Thierry Cruanes. She led the company to a historic and successful IPO in June 2014 from zero to a multibillion-dollar business. In July 2017, two years before he took over as the chief executive of Snowflake, Frank Slootman raced 2,225 miles across the Pacific Ocean, from the California coast to the Hawaiian island of Oahu, on Invisible Hand, his sleek 52-foot sailboat made from carbon fiber and 3D-printed titanium. I become the CEO I need to be, the one that the situation He had built a monster and Data Domain still dominates the purpose-built backup appliance market, 11 years on. Here's how he makes and spends his fortune. The Snowflake executive team represents centuries of technology, product and business experience to create and advance the only cloud data platform built to enable the data-driven enterprise. Sylvia Pagan. "Silicon Valley is very much a high-fiving, self-congratulatory culture," he said. Soon Slootman resumed his old tricks. Snowflake's Slootman, 2 Others Billionaires After Record-Breaking IPO The son of a military veteran and an artist, Slootman studied economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands, before moving to the US with a dream of working for IBM, the CEO told Forbes. They obviously felt they would materialize more of These are people we knew from previous rodeos, Slootman says with a shrug. Subscribe. Just as his hero Patton was described as paranoid yet brilliant, Slootman said he lives in constant fear of inferiority. Just six months in, he had lined up his anchor investors, including Dragoneer Investment Group and Marc Benioffs Salesforce. come along often. Sailing is a small world. concealing modifications he made to another owner's boat. Snowflake is a cloud data-warehouse-as-a-service company operating in a sector expected to grow to $4.69bn revenues by 2024. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. See Bio. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman's discussion of diversity in hiring in this June 3 interview with Emily Chang on "Bloomberg Technology" prompted him to issue an apology on Monday after some . At the many layers between me and the action. Muglia received two days' notice before Slootman was introduced to employees in an all-hands meeting. Overnight, Slootman's 5.9% stake became worth billions, and Snowflake was established as an elite Silicon Valley player it was briefly valued more highly than IBM at one point not long after its IPO, though its stock price has declined more than 13% since the beginning of 2021. 1 job was to make the shareholders money. They were all out there to foul us, to do whatever they can to trip us up. She currently serves on the boards of ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), Warby Parker and Snowflake. comes to mind first, I have learned lessons from Amazon just observing from "I've literally never met the man," he said. mean there isnt room for discussion and debate but I will never create or Denise holds a BA in Business Administration and Economics from Stockholm University, and holds an MBA from Georgetown University. I also had had enough time off, two years. "For many, this is very attractive," Slootman said of San Diego's laid-backness. Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski, a distributed systems and organizations scaling expert, is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support at Snowflake. Doug, thank you for that comment, Slootman replied. Frank Slootman Bio: Early Life. After a slight summer lull, Covid-19 was resurgent, which meant that rather than a global tour of get-to-know-you lunches and PowerPoints in hotel meeting rooms, his roadshow for data warehousing company Snowflake was going virtual. From January 2015 to December 2020, Kelly Kramer was Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Cisco, managing financial strategy, and overseeing all financial functions, corporate development, mergers, acquisitions, integrations and investor relations for the company with total revenue for fiscal year 2020 of $ 49.3 billion and more than 77,000 employees. I used to call it drunken sailors spending. I could not resist having an opportunity to bring something We broke the billion-dollar To win over large customers like Johnson & Johnson, he repositioned ServiceNow from a help-desk IT solutionnot exactly something to excite a fellow CEO in a meetingto an all-you-can-eat buffet of tools that could help a needy CIO solve any challenge. Working with a wide range of clients including TPG, Nordstrom, Yelp, McKesson, and PG&E, Teresa earned her reputation as one of the most trusted advisors in the Bay Area. "People would go surfing in the mornings, and they'd have these home-brew beer-making contests and all that," John Wyss, who was a director of product strategy at ServiceNow between 2014 and 2016, told Insider of the pre-Slootman days. The couple live in the Ruby Hill gated community in Pleasanton, a serene San Francisco Bay Area suburb where the typical home is worth $1.2 million. leave a leadership vacuum in the board room. In April 2019, Snowflake's board of directors announced that its CEO of five years, Bob Muglia, was being