own devices, they very quickly become disconnected or they start operating in their own cylinders. Some companies are legendary where everybody kind of lives in their own cylinder. They never talk to anybody outside of their department and all that nonsense. I mean, I deliberately... you know, cross those boundaries because I figured if I did it at my level, they would do it at their level. We had a saying, it was like, go direct. I would only get emails, you know, from people and they would go, we should do this, we should do that. And I'm like, why don't you go take this up with so-and-so because they actually are the person you should talk to about this. But no, they wanted to talk about it with me. In other words, they wanted to go up and sort of, you know, basically let me carry the water. I'm like, no, if you feel strongly, go over there. You don't need a permit or a license to talk to anybody in this organization ever.

Nakul: Okay. And so the weekly team meeting happens on Tuesday. Did you have weekly one-on-ones with your CXOs?

Frank Slootman: Not just my direct reports, the entire exec team. And then oftentimes I would participate in team meetings in other departments. I just sat there to listen. I didn't want to try to dominate them because then I'm disturbing their dynamic. But, you know, that typically would happen. People would then start asking me questions that they could only ask me in that forum. And that was fine. We didn't do it every week, but they enjoyed having me sit at the table and kind of interact with them. So it was good in that way. We did a lot with engineering because they were always very curious. You know, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? It's good for people to see you. And CEOs need to have high presence in your organization and not just in your main office, but, you know, wherever you're operating. Customers need to see you. Your local people need to see you, hear you, spend time with you. That's how you connect tissue, you know.

Nakul: Let's talk about setting growth goals. In one of your interviews, I heard you say about growing fast. I've always leaned in hard, but in hindsight, I could have leaned in more. How should CEOs think about leaning into their growth product market fit and setting the right growth? Like what is the right growth goal for a year ahead? How do you even set that?

Frank Slootman: You want to lean in, you know, as hard and as much as you can sort of reasonably or even unreasonably, you know, come to your own mind, right? I mean, is there a point where you're driving things over a cliff, right, where you just, you cannot mobilize these assets. They're not going to go productive. And you're right, you get chaos. But here's the thing. I mean, 99% of all people don't lean in hard enough, right? They are on their heels and use a ski term. Skis are designed to be over, not on your heels, you know, but that's how they behave. And people are naturally risk averse, like, well, what if I did too much? Yeah, that's the life we live. Welcome to the club. Because if you have a good company and a good product, odds are that not leaning in hard enough is a huge mistake. Because this is how you create separation from your competition. And the whole dynamic in the company changes when you have higher growth than everybody else. Fundraising becomes easier. Valuations go up. I mean, on and on and on. So I would say, look, you push it as hard as you can until the evidence starts to pile up that you're overdoing it. Usually the evidence piles up that you're underdoing it if you have a good company. Now, if you don't have a good company, the resources will not convert to yield. Now you know what your problem is, right? I mean, you just don't have something that will scale. But if you do have something that will scale, this is where the not leaning hard enough problem shows up. You know, I had a conversation a long time ago with our VP of sales and We were going from $45 million, and I always wanted them to do the first step on the plan. I didn't hand the plan down. I said, no, you tell me what you think the plan should be. I was going to agree with it as another matter, but you're doing it first. Now, of course, salespeople are notorious for, you know, sandbagging because, hell, they want to overachieve. That's how they make money. But fine, you know, they put up $100 million from $45 million. It's now, you know, 20 years ago, whatever, longer. Yeah. So back then, those were really significant numbers, and the board would have easily, you know, rubber stamped that. But, you know, he went through the entire model exactly what we would do to achieve those numbers. And, you know, I just said, well, if you had to do 125, what would you do different? You know, he started to then explain, you know, what he would do different. And I'm like, well, why don't we just do that then? Yeah. He kind of got tricked into this conversation a little bit. But we did do $125 million. So it was absolutely possible by changing the assumptions. And the lesson there is more that goals are incredibly powerful. Because when people get a goal, they start to go like, okay, I now need to break this down in terms of what I need to do to achieve that. So you've got to be very careful with goals because they are insanely powerful. They can also be limp, you know, because if you don't set it high enough, you're just wasting the potential of your business, right? So I find goals incredibly inspiring. And you want a goal that inspires because that causes people to get up in the morning and go, yeah, we're going to get after this and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So goals are very, very important.

