Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better

Frank Slootman doesn’t start companies. But no CEO has a better track record for turning the ideas of others into jackpots. On this episode of the Knowledge Project, Slootman dives deep into the no-nonsense, results-based strategies that have made him a leading executive, including how to approach the first 90 days after taking over a company, doing less and doing better, the difference between a good sales organization and a great one, how to get the best out of people, positioning yourself for future success, and so much more. Slootman is the Chairman and CEO at Snowflake, a cloud computing–based data company which currently boasts a market capitalization of $81 billion. Prior to taking over at Snowflake im April 2019, Slootman served as the Chairman and CEO of cloud computing company ServiceNow, and he also spent six years as the President and CEO of Data Domain Inc., a venture-backed storage company. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our Sponsors: MetaLab: Helping the world’s top companies design, build, and ship amazing products and services. https://www.metalab.com Aeropress: Press your perfect cup, every time. https://aeropress.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I rarely use the word proud or pride because that signals, you know, a profound happiness with the status quo and I don't have that, you know, because I'm always at odds with the status quo. That's sort of the natural malcontent posture that we have. Yeah, we're here, but we could be there. So what gives? How do we get there? Right? So we're always envisioning a future that is different than the one that we're, that we're currently experiencing.

• 0:42Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to the Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. If you're listening to this, you're missing it. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand-edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Today, my guest is Frank Slootman, one of the most incredible operators that Silicon Valley has ever seen. Frank is the chairman and CEO of Snowflake. Before that, he was the CEO of ServiceNow, taking the organization from 100 million

• 1:26Shane Parrish?

  in revenue to 1.4 billion. Prior to that, he was the CEO of Data Domain, leading to an acquisition by EMC for over 2 billion. I've been trying to get Frank on the show for nearly a year, but luckily, I don't give up very easily. I wanted to talk to Frank because his no-nonsense, results-based approach really resonates with me. In this episode, we talk about the first 90 days taking over a company. And while there's no blueprint and each situation is different, there are common methods of thinking and principles that work and you can apply. We also discuss one of my favorite ideas, doing less and doing better. The difference between a good sales organization and a great one, how to get the best out

• 2:09Shane Parrish?

  of people, positioning yourself for future success, artificial intelligence, and so much more. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:25Shane Parrish?

  I think when I was thinking about where to start, I want to start with going into a new company and the playbook that you use for the first 90 days. Can you walk me through what's done before, what's done on day one? And give me some detail over how you look at the next 90 days because that's really the time when you can transform a company.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I tend to take a little bit of exception to the term playbook like it's a cookie cutter thing and it's not. It's also not a football game where there's very precise rules on how to play the game. It's very situational, very much first principles. I mean, you come into a new situation and you just start processing on what you're seeing. But that said, yes, there are things that you zero in on each and every time. And that is, are there right people on the bus? Are there people that need to get off the bus? We're inspecting the functions. Are they working? Are they not working? Do people think they work? What can we see very, very quickly?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  And then you start prioritizing, okay, some things are obvious, they need to be dealt with ASAP, then everything starts to sort itself. So there's usually a number of things that happen incredibly fast, like week one. And then there are things that happen slower, maybe 30, 60, 90 days. But in 90 days, I tend to be through sort of the initial triage of, okay, let's get ourselves on a solid footing here where we can function and operate and understand. And then we can much more incrementally, iteratively progress from there.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  So that's sort of, if you're asking for a framework, that would be it. But I will tell you that every place I've been, they're all different. You've got to be very careful that you don't get into a rinse and repeat mode where you just think you have a formula or an algorithm. And you can just apply it over and over again. That's just really simplistic thinking. It will lead you astray because you kind of try to observe things in a way, you know, like a five-year-old would. They've never seen it before. And how are you reacting to it? You know?

• 4:42Shane Parrish?

  So I understand there's no repeatable framework that you can just apply, but I would imagine there's there's sort of repeatable principles and methods of thinking that you use. What are the ones that you find the most helpful?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Well, I look very hard at what's working, what's not working. And in other words, you know, some things are not working at all. Some things seem to be working reasonably well, and then there are sort of the stuff that you're sort of humming and hawing on. So obviously, you prioritize the, I mean, I've I've sort of separated with people very, very quickly, because I think the function, the functions that they were responsible for were barely breathing. And at that point, you know, I don't hesitate, you know, I move on quickly, immediately. You know, I go after cultural issues, you know, people that are just, you know, egregious violators of just things that we all generally find normal

• 5:32Speaker 00

  and acceptable. You know, we very quickly separate on behavior, you know, performance is something that we will give more time. Behavior, we won't. And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set. You know, when you come in as a new leader, everybody's watching, not just what you're doing, what you're not doing. So if you're not moving on things that people, that everybody is seeing, your leadership brand is already in question, because, you know, apparently, you're blind, and apparently, you're hesitating, or you're tolerant of behavior that you shouldn't be tolerant of. So, yeah, there's pressure because, you know, it's not just what you want to do, it's the whole world's watching.

• 6:10Shane Parrish?

  You said behavior is a choice, not a skill set. I've never heard it quite framed that way. I think that's a very, that's a really interesting way to look at it. But you also said that you sort of, you'll give time for performance, but not for behavior. How much time? How do you learn? Like, when do you pull the plug? When do you reinvest? And how do you think about that?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Well, look, you know, behavior is, it'll smack you in the face usually, but I've also seen things happen underground where, you know, I wasn't aware of it and I wasn't seeing it, but it was happening because of what happened on calls that I wasn't on. You know, one time I got tipped off by an employee of my former company that's at luck. You know, that office over there is a complete disaster and because they knew people there. And you know, salespeople are, right? Everybody talks, doesn't matter what company you're in. And then, you know, we started, you know, basically peeling away the layers and all of a sudden, you know, you come across, you know, really bad situations, abusive situations, you know,

• 7:13Speaker 00

  harassment, all these kinds of things because sometimes it's just not visible. It's happening. People don't like to talk about it. You know, they're worried that they're ratting on people and they don't want to go to their manager because they don't trust their manager. You know, they don't trust HR, you know, which is usually, you know, your second choice or maybe your first choice to go when you have, you know, real behavioral, cultural problems. And then it just, it just keeps going on. So I've been surprised before about how much, you know, wasn't visible to us, not just to me, but also the people that were, that I had brought in that were close to me, they were not seeing it either. Eventually, you know, believe me, we will, we will find it and we will get to it.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  And then we will, we will move at lightning speed because you want to get bad behavior, you know, out of an organization fast because that is your leadership brand. You start tolerating that, there is, there's no end in sight to what you're going to have.