replaced. At ServiceNow and also at Snowflake you replaced previous CEOs who had already built the companies to substantial sizes. The Outsider: How CEO-For-Hire Frank Slootman Turned Snowflake Into And 99 times out of 100, youre wrong on that, which is the reason I [now] pull triggers much faster. After leaving the company Slootman joined the board of Imperva, a cyber security business, and spent some time in venture capital, investing in startups. See Bio. "And so I think by remaining neutral, you can allow everyone the freedom to have their own opinion and then keep that separate from work.". Chris is married with 2 daughters and is an avid skier and golfer. Why do you, as it appears, prefer that? In July 2017, two years before he took over as the chief executive of Snowflake, Frank Slootman raced 2,225 miles across the Pacific Ocean, from the California coast to the Hawaiian island of Oahu . Says Dageville: We have a lot of pressure to deliver on this valuation.. CEO Frank Slootman made $287,990 in salary in 2019. Benoit has a PhD in Computer Science with a focus in Parallel Database Systems and is a named inventor on more than 100 patents. "You know, you're not going far enough, you're not going hard enough, you're not going fast enough. Snowflake, valued at $4 billion when Slootman took over, more than doubled that first day and is up significantly since. A standout economics student at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Slootman finished school a year early to pursue internships in the United States. Slootman retired in 2017, but the break was short-lived. Blocks & Files: What was it about Snowflake that attracted you? Some spoke on condition of anonymity, but nearly all described a militant CEO who's part of Silicon Valley's less talked-about conservative wing, a group that includes Palantir's Peter Thiel, Tesla's Elon Musk, and Oculus' Palmer Luckey. People want to be patted on the back and feel good I'm into not feeling good.". Did you still want to challenge yourself at the helm of a company that could do great things? past. The seven-day competition, the Transpacific Yacht Race, was a test of both mental and physical stamina, in which he navigated his boat with a 10-person crew while cold, wet, and sleep-deprived. By 1998 Slootman was running Compuwares California office amid the dot-com boom. However, at the age of 26, Frank moved to the USA in 1984 to work for Burroughs. Time will tell, of course. by Laura Draper, Head of Content. He was more insulated. It was hard for me to work in a big company, too slow and rigid, just not inspired. From 2017-2019, he was Vice President, Legal at ServiceNow, where he was responsible for corporate, securities, and M&A. Furthermore, Frank was also the CEO of the Data Domain for 6 years from 2003 to 2006. Why are they only tripling sales? Under his tenure, Snowflakes customer count grew from 80 in June 2015 to more than 1000 in January 2018. Mark brings nearly 40 years of experience to Snowflake as an executive leader, an expert in accounting and financial management, and a visionary in growing and transforming technology companies. It . I do prefer the earlier stages of growth. Under the companys Amazon-style pricing, customers could easily expand their usage over time. 10 Facts About Frank Slootman. Prior to Cisco, she was Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of GE Healthcares Healthcare Systems business. I would say, Were spending like drunken sailors, and they would say, Yes, keep doing it. And it was the right thing to do.. Sunny Bedi serves as the Chief Information & Data Officer at Snowflake. Write CSS OR LESS and hit save. Displaying foresight and expertise, she has designed effective strategies to overcome todays biggest challenges, particularly around digital transformation, enterprise risk, cybersecurity, and other vitally important strategic and operational issues. through the acquisition of Bix, where he served as CEO. Eight years later, with Snowflake, he had to do it over Zoom. Slootman and his crew won by nearly four hours. Talking about his decision to come to the states, Frank expressed in an interview; how he had never worked in the country where he was born. Frank Slootman is the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake. Its about getting this entire organization to go in one direction.. Snowflake CEO Offers Apologies, Support for Hiring Diversity From 2009 through 2011, Mark served as President and Chief Executive Officer of VeriSign, Inc., a provider of internet infrastructure services. Frank Slootman currently serves as Chairman and CEO at Snowflake. Franks wife, Brenda, who is also 61 years old, is the Vice President and Secretary of the Slootman Family Foundation. Slootman, who was born in the Dutch city of Huizen, 20 miles from Amsterdam, immigrated to the US in 1982 when he was in his 20s. My eyes are on the horizon., Covering venture capital, cloud and startups. She served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Bay Area Council, and the boards of directors for the California Academy of Sciences and the University of Arizona Eller College of Management. Frank's the type that he