Nakul: You know, it reminds me of this Peter Thiel, I think, trick or framework. work where he'll ask a person what's your 10-year goal and the person will say blah blah blah and then his feedback will be why can't you achieve this in one year and his main point there is that often people have these mental models around we have to do x then we'll do y and then z and it all has to be sequential and his point is often those sequential things are in people's mind you can do a lot of that in parallel

Frank Slootman: Yeah, I mean, it's unreasonable assumptions. Sometimes, you know, you discover potentially you didn't think was there. You know, plus people have a tendency to kind of make things safe and comfortable. So, you know, nobody's going to come back to them and say, like, well, that was stupid, right? Nobody wants to get called on it. So they want to be safe and comfortable. But that's in business. We can't be safe and comfortable. We just can't. So we're all out on the limb. Congratulations. That's how it is. And yes, you need to meet your hiring quotas in all the different categories of recording. I mean, hiring is important to selling, you know. So it's a model, it's a machine that is instrumented and resourced. And when you do that correctly, and the machine is obviously something that works,

Nakul: then it's going to do it. Talk to me about decision velocity. How important is speed of decisions versus getting everybody aligned, especially as organizations have many layers?

Frank Slootman: Yeah, getting everybody aligned is nice. It is not essential. Getting the right people aligned is essential. So you work on that. Who's really essential in this conversation? We're not looking for consensus building as a goal in its own right. It's really about, you know, who is really over the people that are really carrying the execution of what's going on. They need to buy in, right? Otherwise, it's not going to work. So speed, you know, there are times where, you know, you're going to have to go before you're comfortable or ready. That can happen a lot because waiting is a bigger risk than not going. So having a bias for action, generally speaking, is a good thing because, you know, the action, you know, triggers the energy. And it then accelerates the learning that's going to happen along the way. Well, if you're wrong, fine, we'll restart. We'll regroup. We do all these things. But, you know, you don't want to be going off half-cocked if that's not necessary. So it's not one answer to these questions. You need to be more thoughtful and contextual than that. I sometimes feel the need to make decisions when we have a crisis situation going on. We make decisions. You know, we also, when we have just unacceptable, you know, cultural episodes, you know, things that have to do with harassment in your organization, I will pull the trigger like that day, okay? You'll be gone before 4.30, stuff like that, because... I'm here to protect the employees in the organization as well. And when violations happen, it's like, well, you think I'm really going to sit here and study it, right? By the way, obviously, you know, we need to establish that these things really happen. We're not going to go half-cocked there either. But once that is established, yeah, we move. Absolutely. And any organization gets very strong signals about, hey, certain behaviors, you know, they're going to be met with consequences very, very quickly,

Nakul: you know. You touched on culture there. I want to read some of your principles on culture. I'm quoting you. Standards are the real culture. What you tolerate compounds faster than what you praise. Culture is not a poster on the wall. It's a willingness to prosecute the deviation of culture. And then culture is not about making people feel good. It's about enabling the mission. What does culture mean to you in real operational terms? I've heard you, actually, part of the reason I was prepared for this is I've heard you speak about culture and pride. So I would love to hear.

Frank Slootman: To most people, especially in Silicon Valley, they think a good culture is one where everybody is happy and feels good about being there. That's what they think culture is. And I'm like, no, that's not one of this. The culture is there to enable the mission. And the mission is not making everybody feel good. Hell, it won't make everybody feel bad because it's so damn uncomfortable being in a high-growth operation, right? So what does the culture have to do to enable the mission is the question. You know, what behavior enables the mission? And that can, you know, obviously depend on, you know, what the mission is. But, you know, there's obviously things that would be very common. I mean, a willingness. to grow much faster than it's comfortable and willingness to, you know, go with a much higher risk posture than it's comfortable, you know, much higher efforts, you know, than what you're comfortable with or all these kinds of things. So culture can become a real asset to you. It can be a bloody liability, you know, to your mission. Did you have cultural values or operating principles? At Data Domain, because we were a startup, I mean, we crafted all of that. You know, I had very high focus also on respectful interaction, integrity. It was non-negotiable because, you know, I needed that in the organization, you know, for the business to really work, that we behaved correctly in front of the customers at all times, that we treated our own people as well as people outside of the organization, you know, correctly. It is amazing how much business benefits you get from these. You may think like, well, that's just the right thing to do. Yes, it is, but it also has tremendous business, you know, benefits. And I wanted to establish that really clearly. And when I became aware of exceptions to that, and that happens a lot in all companies, we would prosecute them because that's the only way people learn, A, that they're there, and B, that there are consequences. And that culture really happens when you're willing to prosecute it. Otherwise, it's just good intentions, what the road to hell is paved with. Yeah.