• 8:09Shane Parrish?

  Trust is key to moving quickly, I would imagine, with velocity in organizations. How do you go to establishing trust in a performance-based culture?

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Well, you know, people need to believe that you're, that you're fair and that you, that it's not just personal preference, right? That you're not doing things because, oh, I don't like your haircut or whatever. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with, you know, how do we come together? How do we behave as a group? And, you know, if, if you have, you know, people behaving in huge conflict with that, then it's like, yeah, we are going to move on it. Sometimes, you know, I've had situations, especially with young people where... Hey, we need to do a reboot, reset, come back tomorrow. I'm sure your parents didn't teach you, you know, to behave this way and you can do better. And I've seen people come back literally over the weekend and be a different person because for whatever reason, they were led astray by managers that just, you know,

• 9:01Speaker 00

  were inspiring that kind of behavior. That happens, right? People learn behaviors from what they see around them with a behavior that gets encouraged. And they don't realize that they are just getting adrift, you know, from, from their own upbringing and their own, you know, personal principles because that's sort of the environment starts to, you know, really, it's a slippery slope that they get on and all of a sudden they're in a place where they don't even recognize themselves anymore. And that's, that's where a reset can really work, you know, because basically you're re-grounding them to, you know, normal behaviors and then things can work out really nicely from there on. But most of the time, unfortunately, it's like, look, you know, you're not a fit here. You know, this is, this is not who we are, who we want to be. You know, it's choosing, you know, it's, it's, it's just, look, we want you to be this

• 9:46Speaker 00

  way, not that way. And, you know, for some people it's like, hey, they learn behaviors in other companies. It's part of who they are, it's their culture. This is not, this is not for you, man.

• 9:55Shane Parrish?

  Alan Mulally put it to me this way. He said, when you're, you're choosing a behavior that's not the organizational behavior that's desired, you're choosing not to be a part of the organization. I thought that was a powerful way to think about it.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 02

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• 10:40Speaker 03

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• 11:07Speaker 00

  You're separating and you're in violation of the culture. Driving culture is really important because if you don't, you know, other people will fill that void, right? And you get subcultures in a city or a division because strong personalities can do that. So unless you are filling that void, right? It will get filled by something or somebody else. And before you know it, you're just a grab bag of stuff. And it's just a bunch of thieves that's running a company. Well, you don't want that. The company needs to stand for something. This is who we are.

• 11:40Shane Parrish?

  Seems like there's a lot of organizations that are more family based. I mean, they take a very similar approach to a family and they don't necessarily think in terms of performance. What are your thoughts on that?

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Well, you know, we've talked about this quite a bit in recent years. You know, I don't think a business is a family. Unfortunately, in a family, you can't fire your family, even though you sometimes want to. You have to tolerate them and deal with them. And sometimes in the most egregious way. That is just the nature of families. I mean, all the dysfunction that comes with it. But in business, it's more like being a professional sports franchise, right? You're assembling the best players. And, you know, we may be friends, but we don't have to be friends because we're not coming together on the basis of friendship. We're coming together on the basis of mission, you know? In other words, share purpose. You know, we're very demanding of each other and it's really about, you know, our respective contributions to the mission.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  That's the basis of our relationship. So this is much more akin to professional sports. I think that's the correct analogy. Now, some companies. Don't want to be that way. Companies like Salesforce and even Google come to to mind. But you know, in the end, they're laying people off too by the thousands. Okay. So I guess it's not family after all.

• 12:58Shane Parrish?

  Do you think most organizations try to do too much? There seems to be a natural entropy entropy that sort of builds up, right? You start with one thing, it becomes successful and then you sort of expand your footprint. And before you know it, you have, you know, before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they have,

• 13:14Shane Parrish?

  I don't know, what was it like 20 or 30 different products? The first thing he did was narrow the focus down to four key products. How do you think about that?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the interesting thing about about Steve was that he had a he had a standard called insanely great, which, you know, I remember at the time that it was kind of a thing in Silicon Valley. So if it didn't meet that standard, you know, it would get scratched really, really quickly. If it wasn't, you know, incredibly exciting and world changing and all of that. We just couldn't be bothered to, you know, even have that on the palate and and work on that. So I think that's a great way to be, by the way, to just demand to be inspired and be in awe, you know, of the nature of the mission and what we're trying to do. Because that's that gives energy that gives life that creates excitement, that creates focus,

• 14:04Speaker 00

  creates urgency and people come to work, you know, with a sense of mission rather than, well, I have to be here, you know, for my paycheck. So it's really applying that filter rather than I got too many things going on. There just aren't too many insanely great things. It will it will naturally store itself to a small set, you know?

• 14:24Shane Parrish?

  When you come in, you also believe in sort of doing less, but doing better and narrowing the focus. How does that manifest itself in an organization? Like, how do you go through and decide where to focus and what to cut on?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  We constantly have conversations, you know, around prioritization, you know, what is, we can't do everything, so we have to choose. Not choosing is the worst thing you can do because now you're compromising everything. So the question is, you know, we, we use, I use all kinds of different ways of trying to figure out what is most critical and then, by the way, and we revisit that conversation constantly, it has to be sort of, you know, reaffirming, but it's like, hey, if you can only do one thing, which one would you pick and, and, and why, and what will be the consequences of not doing, you know, the other things? So we start sort of strapping it, strapping it on for size and like, can I live with that, or what would happen if, if, if that was the scenario here?