just doesn't take any bullshit, and there was some shit going on and he said, 'OK, I'm done.' But . In a December talk with Foundation Capital, Slootman said he had had "zero plans" to take on another CEO job. situational and operate on so-called first principles. Profile of Billionaire Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman - Business Insider We may never exactly know why the investors of Snowflake unceremoniously dumped its chairman and CEO Bob Muglia, just a few months after a $450m funding round that valued the cloud data warehouse startup at $3.5bn. I dont have to justify it, I dont have to convince you. I was rejected at least a dozen times by IBM. Chief revenue officer Chris Degnan figured his lack of experience in such a structured sales organization would be enough for Slootman to show him the door. Teresa previously served as a Vice Chair & West Region and San Francisco Managing Partner of Deloitte, and as Managing Partner, Silicon Valley. Given her Audit and M&A Partner experience and extensive boardroom experience, she qualifies as a financial expert and is well-equipped for board and Audit Committee service. What brought to the USA? Wyss said. Prior to BMC, John served as Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services with BladeLogic. How would you define your role? Age : 63. Slootman now has a net worth of $1.8 billion, Despite leaving Snowflake in 2018, the IPO spiked Muglia's net worth to, Many other Snowflake employees and investors including Warren Buffett, Sequoia, Iconiq Capital, and Salesforce are set for windfalls as well, per. In both her ServiceNow and Snowflake roles, Sylvia was instrumental in scaling HR functionality in hypergrowth environments into successful and sustainable post-IPO trajectories. He holds a B.A. Chris serves as Snowflakes Chief Revenue Officer and has been with the company since 2013. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman walks back remarks on diversity - Protocol Shelly Begun, who was also at ServiceNow and Data Domain, came on board as the head of human resources. You can look at my private companies and see how that turned out, he says. Slootman did not respond to requests from Insider for comment. As President and CEO of Arista for over a decade, Jayshree Ullal is responsible for Aristas business and thought leadership in cloud networking. Get to Know Snowflake's Leadership Team | Snowflake that outcome could be. So after a while Im, like, Instead of bitching about it, Ill just stick to these train wrecks and show you what I can do with them.. "Don't go to him for the touchy-feely feelings and advice. Sylvia serves as Chief Human Resources Officer at Snowflake. One major cause for the shock: By all appearances, Snowflake wasnt strugglingand it already had a high-profile CEO. + Follow. The Snowflake board member Mike Speiser, who invested in the company through his firm Sutter Hill and served as its first CEO, reached out to Slootman regarding a Snowflake board position, Speiser told Forbes. He settled on a fast-growing but under-the-radar software startup based in Santa Clara called ServiceNow. Denise also helped lead Genesys through its expansion to become a successful IPO and acquired company. However, the details of his conjugal life are known to few. He sees himself as someone who bootstrapped his way up, people said. Also, they havent shared any details on their parenthood, but we believe that the two have a son together. How Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman became a billionaire by ripping up the "You could not escape the combat mentality at our companies. Mark holds a B.S. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bulls parallel systems. He spent 13 years at Oracle focused on the optimization and parallelization layers in Oracle databases including as lead for the optimization group. Slootman hit the austerity button all the same, refocusing resources toward the drive trainproduct, engineering, sales and legaland away from less urgent areas like marketing. Frank Slootman (born 1958) is a billionaire businessman, and the chairman and CEO at Snowflake Inc., a cloud data-warehousing company.. Career. Snowflake CEO: why you must declare war on your rivals - Yahoo Finance Frank Slootman is the biggest Snowflake of them all. I dont like there to be too [2], In May 2019, Frank Slootman joined Snowflake Inc. as its CEO. Billboard ads with corny messages like Happy Holi-data soon lined Silicon Valleys main highway, U.S. Route 101. I will still Prior to Adobe, Mark held senior leadership positions at Documentum and EMC. 5.9% of any company is a huge deal. Benoit is a leading expert in parallel execution and self-tuning database systems. Was it purely the job with Burroughs or was there something else? In 2014, after two years under the radar focusing on shipping the software, Speiser tapped Muglia to replace him as CEO. Insiders said Slootman has torn up the do-gooder playbook of Big Tech's liberal elite and replaced it with a hard-charging, profit-driven ethos that doesn't pay lip service to things like diversity and social justice. In other words, he was bored. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bulls parallel systems. Slootman: Suppose "That was kind of awesome. Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman sat down recently for an episode of our Rise of the Data Cloud podcast to discuss what the Data Cloud means for businesses - and what the future holds. Copyright 2023 | WordPress Theme by MH Themes, Check Out The Net Worth of Hallea Jones! Concerned about Snowflakes appetite for capital, Speiser approached Slootman, whom he knew through the board of another investment, Pure Storage, to see if he could tempt him to join the companys board. Muglia, for his part, told Insider that he couldn't comment on the personality of his replacement. Kramer has extensive experience in financial planning and analysis, profit-and-loss leadership, and mergers and acquisitions. Most recently, Christian worked at Google leading YouTubes infrastructure and data systems. Benoit Dageville. See Bio. "He would always crash my executive briefings," Wyss said. Slootman told CNBC in October that he had no time for Silicon Valley's "lattes and neck rubs" culture. [2] [3] The firm offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data-as-a-service". "It was not written under the name of Frank, which is telling," the former Snowflake executive said. "CEOs can sometimes suffer from a kind of weakness where they want to be liked," Asheem Chandna, a software investor at Greylock and a friend of Slootman, told Insider. After that, Frank attended Erasmus University Rotterdam where he studied for more than 7 years from 1978 to 1985. He'd stay for 20 or 30 minutes, and the customers' jaws would drop and they'd be on the edge of their seat. I have no playbooks, I am entirely From what we have known, Frank Slootman is married to his wife Brenda Lynne Slootman. Under his sales leadership, Snowflake has grown its annual product revenue from $0 to over $1 billion. Slootman: I admire Slootman's long-time right-hand man, Michael Scarpelli, who had worked with Slootman at both ServiceNow and Data Domain, took over the chief financial officer job from Tuchscherer. Mr. Slootman is a billionaire businessman who was born on 3rd October 1958 in Holland. The IPO was the third for Slootman, who moved to California for a job at Compuware in the dot-com boom, then worked at Borland Software. from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a J.D. Prior to Oracle, Benoit worked at Bull Information Systems. That someone was Frank Slootman. If Im doing a bad job, you should go ahead and fire me. A Pac52 sailboat like Slootman's Invisible Hand costs between $1.8 million and $2.5 million. But sailing couldn't keep him occupied for long. Cofounders Dageville and Cruanes are counting on Slootman and CFO Scarpelli to steer Snowflake through the stock markets gyrations. "So Frank talked to me for two minutes and he was, like, 'Wow. In December, Bloomberg reported that Slootman's stock options were valued at $108 million monthly, thanks to its then market cap of $120 billion. He also owned and sailing a boat called Invisible Hand and co-funded the Pac52yachting regatta. summer of 2003 until its acquisition by EMC during the summer of 2009. Snowflake is a special company, they just dont This stock is being completely driven by the Robinhood crowd., Perhaps Slootmans greatest triumph so far: selling both outside experts and those within the company on the possibilities of Snowflake 2.0, its shift from being a data warehouse to more of a data hub on which businesses can securely (and temporarily) share information with each other, develop apps and feed their data into artificial intelligence tools. Previously, Sunny has held leadership roles at VMWARE, JDSU, Deloitte Consulting and Andersen Consulting. Analysts say it continues to beat Amazon and the tech giants products head-to-head; as Snowflake gets bigger, it can negotiate better rates, too, driving down its operating costs. But one former senior employee defended Slootman's approach to social issues. Slootman, 62, took over a nondescript conference room on the second floor of Snowflakes Dublin, California, office, embarking on a series of meetings that now rank with Mark Zuckerbergs Harvard dorm coding sessions in terms of value per hour. He recalled one instance when Slootman referred to ServiceNow's customers as its "homies. After needing just over $5 million in investment in its first two low-profile years, by early 2018, when Snowflake reached a valuation of $1.8 billion, it had raised almost a half-billion. "I crawled on the shore in this country, literally with 100 bucks in my pockets, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that," Slootman told Forbes. Slootmans my-way-or-the-highway attitude caused a stir when he arrived at Snowflake on April 26, 2019, hours after cofounders Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes informed well-liked CEO Bob Muglia, a Microsoft veteran, that his services were no longer required. Instacart Appoints Frank Slootman, Chairman And CEO Of Snowflake, To He has more than 15 years of management and leadership experience. After the Data Domain acquisition, Slootman spent two years inside EMC as president of the Backup and Recovery Systems Division. Slootman came on board in early May 2019 and started his sterling resume in the enterprise software world. This stock is being completely driven by the Robinhood crowd.. The former Snowflake executive recalled Slootman once saying: "I'm not good at hobbies. Dominic Ruso, ServiceNow's former vice president of finance, replaced Balaguras. It also changes over time. Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, on the day of its 2020 IPO, Sept. 16th, 2020. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Of the virtual IPO he says, I absolutely loved it.. I still dont think Ive ever taken anybody out of a job too soon. The energy, buoyancy, and temperament in this country greatly appeal to me. "I never decided to go back or talked to anybody. From 2011 until 2018, Mark served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Palo Alto Networks, a global cybersecurity company, and as Vice Chairman of the Board until December 2022. It currently boasts a market capitalization of $81 billion on trailing sales of roughly $580 million. Frank Slootman currently serves as Chairman and CEO at Snowflake. This story appears in the March 31, 2021 issue of Forbes Magazine. I would say, 'We're spending like drunken sailors,' and they would say, 'Yes, keep doing it.' Mar 11, 2021, 11:30 ET. Frank explained. Business is what I'm good at.". Snowflake, a cloud-based data-warehousing company, went public at $120 a share, and has since seen shares trade as high as $328 per share. I worked on the merger of Burroughs and Sperry which became Unisys. Updated Jun 8, 2021, 8:46am PDT. That lasted until April this year when he stepped into the chairman and CEO role at Snowflake. Very large enterprises are choosing a vendor to go to bed with for five years, minimum, says Patrick Colville, an analyst at Deutsche Bank. Frank Slootman. Amping it up with Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman - SiliconANGLE So why did the Snowflake VCs call on Slootman? Founded by billionaire Fred Luddy, ServiceNow was cash-flow-positive and doubling revenue, but understaffedanemic, as Slootman now says. He is still on the boards at Pure and Elementum. In addition, her organization managed finance for the companys supply chain, marketing, corporate communications, operations, HR, and IT groups. . Blocks & Files: Are you still involved in regatta racing with your yacht Invisible Hand? The day he took the company public on Nasdaq in 2007, shares jumped 66%; two years later, EMC outbid rival NetApp to acquire the business for $2.4 billion. Start your free trial. "If you tell most people that, they'll be like, 'Wow, that sounds like an amazing company. Who is Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman? | The US Sun Frank has always refrained from talking about them even in his interviews. "At the end of the day, there is a pretty fierce competition for talent, and people are going to vote with their feet," Bullinger said. "I'm sure anyone who was a woman or a minority group or LGBT was like, 'What the heck? Mark also serves on the boards of Cisco, GoDaddy and Pure Storage. Along the way, investors witnessed his brusque leadership style firsthand when Leone made the mistake of interrupting Slootman with unprompted advice in a board meeting. degree from UC Hastings College of the Law. We may never exactly know why the investors of Snowflake unceremoniously dumped its chairman and CEO Bob Muglia, just a few months after a $450m funding round that valued the cloud data warehouse startup at $3.5bn. We sailed straight in. Slootman: Sailing is in ones blood. Chief Marketing Officer. Christian earned his bachelors degree in Industrial Engineering from Los Andes University, and he is a named inventor on numerous Snowflake patents. What's between them going even faster?'". Prior to Oracle, Benoit worked at Bull Information Systems. But Slootman was more interested in running the show, and Snowflake seized the opportunity. Kramer holds a bachelor of science degree in mathematics from Purdue University and received the Purdue University College of Science Distinguished Alumni award in 2017. doing well, like Snowflake. After fighting so hard to become a CEO, Slootman doesnt know how to do anything else. "He's very much like 'Don't ask me to do things that optically look good or that are PC because that's not Frank,'" he said. by Frank Slootman. Frank Slootman - Wikitia He's focused on making shareholders money. To make the company more Wall Street ready, Snowflake started working with its bigger customers to show them where they were wasting money running needless reports. Chief Financial Officer. He is also on the board of Maplebear, Inc. and Elementum Ltd. (United States). But this whole Snowflake exercise could have turned out dramatically different, the CEO says, if the founders had pursued their original premise for what the company should be. Scarpelli got to work on Snowflakes books. The former sailor runs pre-IPO companies like a tightly rigged high-performance watercraft, a captain with extreme confidence who will throw overboard anyone who shows the mildest mutinous inclination.