Nakul: You know, so culture is really about enabling the mission, and you have these three criteria for missions, big, clear, and not about money. Can you elaborate on that? Well, you know,

Frank Slootman: the money thing is, it's like if you had a mission that said we want to be worth $100 billion or whatever, some stupid number, people don't get energized, electrified by that. Well, you know, I mean, maybe it's going to be a much bigger number for Christ's sake. So, I mean, it's like, Money is a demotivator. It's not really a motivator. In other words, it works against you when it's not there, when it is there. It doesn't do that much. It really doesn't activate the tissue, if you will, of the organization. You see that with Elon Musk all the time. He talks about what he's doing. He's trying to better mankind. I mean, there's probably no nobler sense of defining mission than that, right? Right. safe society from itself, you know, kind of thing. So that's very inspiring. It's very noble. And for people, that's worth getting up for. So, yeah, those are things. But, you know, I always told our employees, when I start chatting with them in a large group format, like old hands meetings, I say, I'm here. to better your station in life. He says, you may think that I'm just here to make money for myself or my family. He says, actually, I'm not. He says, I'm going to make money for you. People were dumbfounded by the fact that I would make a statement like that But I really meant it. But obviously, you know, if I made money for them, you know, I would make money for every other stakeholder in the process. And in other words, there was complete alignment, you know, along those lines. And there's no greater reward that you get as a CEO of a company is when you realize you have impacted the lives of many people. It's something, you know, people usually during the holidays, you know, after a few glasses of wine, they They become emotional because they just can't believe where they are. They never thought that would be possible, right? And they'll send you a text and, you know, just immense appreciation for having been on the journey. And that lasts much longer than a little bit of money that you've made along the way. We've kind of become blasé about it, but I never become blasé about it. you know, other people, their families, you know, maybe essentially having that sense of security and liberation in their life is a really big deal. I don't think people talk about that enough because that is what happens in Silicon Valley. And I don't think people realize how wide the blast radius is, you know, when large value is created, you know.

Nakul: So, um, All of this is energizing when there's winning happening in the marketplace, when things are going well. But when things are against you, man, people are already exhausted. How do you maintain intensity and culture when the market downturn is happening or when COVID happened like in the early part of 2020? Can you talk about how do you maintain that energy in the organization?

Frank Slootman: Look, you can just as easily use that, you know, to energize teams because, you know, usually other leaders have said this, you know, they like it when the chips are down. because there's all this upside, right? When the stock is high, it's asymmetrical now. In other words, we have far more downside than we have upside. I've lived that scenario myself. That ain't great. What you want is having tons of upside. You want to be asymmetrical in the other way. So there's ways, you know, to really energize teams when they feel the challenge. We're in it together. Here's what we're going to do. It's very energizing. So I think, you know, crisis can be used, you know, for good measure.

Nakul: Could you give us a real example during COVID or a different example where things changed, there was a dramatic conflict in the world?

Frank Slootman: COVID was obviously a scary time for tons of people. It brought me a We were a cloud company. I mean, we literally walked off the job. I shouldn't say we walked off the job. We walked out of our offices overnight and we didn't reconvene for years. And I was like, holy shit, I have a company that is what exactly? And we needed to continue, you know, to sell and deliver and support and do all these things. How is this going to happen? So, you know, we just kind of, You know, we came together, we invented, you know, new institutions, you know, new processes, you know, to sort of, you know, deal with, you know, the lack of having proximity to people all day long. You could run into people into the hallway and have a chat, and all of a sudden that wasn't there anymore. One thing I did back then, I started writing an email on the weekends, and I would go out on Monday morning to the entire company, thousands of people, and... And it came directly from my hand, typos, Dutch English, I mean, everything. It was not reviewed. It was not added to nothing. It went directly from my email, right? And I wrote about things that I wanted to write about because it related sometimes. to broader topics, sometimes to what I had seen and was part of the week before, and then I tried to put it in a format. In other words, why am I contextualizing this as being relevant? Why do you need to know about it? Because I use it as my personal Twitter feed, if you will, at the time, where I have an opportunity to talk directly to everybody every single week. What am I going to say? What am I trying to convey? And it became such an institution because lots of people would then email me. And by the way, very wide-ranging topics. You know, so people were always surprised. What is he going to talk about this? Right? And sometimes it was just fun stuff. And people would ask me questions. Any good shows you've seen? Anything you recommend? I mean, it was hysterical. You know, what kind of a conversation, you know, would happen. And so, in other words, from these circumstances often come very interesting, you know, accommodations and institutions that take – I did that for four years straight. Even after we got back into the office, people were like, you can't stop. You know, because it's the first thing. They said, this is my first cup of coffee on Monday is what I look for. If I'd be traveling and I was late, people are sending emails. Where's your email? They start panicking. You know, it's like something has happened. Like, no, no, I'm just like, sorry, sorry. Yeah.