• 15:20Speaker 00

  The problem is, you know, we, over time, people create, you know, they're, they're a mile wide and an inch deep, right? We, we create more and more and more and then pretty soon we're swimming in glue, you know, we're lethargic, you know, we're moving like, like molasses and that saps the energy, you know, out of the people and, and the organization. So what I go through is, okay, let's just, let's just take things out, let's just, you know, do things in sequence rather than in parallel, because, you know, we, we just want to be lightning fast on the things that really matter and really, you know, make sure that we're appropriately provisioned, right? Because oftentimes, you know, everybody gets, you know, one hundredth of their resources as opposed to getting, you know, fifty percent of their resources.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Things all of a sudden go a lot faster when you have the focus and, and the resources and the provisioning. Things really move, right? Whereas if you have to share with fifty other things and nothing moves now. Being very aware of it now, you, you can create focus in different groups, right? When you get bigger as a, as a company, right? It's really about, you will be multi-focus and you will be multi-purpose, but you have now way more resources. You can, you can, and we often have done that by creating, you know, product teams with general managers on them, that, that were measured, you know, on the progress, you know, against their targets, right? So they, they could really go after their targets for their vertical industry or their product type or their channel. They could own it, they could, they could declare victory at the end of the month.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  So you can create focus in, in, in a multi-mission organization, you absolutely can. I mean, certainly, Google was actually quite legendary for doing a lot of that stuff. Because they had a lot of successful things that they did, and I think there's many other companies that have done that as well. But you don't do it through a large, you know, monolithic, functional organization, because now everybody's a small cock in a giant wheel, and that's, uh, that doesn't create, uh, you know, the momentum that you want.

• 17:15Shane Parrish?

  In your experience, is there a number of priorities that people can focus on and deliver really exceptional results? Is it like one, or two, or three? Obviously, it's probably not 10. Is there a number that seems to be key?

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Obviously, greatly depends on what it is. You know, I don't start off saying it has to be this number or that number. I just want to see what it is, because these things are not created equal. It might just be one thing, because it's just so big that it's going to consume us, which is then fine. You know, sometimes it's not, and we can, we can address more, obviously, more than one thing. Most product organizations, obviously, have, uh, you know, have lists of projects and, uh, you know, maintaining, moving all these things along, you know, with, with the focus and, and, and velocity and momentum. Yeah, that's the art of management, you know? You will know, you know, when things are grinding down to a halt, and things are too slow, momentum is not happening. Revisiting

• 18:13Speaker 00

  prioritization over and over again is really important. You sort of want to convince yourself again and again, this is correct, this is correct, or no, it's not, it's not working, you know, based on the, on what we're seeing. That's okay. You know, you don't know everything ahead of time, right? So you, you learn day by day, um, and you calibrate and, and, and adjust, you know, from there.

• 18:32Shane Parrish?

  It seems like bureaucracy naturally creeps into organizations if it's not fought. How do you go about fighting bureaucracy? What's your role in that?

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's a really important observation, because, you know, larger companies, they, they tend to become their own worst enemies. It's not what the world does to them, it's what they do to themselves. And introducing bureaucracy, uh, in other words, undue process, you know, a lot of friction in terms of getting things done. So I often talk about this in my communications, you know, to the company. It's like, hey, you know, we, we have to hang on to our youth, our innovative muscle, our audacity, our daring. And, uh, you know, I always say, look, you know, hierarchy, org charge mean nothing to us. You know, we operate through influence. If you can convince people, great, and if you can't, well, then you just can't. Doesn't matter what your title is, or what organization

• 19:24Speaker 00

  you come from, or who your boss is. So it's really, it's an extreme meritocracy. It's really your ideas are judged on their merit, you know, not on, you know, where they're coming from. You fight it. I always say, let's be like Peter Pan, you know, we never grow up, you know, at least not entirely, you know? So we maintain that chip on our shoulder, that attitude, um, and you know, back to the insanely great thing, right? If we're not inspired what we're working on, that's a problem in and of itself. We gotta go get that back fast.

• 19:57Shane Parrish?

  I think I remember from one of the interviews I was listening to to prepare for this, that you look for maladjusted people.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  I'm probably one of those people myself, but, uh, you know, yes, I mean, look, you know, where does drive come from? Where does ambition come from? You know, it is a lack of adjustment because if you were a perfectly balanced person, you wouldn't have any ambition. You're so happy with where things are, you barely have a reason to get up in the morning, you know? Um, but, you know, maladjusted people, they just have this disparity between where they are and what they want to do and what they want to prove. I mean, all of us want to prove things either to our parents, if they're still around, or our siblings, or our friends, or people that didn't believe in us.

• 20:38Shane Parrish?

  Totally.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  All this stuff. And that's very powerful, you know? I remember, you know, I had a, we had a great exit with Data Domain back in 2009. And we were very proud of the work we did because it was a startup. It was just, you know, we didn't have product market fit for the longest time. And it became, uh, you know, we were a bigger exit than the 10 next, the next 10 competitors combined, all this kind of stuff. But then people started saying, oh, you're just lucky, you know, you know how that goes, right? Well, you know, that, that just puts on the afterburners, uh, you know, for me. It's like, I'll show you luck, you know? And that's, that's attitude and attitude is something I like in people. I like people that have attitude, that have a chip on their shoulder.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  That have a burning, you know, need and desire to prove something. Now, over the years, that will wear off a little bit. That that's just the nature of things. I mean, you, you, when you're eighteen, you have a very different life experience than when you're forty years older. You know, depending on what happened in between. But I, I, I generally, uh, you know, uh, like people who sort of constantly are very, very strongly aware of where they are versus where they could be. As, you know, I, I, I rarely use the word proud or pride because that, that signals, you know, a profound happiness with the status quo. And I don't have that, you know, because I'm always at odds with the status quo. That's sort of the, the natural malcontent posture that we have. Yeah, we're here, but we could be there.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  So what gives? How do we get there? Right? So we're always envisioning a future that is different than the one that we're, that we're currently experiencing. If we could do it all over again, what would we do? Right? Those, those kinds of conversations. So it's very refreshing. It's, you're, you're constantly sort of reinventing, you know, what's going on and also keeps you safe. Because there are people out there who don't have legacy. They don't have nothing existing. They start from scratch. Well, they're going to get the better of you unless, you know, you, you develop that attitude, you know, in your own company, your own business as well.

