Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Business:Investing
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 twenty years, he has three times taken over emerging enterprise software businesses – first Data Domain, then ServiceNow, and most recently Snowflake - and led them across the chasm into large, billion-dollar businesses. Please enjoy this great discussion with Frank Slootman.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
-----
This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the new digital hub for market intelligence. The Tegus platform empowers Investors and Corporate Development teams to invest smarter by pairing best in class technology with the highest quality user-generated content and data. Find out why a majority of the top firms are using Tegus on a daily basis. Head to tegus.co/patrick for your free trial.
-----
This episode is brought to you by Lemon.io. The team at Lemon.io has built a network of Eastern European developers ready to pair with fast-growing startups. We have faced challenges hiring engineering talent for various projects - and Lemon.io offered developers for one-off projects, developers for full start to finish product development, or developers that could be add-ons to the existing team. Check out lemon.io/patrick to learn more.
-----
Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.
Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus
Show Notes
[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
Adam Sandow - The Power of Print Media - [Invest Like the Best, EP.376]
Howie Liu - Building Airtable - [Invest Like the Best, EP.375]
Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374]
Dev Ittycheria - The Database Evolution - [Invest Like the Best, EP.373]
Nico Wittenborn - Finding the Adjacent Possible - [Invest Like the Best, EP.372]
Mitch Rales: The Art of Compounding - [Art of Investing, Forever Episode]
Marc Lasry - Making Bucks in Credit and Sports - [Invest Like the Best, EP.371]
Bill Gurley & Michael Mauboussin - Putting Theory into Practice - [Invest Like the Best, EP.370]
Tim Ferriss - Curating Curiosities - [Invest Like the Best, EP.369]
Ken Langone - The American Dream - [Invest Like the Best, EP.368]
Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection (Dunbar's Number) - [Invest Like the Best, EP.367]
Sean Feeney - Reinventing the Restaurant Business - [Invest Like the Best, EP.366]
Dave Fontenot - The Monastery of Code - [Invest Like the Best, EP.365]
Anne-Marie Peterson - The Capital System - [Invest Like the Best, EP.364]
Aravind Srinivas - Building An Answer Engine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.363]
Ali Hamed - Building an Investment Firm - [Invest Like the Best, EP.362]
Cyan Banister - Investing for a Higher Purpose - [Invest Like the Best, EP.361]
Danny Meyer - The Power of Hospitality - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]
Chuck Akre - The Three Legged Stool - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]
Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360]
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free