Nakul: That's correct. So actually, that was then a weekly email every Monday morning goes out.

Frank Slootman: Oh, it was the same time. Yeah. That's great. But you institutionalize certain things. And when companies get bigger, it's really hard to maintain that sense of fabric. I gave people a sense, an opportunity to know me through what I conveyed because it was very personal, familiar style to them, the way you talk and how you talk. They're like, I know this guy because this is how he talks. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a sterile, abstract company communications and big words like vision and mission. No, none of that. It was very, very concrete.

Nakul: So talking about crisis moments, these are also particularly anxious times in tech. You know, AI is changing so much and there's a sense of anxiety amongst founders and CEOs that in one to two years, we're all going to be in a haves or have nots category. And especially because it's not just about calm execution to manage through a changing time. It's like people's entire product roadmaps and business models are up for grabs. What would you advise or how are you advising CEOs in today's time to manage this volatile environment?

Frank Slootman: Yeah, number one is, first of all, that also represents great opportunity, right? Secondly, you may have been comfortable before. But you probably shouldn't have been. This is just one giant wake-up call that you're getting, you know. In other words, are you getting it? You know, are you processing this, right? There's a lot of people stick with plans because, well, you know, it seems okay. You know, I'm not hearing anything. And now all of a sudden, yeah, massive wake-up call and anxiety. But we're living in lives of anxiety all the damn time. I do. Even when things are going well, do you think I believe it's going to go well tomorrow? Not necessarily, if I have no reason to. People always want to believe things that are pleasing because then they can go back to sleep and they can sleep all at night. But, you know, as leaders in your organization, no, we actually drive the high anxiety in the ranks and then we actually think that's a good thing. I need people to be on their toes and not take things for granted. So, in other words, I need to embrace this rather than be afraid of it, you know.

Nakul: You know, AI is changing so much about, you know, companies, how companies build product. I mean, engineering is changing dramatically. Pricing is changing dramatically.

Frank Slootman: Yeah, everything you know might be useless at this point. Is that a possibility? Yeah, is that a possibility? Yes, it is. That's scary, isn't it? Try being a fifth grader. You don't know shit. How high anxiety would it be to be a fifth grader? You enter the world and you're like, I don't know nothing.

Nakul: Do you have thoughts on how you'd be running a company differently today than how you've run? To the point you're talking, I don't know nothing in today's environment.

Frank Slootman: Well, I mean, I made a massive change, you know, at Snowflake because of the fact that our swim lanes were evaporating on us, right? We had a business motion and a selling motion that was highly predictable, incredibly successful, comfortable, profitable, I mean, on and on and on. And then, you know, through AI, you see the swim lanes, they're not going away. They're still there. but they're also starting to evaporate. In other words, we're getting into a mega market, you know, where the boundaries are much bigger, but also very different. And it's sort of, you know, what Intel said when they moved on from memory chips, they had to embark on the journey, but they couldn't see the other side. And that's what this is. We can't see the other side. So your whole mode of execution and operating is so different because you have to try many, many things, and many things will not work. But, you know, hopefully some will, right? So you're attacking the anxiety through action, right? Because the worst thing is just sitting there and waiting. Well, let's see what happens. No, that's not what we want to do, you know? We want to get after it as hard and as smart as we can. And there's going to be tons of false starts. We've already seen the false starts. You know, everybody chasing, you know, LLMs and all this kind of stuff that all turn out to be insane, right? But that's what happens when people are anxious, you know?

Nakul: Your book lays it all out. It's one of the most brilliant business books. Narrow the focus, raise the standards, increase the pace, align your team, transform your strategy. Those are the five. I memorized it properly. But why do more people not execute it? Like what comes in the way of actually knowing this versus executing on it?

Frank Slootman: I find it self-evident from where I'm coming from. It's just a way of thinking. It's not a philosophy. It's just how you approach stuff, sort of a first principles type of thing. I think what is really troublesome is when, you know, people execute according to what they've done before, what worked for them before, what worked in that circumstance. I sometimes see people, you know, do their job they did in their previous company the exact same way, even though we're a different business, a different phase of evolution. It's like, it makes no sense. It's mindless. So people that can really think, you know, first principles in the context that they're in, you know, that's really, you know, has these conversations about can this fast, can this be faster, what

Nakul: Why don't we talk about this tomorrow instead of two weeks from now?