• 22:41Shane Parrish?

  It seems like the natural state for most people is to get reasonably good at something like driving a car. And then there's a bit of a complacency that sort of sets in. It's like I get to average or slightly above average in my job. And then I sort of like let off the pedal. How do you prevent that?

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Obviously, you know, their relationship, you know, with the people around you, your team and, and your managers, like, you know, are, are people driving you to higher standards or they not? You know, are they accepting, you know, of, of the way things are? But, you know, one way we do this, uh, I mean, this is throughout your organization. Uh, all our employees, all that are not in sales, because salespeople are on, on. On commission plans, but you know, every quarter, you know, the company has to, you know, earn the bonus pool. In other words, the money that we're going to use for bonus, we have to earn it. And then we tell people how, how, how we earn it, exactly what the metrics are. And, you know, we share all of that. So they know, hey, none of us are going to get bonuses unless the company gets paid. But once, once we, once the company earns

• 23:38Speaker 00

  it, now we're starting to allocate the, the, the bonus money to managers and departments. And we just say, look, you use this money, you know, to send messages to all your people. There needs to be a bell curve. We want to know who is, you know, deserving of two X, three X versus who is deserving of zero. Um, so that we, we see the full spectrum, the bell curve, if you will, uh, of people that are, you know, performing, you know, incredibly well and, uh, and the ones who are not in good standing. This is not so much about, oh, I don't want to give money to, to people who aren't doing well. It's more, are we giving enough to the ones who are doing great, right? I don't want the great ones feel like they're treated the same way as people that are obviously not

• 24:23Speaker 00

  in good standing. That, that, that just, you know, that creates a, that's not a performance culture. So, um, we do this every quarter. And, um, in the beginning, when, when, when people have not lived this life before, it's very challenging for them. It's like, oh my God, I gotta have a conversation like this about money and performance every single quarter, every single person. How do I do that? Well, if people get used to it, because during the quarter, they now start to have a different, you know, a much sharper lens on the work and how the work's getting done. And they keep notes and they make notes. And then they can really give a credible message back. And employees will also ask,

• 25:02Speaker 00

  hey, uh, if, if I wanted to have 150% bonus or whatever number, uh, what do I have to do? And, and by the way, this is exactly the conversation you want to have. What do I have to do? Damn good question. Let's go have that conversation. What do you have to do? Right? Everybody wants to aspire to something. They want to be better. But you got to force that conversation to happen in such a way that it has consequences, right, in terms of compensation and recognition and celebration and all of that. I'm big on recognizing, you know, great work. I think great people need to be, need to be celebrated and rewarded and singled out in every way possible. Again, that's a merit,

• 25:43Speaker 00

  performance culture, you know, these days that is being frowned upon in popular culture. But in enterprises, this is really important. People need to become the best version of themselves. And this is, this is part of how we go about doing that.

• 25:57Shane Parrish?

  Aside from money, what other sort of mechanisms do you use internally to reward?

• 26:01Speaker 00

  It's recognition and celebration, you know, you know, we, for example, we have equity awards in, in sales for people that are landing designated customers that we desperately want. And, you know, we, we, they're often surprised because they may have forgotten about it because it's not a, you know, it's just something that only happens when you, you know, you, you land certain customers. And, you know, we'll get on it, you know, to send notes, you know, have conversations, references in other conversations. All of a sudden, everybody knows in the whole company, like, wow, this guy, this team did this. And

• 26:41Speaker 00

  they're like, wow, you know, they're bathing in glory, you know what I mean? And, you know, salespeople live for that. I mean, yes, they live for money. I know, you know, they're, they're, they're corner operated, but they also live for, for recognition because that is just a, you know, it's, it's very, very rewarding. It's in a very deep, you know, psychological way. It's very rewarding. So you want to bring that. Don't take it for granted, you know? It's not like, oh, that's just doing your job. Yes, it is. But at the same time, man, this is, this is, this is amazing. Okay? Especially when it comes from me as the CEO, and they're like, my God, you're taking time out of your day to, to tell me this? I'm like, yes, we are.

• 27:20Shane Parrish?

  Well, most organizations are sales organizations. And I guess I'm wondering, we, we all sort of recognize a bad sales organization because that business will go out of business. But what's the difference between a good sales organization and a great sales organization?

• 27:35Speaker 00

  You get much better sales organization when you have full alignment in the entire company so that everybody works for sales effectively. We always say that we're all working for sales here because they're the tip of the spear and the rest of us are really the wood behind the arrow hat. You know, that's sort of the way I characterize the relationships between sales and the rest of the company. And sales needs to feel that wood behind the arrow hat. Like, everybody is killing themselves to help me succeed. And it's not so much that it's all about selling stuff and transactions and deals and all of that. It's just that sales experiences the reality of the marketplace the first and the most profound in the most profound way, right?

• 28:18Speaker 00

  The rest of the organization sits much farther away from the cold winds of competition and some of the ugliness that happens and the uncertainties and the anxieties and all these kinds of things. So, yeah, sales is harder, which is why the rest of our organization needs to be in alignment and in support of them. So, alignment is really important, right? That we really provision the whole company behind that because they are experiencing a reality in the marketplace and we, the rest of us, have to adjust to that. We gotta help them, we gotta change things. So, it's a constant process of basically living their experience and what does it mean? And how often are we seeing this? And what are we gonna do about it?