Frank Slootman: What's going to be different in two weeks? And there may be an answer to that question, but there are also... You know, I always say, look, you know, if you leave people to their own devices, pretty soon you'll be the DMV, which is the shittiest service experience, you know, not everywhere, but in many places. It's lethargic. It's unmotivated. They just want to go home. You know, that's not good, right? You're running companies. You want to have a gung-ho, driven, uber-ambitious group of people. That's what you want. Right. And so that's why these conversations that are challenging and what you call confrontational are fine. That's part of that mode. You know, people would expect that. And if you don't, you can go back to your cubicle at IBM. I don't know. Okay.

Nakul: Let's talk about the inner game. The world sees you as a super successful CEO. Did you ever have doubt on yourself? All the time. Just to say more. So let's divide that into when you first became CEO of Data Domain in the earlier days of you being a CEO and then also talk about Snowflake where you've built Data Domain, you've built ServiceNow and you're coming in as a third time CEO. So let's start with Data Domain. Talk about self-doubt and how did you deal with it?

Frank Slootman: Data domain was incredibly challenging for me personally because it's a startup.

Nakul: We have no idea what we've got. Maybe set the context. How many people were there in the company?

Frank Slootman: There are like 15, 16 people somewhere in there. Myself and one of the co-founders were the only people who didn't write any code. At the time, we had a couple of units in tests. We didn't know. Just didn't know. And it was my first CEO job, so it was also a sense of i burned the ships behind me i can't i can't go back yeah ever it's only it's this or or else kind of a thing and and that that level of motivation you'll you'll never uh replicate that again in your life you know because you know later on you know when you've done things you get gold stars behind your name and you know everybody you know is out to get you into their companies that's very flattering and all of that but There was a time where, you know, if I fail, God knows what will happen, you know, to me and my family at that point. So how do you deal with that? I couldn't fail. And so fear of failure, you know, whether you think that's good, bad, or indifferent, it was an enormous driver, enormous. So it so sharpens the perception of, of everything, right? You know, how we spend money, you know, in order to keep an auction in the tank, managing one from one fundraising milestone, you know, to another, being incredibly efficient with resources, being all all over our customers, like literally being all over. So in other words, it was a very, very intense operating group of people. We were incredibly judgmental, you know, about, you know, whether people were making it or not making it. So it was so high on the census, right? It was visceral. And we also made... Really good decisions along the way that the company, there were like 15 companies in this space and we separated from them. We broke out. Everybody, you know, when they saw us separating, everybody starts second guessing their own strategies. doing restarts and we just we stuck to our guns the entire way we had this mantra tape sucks two words that basically described the entire business the entire problem and everybody nodded you're right tape sucks what do you got you know and then we're like we have we put tape out of its miserable existence which is what it was it was an industry you know that was you know way overdue not to go away

Nakul: But when you have those doubts, do you just ignore them? Do you shun them away in the corner of your mind?

Frank Slootman: How do you embrace it? The opposite. I mean, it's like facing your demons like for breakfast. It's like you just want it to be in it as opposed to, no, you're not compartmentalizing. It's like going headfirst forward because you're more comfortable attacking it than anything else. As long as we were attacking it with everything we've had, we had some measure of comfort around, you know, our daily, you know, existence, right? I mean, in the first year, I didn't know how we were going to survive because I had a product that was, you know, one terabyte usable space, hard to believe, and it was a full three-year rack, you know, and it was operating about 25 megabytes a second. Well, we couldn't back up a file server or a database server, and everybody's like, that's a nice idea, but that will never work in my mind. Yeah, yeah. We found a way to stay alive that first year through use cases that were size enough, if you will, for us to be able to sell. And we sold about $3 million that first year. And that gave us a whole—and by the way, we weren't spending any money. It was very small. you know, one sales guy and we did all the selling and all of that. But we stayed alive for a year. You know, year two, I mean, we had a product that was more than twice as big, more than twice as fast. The aperture started to open, right? And from there, you know, We always sat bigger, faster, bigger, faster. And we turned that crank over and over. You know, we were predicated on a CPU platform, not on a disk I.O. So in those days, through the Intel multi-coring strategy, I mean, the CPU strategy, it leaped like every year enormously. So, I mean, we were going like this in price performance. And then this guy, of course, is absolute death because it barely moves on a year-to-year basis. So we have the correct architecture, the correct strategy, and we separate it technically and business-wise from everybody. I mean, data domain was sold for more money, way more money than everybody else combined. It was the absolute runaway winner in that business, and it still exists to this day. It's still a multibillion-dollar revenue segment.