• 28:59Speaker 00

  But in terms of your question, I mean, one thing that's really important to me, I'm a stickler for consistent execution in sales organization, meaning that every quarter, everybody shows up. You know, what we can't have is like, well, yeah, the bad quarter, but I'm gonna do better next quarter. I don't want that, okay? We need to run ourselves and our organization in such a way that we show up, all of us, every single period, you know, every single line of business, channel, geography, and so on, right? And if that becomes the culture, the expectation and the reality, yeah, you're gonna do way better than the rest of them because, you know, sales tends to be a very unevenly distributed thing and you wanna work on that.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  And so, the expectation is, you know, I don't care how far ahead of plan you are, you have a shitty quarter. That's not a problem with me. I can't build on you. I can't trust you. I can't expect that you're going to deliver. And you work on that all the time, right? People that are that are not consistent, you better you better find a way to get there. Not overnight, but you're gonna make moves. What moves are you gonna make? What are the reasons that this is inconsistent? What are you doing differently? Right? Because we always say a good quarter is one where you exceed your numbers, but also one where you set yourself up for the next one. You gotta do both. It's not just about making the quarter. You also have to lay the foundation for the next one and the rest of the year. So you gotta think much more long term, much more strategic, you know, about your business rather than

• 30:27Speaker 00

  I'm just trying to hit a number for the quarter, you know?

• 30:31Shane Parrish?

  I think of that sort of like running a billiards table, right? Like where you leave the ball matters for the next shot. You can't just anybody can make one shot, but you want to run the table.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 30:41Shane Parrish?

  There's a natural tension between sales and product. And at the start of an organization's life cycle, you can sort of get away with customizing the product per sale. But when you start getting into enterprise, you can't do those things. How do you think about the relationship between sales and product and who's driving the bus and who's not and how that looks?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, there's, there's, there's tension there, sometimes healthy, sometimes, you know, not as healthy. And, you know, it's, it's a relationship that has to be managed very aggressively. Certainly want a product organization that really views the reality of sales as their problem. Okay. As opposed to, well, you guys are just not smart enough or whatever. And they're interested in all kinds of things that have nothing to do, you know, with the sales organization succeeding. The, the alignment again is, is number one. But you have situations where, you know, sales goes, this is not working. Okay. And we have enough data points to say that it's not working. Okay. What are we going to do?

• 31:40Speaker 00

  So that dialogue goes on all the time. You know, we make mistakes, you know, we, we prioritize incorrectly. We're too slow on certain things. I mean, all these things happen, right? But that's a, that's a continuous force field that we're, we're working on. You know, the, the thing about sales is that

• 32:00Speaker 00

  You know, great salespeople can't sell a bad product, right? But lousy salespeople can sell a great product, okay? And that's, that's very important because, you know, oftentimes in Silicon Valley, they think that sales is the problem. And I'm like, no, because if you had a great product, you know, even an average or below average salesperson will be able to sell it, right? And typically, sales problems are, are product problems, but typically, that's not the, the initial assessment because, you know, you don't want your baby to be called ugly. And, you know, the investors around the table have invested in your technology. So you don't want to openly face your demons and, and really confront things the way they really are.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  And that then leads to a focus and, and solutions that don't work. Like, well, let's hire another VP of Sales. Well, that won't work because your product is the problem, you know? So, so I, I do hold the, the product people to a very high standard because we have to make very average, uh, salespeople productive in a very predictable manner. That's hard. And that's exactly, that is where the focus should be. Because if I have to hire brilliant salespeople, even though even brilliant salespeople can't sell a lousy product, there aren't that many of them. So that's not a scalable model. Would you go as far as saying a great product sells itself? Almost. Um, I've certainly seen that, um, you know, with my own eyes, uh, in, in, in, in various companies. You know, I used to say about snuff, like it's like a two-year-old golden retriever.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  All I gotta do is, uh, you separate them around and everybody's gonna want one. And, uh, it, it sometimes wasn't that far off because it was the, the, the benefits, uh, were amazing. I mean, you benchmark these products and sometimes they were an order of magnitude faster, you know, because of all the, the architectural breakthroughs and the, the provisioning of the workload. Uh, so people were like, wow, this, I mean, that, that wow experience is just, is just priceless, right? So all you have to do is get people to try it. And they go like, yeah, this is a no-brainer. And so in that sense, it almost sells itself.

• 34:22Speaker 03

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• 35:03Speaker 00

  I mean, we used to see that with companies like VMware as well. I mean, you know, once people were sold on virtualization, I mean, all they were doing is picking up orders, right? This is actually, you know, a bit of a problem because, you know, you hire people from a very successful company. They've never really sold because they were just riding the momentum, you know what I mean? And then they get into a company where they do have to really sell and they do have to campaign and they do have to fight. And they have no idea because we didn't, we never had to do that before, right? So I like to hire salespeople who have really been in shitfights because that breeds, you know, the type of skills and focus that you really want to have, right? Or that people that are good at, you know, quoting and picking up orders.

• 35:46Shane Parrish?

  That's an incredibly valuable point. I don't think I've ever heard anybody mention that before. What are the methods of thinking that you would use sort of in the first 90 days to assess the degree to which the problem is not sales or product? Like, how would you go about determining where that problem lies? Do we have the wrong sales organization, the wrong culture? Do we have the wrong product? And obviously, it's probably a little bit of both, but how do you go about thinking about that?