Nakul: So taking action allows you to attack your doubt. Like you run towards it and take action against it rather than...

Frank Slootman: That's one of the biggest lessons that I've had for a very long time is when you're in a place where you're like, don't know what to do. I don't know how to solve this. The way to deal with that is, you know, you attack it with everything you've got, right? Every amount of energy you have, you're going to force it onto that problem. And then you learn that very unexpected things happen. You know, the old saying is, you know, when you commit, you know, providence commits as well. So things start to happen to you that are unexpected because your conviction and your commitment is so high that now, I mean, the world is changing with you to help you. Whereas when you hesitate, the world does nothing. Actually, it might be working against you. And I have lived that dynamic many times. That's why I'm super high conviction that high focus on problems, you're going to break them. And in other words, you're going to find a path. It's a matter of how much time do I have, how much resources, how hard do I concentrate on it? And there's other entrepreneurs that they know about this, that this is the dynamic. If you can bring it to it, I mean, amazing things can happen. But if you're gonna go at it with PowerPoint presentations and smart talk, I mean, it's all about the degree of focus and then the amount of resources and then people that whose standards are impossible.

Nakul: What kind of doubt would still plague you as the CEO of Snowflake when you've been already so successful, you know what you're doing?

Frank Slootman: Well, I did something fairly unusual at Snowflake. I knew... I had to replace myself at some point in the future because I was getting younger. And because we were caught up in the middle of AI, me not being somebody that is sort of at the forefront of AI, but this is what I think CEOs should do. They should look at the business, not like, oh, I want to hang on to my job. No, what's best for the company? What gives the company the best chances to succeed given these circumstances. And Frida is a guy who can start up a team in the morning and have things to show in the afternoon. I mean, it is like unlike anything you've ever seen. And he's an absolute pit bull, you know. And that is what you need. That's what I felt the company needed more than what I knew how to do. Now, There were a lot of things where he had limited experience, you know, coming from Google and all this kind of stuff. They were like, look, everybody has put some takes. We're going to bet on what he has as opposed to, you know, what he doesn't. Right. And so that's how you make these kind of. decisions. So, in other words, it's very weird as a CEO to go like, you know, I don't think I'm the best player at this point. I think this guy, by the way, I was a large individual shareholder, so this was not charity on my part, okay? So, I thought the shareholders would do better, you know, this way, and I think we're now two years in, and it's super clear to me now, you know, because it takes time. He absolutely is. Because I've seen the revolution unfold, and we're talking about, you know,

Nakul: What was your personal week like as a CEO? How did you manage your mental health, staying healthy, not burning out? Can you talk about the non-work side that we don't see?

Frank Slootman: Yeah, there's not much of a non-work side. People that talk about work-life balance. I don't even know what that means. Because if you try to make that distinction, I don't know how you do these jobs. I just don't know. And I think most people that have these jobs don't know either. They pour everything they've got into it. And the family and everybody around you, they make those compromises. And they do it. And it's hard, especially when you do it for like 20 plus years. But it's also, you know, there comes a time where, you know, we don't want to keep doing this because, again, you know, I'm the quarterback who doesn't know how to get off the field. It can't become so interwoven with who you are that that has now become who you are. I mean, I'm not that person. I can't live without it.

Nakul: But did you have a weekly routine around either exercising or sleep or something that helped you sustain yourself for this longer time?

Frank Slootman: Well, you do burn yourself up. There's just no other way around it. you're a journalist, you're sleep deprived, you're all these things. When you're home, you're not home, meaning that you're, you know, you're preoccupied, you know, with tons of stuff. I mean, I had a five-year episode where I was, you know, racing triathlons, and of course, every day triathlons is 99% training and 1% racing, but That was very beneficial because it just, you know, spent hours on the bike or long runs. You think you have time to think and reflect. And that was incredibly beneficial because, you know, you physically felt good. And then, you know, in your mind, you had worked out a lot of things, established clarity about things that you didn't have before you stepped on the bike. So having something like that is really, really good. But, you know, being sleep-deprived and adrenaline-soaked is not great because we have, I'm saying we, people like us, will have long-lasting effects of that. It changes your basic, yeah, I mean, you'll never sleep well the rest of your life, you know, so.

Nakul: One of the quotes I remember from you, and I might be paraphrasing here is, everyone is into feeling good. I'm into feeling not good. And I love it because I kind of subscribe to the same psyche. But can you say more as to what do you mean by that?