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, and by the way, it is often a little bit of both, which is what creates the confusion, you know, around these topics, but look, you know, I'm. I can't tell you how many customer slash prospect calls I've already been in this week. It's Friday, you know, and there were numerous when I must have talked to seven or eight banks this week, you know, CIOs, CEOs. I experienced reality the way the salespeople are, obviously a little bit differently because I talk to higher level people in organizations. But, you know, I experience things firsthand. What you don't want to do is sort of, you know, rely on information, you know, because you just get it secondhand, thirdhand, fourthhand, and you don't know whether you're dealing with a feeble person that has no fortitude

• 36:56Speaker 00

  or whether you're dealing with a real issue. So there's no substitute, you know, for inspecting things at the front lines and really be part of it. I always tell salespeople that if I can't sell it, I'm not expecting you to sell it. Okay. So if I, if you're going to get your nose bloodied, I'm going to get my nose bloodied, right? And so you need to get to reality. In other words, you need to see things as they really are. So you've got to be very, very careful with, with second and third hand, you know, information. And sometimes, you know, I, I gotta whip people up the hill. It's like, look, you know, you guys, you guys are basically, you're intimidated by the marketplace. You know, you're, you're your own worst enemy because you just lack fortitude and confidence and you can't, you

• 37:38Speaker 00

  know, articulate things. And that's, you know, that's all under the header of sales enablement, right? And, you know, I personally get after this. I'm very aggressive in terms of, you know, really pressing our case in front of, you know, the customers and the marketplace because I need my organization to do the same thing. If I'm not doing it, you know, then, then, you know, they're not either, or they're not going to go at it with the same confidence and fortitude. So leadership is important there. You want to set an example that people go like, oh, I guess that's the way it is then. And, you know, I should be too. So you, you bring forward, but, you know, people see me talk in front of a customer, they go, And they see the customer react and they see the customer ask questions like, hey,

• 38:22Speaker 00

  I can do that too. Okay. There's no better learning than right in front of where the action happens. So you want to bring that. If you just want to post some data sheets and some videos and what have you and then sit back and wait for things to happen, you're going to get killed. So you want to press all the way into the end zone and then people go like, okay, I think I can do it. You know, I've seen it. The results are there. It works.

• 38:48Shane Parrish?

  We talked about positioning yourself for future success and we sort of used the analogy of running the billiards table. What are the ways that an organization positions themselves for success tomorrow that is hard to do today, that's hard to compete with, but makes tomorrow easier?

• 39:08Speaker 00

  I've always told other CEOs, especially people that are sort of first time CEOs and knew that you can count on the fact that you will be confronted with a need for transformation because it happens to all of us. And the question is, will you recognize it? Will you recognize it in time? And will you be able to execute on it? Those are all super big questions because you walk into a situation, it works, and then one day you wake up, it's not working as well anymore. The world has changed and the world does change. The technology changes. I mean, you see a lot of that right now with AI, obviously. People's perspectives and

• 39:52Speaker 00

  narratives, they're all up for grabs. I mean, it's one of the most disruptive things I've ever seen happening in the world of software, all my years, you know, of doing things. But you also, you know, the early adopters, you know, and in Jeffrey Moore's style of thinking are very, very different than, you know, when you get across the chasm and you're dealing with a more mainstream customer because they buy differently. You know, people ask me, you know, why do you think this is sort of a late adopter? I'm like, well, because he hasn't bought yet. That's why. He would have bought already, but he was an earlier adopter. Okay. So by definition, he didn't. Why didn't he? Okay. So he has different ways of assessing

• 40:33Speaker 00

  and thinking, you know, about the value, about the risk, all these kinds of things. And these things are difficult to observe. Sometimes, you know, you just wake up and you're like, you know what? Things are different now. They have changed. Just in the aggregate, you just sense the change that is happening.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  And then it becomes a question, okay, we have to adjust, we have to change, we gotta do all these, you know, all these things. But the need for transformation, people don't expect it because we have a very, you know, humans have a very linear attitude about the world. In other words, it's just gonna continue as it is. We rinse and repeat and it will never change. No, it will change. And it's just a matter of, you know, can you recognize it? And can you do it in time? And then will you know, you know, how to successfully deal with that? And a lot of people can't. They'll fail on recognizing it, or they fail on the timing of it, or they fail on the execution of it. And we've had a lot of great enterprises, obviously, that we all know. I mean, you look at, you know, the Fortune 100, the Fortune 500.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  I mean, how many companies are still there that were there 20 years ago and 30 years ago and 50 years ago? Right?

• 41:43Speaker 00

  So you gotta, as a leader, as a CEO, you gotta be extremely open minded about what is happening. Right? And not assume the linearity of the business. It takes many forms. Some things are incredibly disruptive, you know, some things are, you know, are marginal.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  So that's, by the way, the rest of your organization will not have this posture because they got their heads down. They're very much in a pattern, in the mode. So that means that you really, you don't wanna have that, that mode about you as the CEO, as a leader. You wanna be, basically, you make everybody else work. You got your head up when they have their head down.

• 42:21Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned AI is the most transformative thing you've seen. Talk to me a little bit about AI.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  I've not always been the world data, but I started out very early in my career in the world of data. And I've gotten back to it again and again and again. So I've seen the challenges from the early days. You know, just being able to take transactional records and being able to put them into a format. Where it was sort of human readable and sensible for humans to consume. I mean, this is going all the way back to the late eighties. You know, when we have what we back then called decision support systems. We didn't, I mean, we didn't even have the term of business intelligence or none of those terms even existed back then. But, you know, especially in the, by the way, there was only certain verticals that did this. Like retail was really big on it, you know, they would be able to sort of break the skews down by, you know, by

• 43:12Speaker 00

  by location and channel and store and all these things, very, very granular detailed data. These are massive mainframe processes that would, that would run usually on a monthly basis, you know, let alone the 24 hour cycle. So every month you would get data, that was already a big deal back then. So things have, have, have progressed. Our relationship with data has progressed, you know, very, uh, very slowly, painfully difficult. And, uh, obviously the, the biggest change we had until now was really the introduction of search, right? I mean, it's not 25 years ago. I mean, I became a search junkie, I still am to this day because I find it so empowering in terms of your relationship with data. But search now feels old because, you know, it matches on strings.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Uh, it's, it's stateless. I mean, it doesn't remember a damn thing from one search to the next. And it has no context, you know? If you search on Snowflake, you might get the weather, you might get, you know, you might get the, the, the social phenomenon. Or you might get the company because it doesn't know, it just knows the word. Um, so we now have opportunities to, to massively enrich and contextualize, you know, search, you know, uh, searches for data. So our relationship with data is going to just get catapulted into the future here. Just, just unbelievable. We'll be able to ask harder and harder and harder questions um, of our own proprietary data and, and get better and better and, and, and more valuable answers.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's, it's fairly easy, you know, to use natural language interfaces now. The whole text to SQL has become, you know, a table stakes. I mean, you, you, you can, you can interrogate, you know, uh, you know, a sales force data on Snowflake, you know, what just, just text to SQL. And it's really nice, by the way, I mean, hell, it's a whole lot better than, than, than using dashboards for, for, for the most part. Not, not all of it, but for the most part. So fine, you know, that's a step forward, but you know, I want to ask very business specific questions, you know, an insurance company may say, hey, you know, I have disproportionate, you know, bodily injury claims in this state compared to the surrounding states, you know, A, what's going on, B, am I going to have it again next quarter, C, what might I do

• 45:22Speaker 00

  about it, right? Should we just stop, you know, underwriting in this geography altogether, which is what's happening in California right now? And, or, or, you know, we, we, obviously it's pricing issue because how do we price risk, you know, is it a policy issue? Those are questions that, you know, God, analysts would be launched on, right? Because people would do their reasoning, not the system, that the system becomes like a, an advisor to you and, and, and, and literally in damn near real time. So this is, this is, this, our, our relationship with data is, is going to get amped up here, to use a term, in ways that we just can't even imagine. Obviously, content generation is, is what everybody's looking at and they find it very cool and it is, you know, but how is it going to work

• 46:06Speaker 00

  in medicine? How's it going to work in education? I mean, it's just, it, it's, it's going to be a renaissance, you know, in, in, in intelligence and computing and, and, and the, how we mobilize data for, for purposes. Yeah, it's, it's a great time to be, be alive and I think the innovation will drive a lot of, a new employment. We will also, you know, have a lot of, you know, obsolescence, you know, in, in jobs and even functions and industries and processes. But that's the nature of, you know, of, of, of, of a capitalist, you know, free economy. Creative destruction is, is just a nature of stuff and we do pretty well with that, even though it can be disruptive. I mean, we, we used to learn one profession and that

• 46:50Speaker 00

  would last us for our lifetime. Now, now you need to shift gears more than once in your lifetime because it's moving so much faster, right, than anything we've ever seen. So the acceleration is going to be dizzying. There's no, no two ways about it.

• 47:04Shane Parrish?

  Is, is there anything that gives you hesitation about AI?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yes, of course, and people talk about this, you know, all the time. I mean, social media created the fake news phenomenon because, you know, so many people use social media to inform their reality, which I don't, I don't recommend that, by the way. I always tell people, turn that shit off, man, because, you know, you're, you're distorting what you, how you really should be interpreting things. And I don't, I don't like that. But social media had a lot of good things, you know, obviously, but it also had, you know, the, the flip side, you know, is that, you know, people, it became very, very powerful, influencing people in terms of how they experience the world. Obviously, this can take that to the nth degree, you know. I mean, it can change the realities. How's that gonna go?

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Right? You can see the, the opportunities for, for abuse becoming extraordinary. Yeah, we're gonna have to deal with that, you know, but we have to still count on the goodwill of men and women because, you know, that's all we have at the end of the day, right?

• 48:07Shane Parrish?

  One of the things we talked about earlier, I want to come back to you just before we end the interview, is you talked about, we all make mistakes. How do you handle a mistake? At the moment, you, how do you recognize that you've made a mistake? And then what do you do when you've made a mistake? You personally?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  I use mistakes as, it's a cultural moment and a teaching moment. Because it's actually good for me to go, oh, I really screwed this up, because it's sort of, you can do really well in the world by being a fast course corrector. What is devastating in organizations is when people defend bad decisions. Okay. But if, if you can fail fast, that was, that was Scott McNeely used to say that, fail fast. If you can fail fast and correct, you can do really well. So mistakes can become a real cultural moments, like, hey, you know, I really screwed this up. Let's, let's unpack this and understand what were we thinking? You know, what were the assumptions that were wrong? Right? And then, you know, that's a good culture, because now everybody goes like, look, I can revisit

• 49:06Speaker 00

  my dumb decisions now. All right? In other words, fail fast, you know, have urgency around your bonehead. You know, decisions that you've made and the things that are not working. That's really what you want. And when I do it, you know, it's basically now it gives permission to everybody else to do it. I I'm basically politically neutralizing, you know, the idea of making mistakes. Because making mistakes, everybody who makes decisions will make mistakes. You know, people always ask me, what are your biggest mistakes? Well, my my biggest mistakes are always around hiring. You know, it's like, you know, I I've hired a lot of great people over the years, but I've also made my share of mistakes because that's just the nature of things, right? But if you're willing to confront it, I I sometimes, and I I talked about this in the book as well.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  I may make mistakes again and again on the same topic, you know. It's that, but the one thing I will tell you is I won't stop until I get it right. Okay. And I will, in other words, I'm I'm willing to say again and again that I screwed it up, but I won't stop, you know, until we're in the in the place that we uh that we need to be. So that that's very powerful message to people to say, look, this is the behavior we want. Confront your demons. Basically, uh, you know, go after the things that didn't work, that were wrong. Um, God, if you can get people to, because most people, you know, they're afraid they're gonna defend their decisions and uh and and especially when it's a gray zone, right? In other words, it's, you know, some people are, you know, not good enough to keep,

• 50:30Speaker 00

  not bad enough to fire, you know, the the those are the worst cases because like, well, you know, person looks nice, speaks speaks well, articulate, you know, but they but they're the ultimate passenger. They never move a dial, right? And and, you know, those are the ones that always survive, you know, way too long, you know, until we have mass layoffs and all this kind of crap going on. But you can get people to say, no, you know, when there's doubt, there's no doubt. You know, have a higher bar, you know, have high conviction. That's hard, you know, trying to get your organization to get to that level, you know, of of, you know, basically very unyielding, uncompromising. That's hard because most people wanna lay the bar lower and, you know, not rock the boat, not be confrontational, because all that stuff is hard, hard, hard, you know.