Frank Slootman: Because we swarmed to the ball, okay? We're going to go to that place where, you know, we know it's not good, it's uncomfortable. You know, a lot of people want to, if you want to feel good, you know, maybe you should, I don't know what you should do, but in business, we're going to go find and go to those places, right? So I always tell people, you see me smiling, that's not a good sign. You want to see me with a frown on my face because that means I'm completely invested in what's going on. If I'm smiling, I better have a damn good reason why I'm smiling as opposed to a bad reason why I'm smiling, right? So, yeah, I was comfortable being unhappy. I like to be in an unhappy state because that told me, you know, I'm invested in dealing with the issues that I need to deal with. I'm comfortable being in that mode. I'm very uncomfortable not being in that mode.

Nakul: All right. We are going to go for our quickfire round. You ready? Go. A CEO you admire and why?

Frank Slootman: I'm a huge fan of both Elon Musk and for obvious reasons, if you don't understand that, you probably need to take a closer look, as well as Steve Jobs. I have quoted Steve Jobs over the time, you know, so many. times because I thought he was very funny and also he colonized things and it just so well reflected what I was trying to say and both these men you know obviously they changed the world they created markets they killed markets so it's like isn't that what we're all getting up for in the morning it was absolutely amazing What's

Nakul: the question you ask in every interview when recruiting an exec?

Frank Slootman: You know, I've often answered this question, and the question is my first question, because when I start to talk to people, it's like, tell me, what's your innate God-given thing that you're super good at and that is almost effortless to you and that just everybody else is amazed that you know how to do this? Could be golf, I know, I don't know, but it's a thing. We all have something that we are, you know, sort of, disproportionately good at. I want to know what that is because when I hire somebody, that's really what I'm buying. I'm not buying your experience because I can get you experience. It's not hard. I cannot get you aptitude. You bring that. What is it? What do you think it is? It takes a lot of people off guard. They think it's a trick question. And it's not. And I start discussing it with people because they're really uncomfortable Some people have really good answers. A lot of people, I don't think they've ever been asked that question before. The inverse is also, they think that's definitely a trick question, which is, what are you not good at? What should we never ask you to do? What job is just absolutely lost on you? Because that also says a lot, right? And that's the first part, because that's really knowing what I'm buying, right? By the way, I ask, you know, when I do references, I ask that question, too. What do you think this guy's superpower is? What's your superpower? And we use that word a lot now. That's sort of this. What's your superpower? You know?

Nakul: A red flag that you never ignore in recruiting.

Frank Slootman: Bad vibe. The word vibe is also, you know, very trendy, obviously. It's just a feeling that you don't know what to, you know, what to make of it. But that's not good. You can't ignore that. You don't have to, you know, turn it into a big thing. But I'll never get over that. I want to feel strongly about the interaction, not knowing anything else yet, you know.

Nakul: most overrated startup advice?

Frank Slootman: Yeah, there's, you know, I think what happens a lot in companies, they start scaling prematurely before they really are ready or have established viability, product market fit. They don't even know what that looks like, what that feels like, you know, when the right time really is. They just think, well, you build a product and then you just start filling out an org chart. The other thing that I find a huge mistake is people want to fill out the org chart from the top down. And I'm like, no, you go from the bottom up. We don't need, you know, a second later sales manager when you're a popsicle stand and you have only one guy that can't even get to have his quota, which is absolute nonsense, right? You know, what I've seen over and over is that, you know, we see sales executives failing all the time. It's not because they fail per se. It's because the product, you know, is not selling. And the reality is... You know, lousy salespeople can sell a very good product quite well. I've lived it. I've seen it. It's just an established thing. And great salespeople cannot sell a shitty product. So it's, you know, we start believing we have something and that we have pressure from VCs and all this kind of stuff. Like we got to go, you know, show that we're going to market and it's all becoming mechanical. It's like, no, you know, keep your powder dry until you see the water rise. The time will come when it's extremely obvious that you have to pivot and open the floodgates. And if it's not obvious, it's not time. Biggest misconception about you? Well, by far the biggest conception about me is that I am a real hard-ass. I'm a real softy, you know, in many ways. I'm also highly collaborative and facilitative. I'm not a handed down the mountain, do what I'm goddamn well telling you. There's none of that with me. I already told you I try to bring people along in thinking, right? Because it's not just about me saying something. It's about I want to make their thinking more beneficial to themselves and to the company and also in our relationship. Because if we don't speak the same language and we don't see the eye to eye, we'll have lots of friction and things will not be happening. Eventually, we're going to start separating, right? So that's why I do that. When you work really well with people, it's a great thing. a mistake you still think about? Well, one enormous mistake is that I waited 10 years to come to Silicon Valley. And, you know, I came from Europe, you know, I wasn't, I mean, the computer industry, that's what we call it back then. We didn't call it tech or software or anything, or AI, let's just call it computer industry. I mean, Silicon Valley was nascent in those days, right? It was really hardware at that point. Software was barely an industry, but, you know, the, I so underestimated and not just underestimated, didn't understand the significance of where you are, how impactful that is on your career. And to this day, when I talk to people that are looking for career advice out of school, and I get asked a lot to speak to these graduating classes, and I never miss an opportunity to say, The first thing you got to decide is where are you physically going to be? Because a lot of young kids, they want to be where their friends are. I mean, that's stupid. I'm sorry. Or they want to be where they got a big title and a big salary. Stupid. Okay. The place where you are is going to dominate. what opportunities, you know, you're going to have and the types of people you're going to be associating with. That's going to shape your career. And you manage your career over its entire duration, not over your next job, right? Because that's what happens, you know, all the time that people, they manage from one job to another. And after 10 years, you look at their resume and you're like, what the hell were you thinking? You know, all these shitty companies in here. And they can't explain it either because they just did one thing at a time. So it's just much better, you know, A, you know, I focus on where I'm going to be. The second question is, who am I going to be with in that geography, right? You want to, you know, find a company that is, you know, a big brand in the sense that it's respected and well regarded and seen as a very talented company. successful group of people because it lays a foundation, you know, for your career. After that, you can start worrying about the actual job, which is fairly inconsequential. I mean, the title doesn't matter. The pay doesn't matter because you'll have many jobs. Every 18 months, people change jobs.

Nakul: So how unimportant is that job, you know?

Frank Slootman: And, you know, it wasn't too late for me. I was in my late 30s when I came to Silicon Valley. But when I came here, people looked at my resume and like, dude, what have you been doing? You know, I came out of Michigan. That's not exactly, that's great for the auto industry. It's not great for what I was doing.

Nakul: We have two closing questions. The first one being with everything that's happening in the world with AI, what do you think our world looks like in 10 years?

Frank Slootman: Yeah, I don't know what a 10 years is a good timeframe because I think this is a dislocation and, you know, that is on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, right? I mean, prior to the Industrial Revolution, 95% of all people worked in agriculture, and afterwards it was like 2%, right? People moved to the cities, you know, away from, you know, the rural areas. They didn't even have subdivisions or suburban areas. uh environments back then and everybody you know the jobs were new and and all of that um i mean it used to be uh the time of our parents that you know one career would last you a lifetime that's already over that's been over you have to you know uh you will shift careers inside your your lifetime now it's like you know you need to shift you need to be ready to shift like all the damn time like almost in a fluid motion And I find that incredibly challenging because people will become exasperated. They're like, unless you want to be a plumber or an electrician, I think you're going to be totally fine for a long period of time. But it's especially for people that, you know, get sort of these white-collar university educations, whether it's communications or business or marketing. I mean, God help you. You know, you need to start thinking, Much, much harder about what this means and what it could mean. And how do you how do you stay relevant in that world and in the most critical version of the future you can possibly come up with? It will be OK. No, it won't. It will not. It will be for some, but but but not for others. I mean, you have to use the analogy a lot, you know, about newspapers that look like they're going to be fine in the early 2000s. In the end, they were all killed, you know, and they had to change their business models and what they did. And we don't really have journalism anymore anyways. So sometimes it just takes longer to play out, but it's playing out all right, you know.

Nakul: Okay, final question. With everything you know about life now and this moment of AI, what would be the singular piece of advice you'd give to the 25-year-old Frank today?

Frank Slootman: Learn how to talk to a prompt. I'm only slightly tongue-in-cheek on that one because what I'm really saying is, you know, how do you interact with machines is really the question, right? And how does that evolve the Because in my entire history, I've been talking to machines in very arcane languages and navigational methods and all this kind of stuff. And I never, ever thought I would see the day, you know, that the boundaries between man and machine were completely erased. It's extraordinary. But what does that now mean for those of us whose skills are all around talking to machines, notably programmers, you know, who are, you know, that skill is the first to go.

Nakul: not the last yeah yeah well frank uh you've been incredibly gracious with your time and uh your place thank you for hosting us here in kona hawaii uh at your home uh thank you very much thanks for doing this you bet