• 51:14Shane Parrish?

  Those passengers are probably the easiest ones to hire too, because they get to the interview, they say the right things, they check all the right boxes, and then they come in. Interviews are notoriously like difficult to to hire with, I would imagine, because you just really want to see on the job performance. How do you how do you assess that?

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Well, you're exactly right. Interviews are far less valuable, not for all roles. I mean, there's roles where interviews, like, for example, in engineering, I mean, they're like, they put them in front of a whiteboard and say, here's, you know,

• 51:45Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  write code that does this. So you can, you can very much, you know, test people's skills, you know, that way. But, you know, in the other roles where, you know, people become good at selling themselves, right? Because they've learned that over the years and they they they talk well, they look well, and they're very pleasant, and they're getting along and all these things. But the way to find out anything about people is to fully surround where that person has been, okay? And, you know, if they've been at company A, you know, you go find out who in my company was at company A while this person was there. And let's go, I'm going to go ask inside the company first, who knows this person? Because they, you were a contemporary, and, you know, what was that person's reputation?

• 52:30Speaker 00

  And so on. You learn a, you learn a whole bunch of things very quickly. You don't even have to go outside of your own company to, you know, to find out. And then you see if if consistency, you know, or of information is manifesting, or it's still confusing and contradicting and all this kind of stuff. And then we go outside, you know, we go call people that we know or have known and say, hey, you really, and you really want to hear from people that have directly worked with them and said, what was the experience like? It doesn't have to be an indictment type of conversation. It's like, look, I just want to know more about this person. How did this go? You know, tell me some stories, you know? Because now, now you start to really get color and texture around a person as opposed to the sniff test, which is what an interview really is.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  And the thing is, you're going to learn, you're going to get great conviction now, because you're like, you know what, I'm, I think we're really on to a great person. Or you're like, wow, you know, I'm glad I made these calls, because, you know, we were, we were, this, this was not trending, you know, correctly at all. And I find that people rush, especially in fast-growing companies, you know, we have hiring targets. And they're just slamming bodies and it's the worst thing ever. I'd rather hire more slowly, but better than faster. And I have to do a lot of course corrections along the way. And people are lazy. They're like, oh, it's probably okay. No, probably okay is not the

• 53:55Speaker 00

  standard. You need to know and have conviction. And you need to take the time and do the work to develop that conviction, especially in places like Europe where it's so difficult to separate and so expensive and so time consuming. The opportunity cost is enormous. You really need to do the work, right? So you've got to bring that into your recruiting culture. It's not like a check a box, see you Monday. No.

• 54:20Shane Parrish?

  It sounds like you just hit on something that I think is one reason that your cultures are always so successful, which is you just elevate the standard.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  I mean, having I standards goes back to the insanely great Steve Jobs. I mean, he had a really hard time dealing with mediocrity in any realm. And it's very hard to live with, by the way. Steve was super hard to live with. I mean, everybody was a shithead and didn't know people's names and all of that. Yes, I know it's hard to live with. And personally, I'm not that way, by the way. I don't know three people that way at all. But at the same time, you know, the leadership needs to really reinforce. We have very high standards. And then other people will want to follow that. Okay, they will do it because they feel like

• 55:07Speaker 00

  that is the way, that is the right way. Leadership sets tone, sets expectations. And if you don't do that, yeah, you become the California DMV, the worst goddamn place in the world to try and get something done, you know? The lack of leadership, you know, people go slow, they go substandard. I mean, it's just a hellish world, you know? It's like, I feel sorry for the people who have to be there. So as leaders, let's create an environment where great people feel like, yeah, this is a good place. This is a great place. They have urgency. They have high standards. They move fast. You know, that's what you want. That creates energy. It gives energy. It just lets people, the right people will love it. And some of the wrong people will go like, you know what? This place is too intense for me. I can't

• 55:49Speaker 00

  handle it. You know, I need to get the kids from school at 4:00 PM. I get that, right? But it's like culture, it doesn't mean that people are bad, you know, when they don't like the culture, it just means that they are not a fit. They're just different, you know?

• 56:03Shane Parrish?

  Totally. We always end on the same question, Frank, which is, what is success for you?

• 56:08Speaker 00

  You know, it's not a word that, you know, I'm constantly thinking about or thinking about that, you know, at all. You know, I'm, by the way, your thinking gets sometimes poisoned by the type of words that you use and the concepts that you preoccupy with. I mean, people sometimes ask me, what's your legacy? Legacy is not a word that I use. Okay. It's not, I find that very sort of a lot of self-absorption around that stuff. Like, you know, I need to live beyond the grave. I really don't need to, and I don't want to be, you know, feel so important that that's even a question, you know? My enterprises that I'm in charge of must succeed, you know, they must succeed because that is the contract that I have

• 56:52Speaker 00

  with all my stakeholders, you know, not just investors. Obviously, I want them to succeed because the investors succeed with us, my employees are going to succeed as well. I mean, I'm trying to give my employees, you know, an incredible shot at changing their, their station in life, advancing their careers where, you know, 10 years from now, they still feel like, well, that's the best thing I, I ever did. And I get a lot of that from, from, from people that have worked with us in our prior companies. And it's very personally rewarding to hear that, that they still, you know, have, you know, sort of this warm feelings about the experience that they, that they had, not just the money they made, but just the people they were with, the things they did, and they became better than they

• 57:32Speaker 00

  ever thought they were, right? That's success to me is, is, is achieving that. In my, my, my partner ecosystem, I want them to be wildly excited about being our partner. They're succeeding with us, right? So, so we, we, we try to make all parties, you know, succeed in their own worlds, you know, with us. Employees have their own agendas, their families, they have circumstances, they have issues. So, you know, we help them and, and, and everybody else, that's, that's part of our, our, our universe. I guess that's the best way I can answer that question.

• 58:15Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much for taking the time today, Frank. That was an amazing conversation.

• 58:20Shane Parrish?

  You bet. Anytime. Thank you.

• 58:25Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.