Bill Gurley: Imagine competing against a team like Frank Slootman at Snowflake. What are your odds?

Original link: https://arminli.com/bill-gurley-frank-slootman/

Bill Gurley
It is said that excessive capital in the past few years has led to excessive enjoyment and higher expectations of employees, and when encountering a market reset, these adjustments (layoff / cost
reduction / back to
office) will shock and surprise them. In today’s world, cash flow is important and to survive you have to outperform your competitors. You need teammates who are ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Sadly, we may have trained some of our employees to be at odds with this mindset.

Bill
Gurley recommends an interview with Frank Slootman, saying “If you think the above is heretical, then you should imagine if you were dealing with
When Frank Slootman competes on a team like Snowflake, what are your odds? ” (historical article has an opinion on Frank and
A more detailed introduction to Snowflake, with a link at the end of the article)

then Frank Slootman
What is the team like?

Here’s a selection for the interview:

How to evaluate a team when joining a company

Check jobs, not people, and I’m going to make decisions (layoffs) very, very quickly, I’m not going to wait for it all. For example, if someone is running the HR department and the HR department doesn’t play any role, that’s enough. I’ve never fired people wrongly, and I’ve never fired people too early. However, I have had times when it was too late.

Extreme Decision Speed: How to Make Decisions in a Day

by
Snowflake
For example, I told the board of my plan before I joined and got them to endorse my plan, so I could get started on the first day I joined. I don’t want to present my proposal to the board while the company is making changes. i join
Snowflake is almost three years old, all the changes have happened in the first 90 days and nothing has changed after 90 days.

How to evaluate new executives

The role of the interview is overrated, and if your hiring is based solely on interviews, you’re crazy. You want to talk to all possible people who have lived with this person, be it superior, subordinate or peer. Ask what that person is like, what is good and what is not so good. In no time, you will have a very good picture, both in terms of performance and behavior.

People hardly spend enough time doing background checks, which are easy to do. you can go
LinkedIn Find this person’s former colleagues who also work at your company. In other words, you don’t even have to look outside the company.

Leadership requires constant conflict, what do you think is a good conflict

Conflicts are our normal behavior, I never thought they were great, the problem is that we are dissatisfied. We think that we are always dissatisfied with the status quo, there is always room for improvement, and there is always such a gap. If there is always a gap, then there is always a conflict.

“My God, you’re doing such a great job and I’m so proud of what’s going on here.” — that’s not how we talk. We’re talking about specific things that aren’t going well at work. Why don’t these people come up? It’s a very, very curious inquiry, trying to understand what’s going on, raising the bar, in other words, always having higher expectations.

I’d rather have no one than someone who isn’t functioning, because if everyone sees that person isn’t functioning, it’s going to be a real leadership trap. You didn’t do anything, but that’s why you lost your leadership. You can’t tolerate it, you should spend time looking for a replacement, you can’t tolerate mediocrity.

What’s your secret sauce when it comes to persuading senior talent to join?

Much depends on how culture affects people, because culture is not for everyone. It works for some people and not for others. Our engineering leadership is courting very, very high-end talent in the world, and they also want to work with me and
CFO
talk. This is a normal process. Because they want to know how committed I am to the department and the mission, the business.

I think hiring is obviously a sales and a merger. Because they’re all on the same spectrum, when you do M&A basically what you’re buying is talent. You can buy it through M&A, or you can buy it through recruiting.

How do you evaluate a new product by narrowing the focus?

I like to ask people, “It’s February, if you could only do one thing this year, what would it be? Why?” When you ask people what their priorities are, you get
10 or 5
indivual. In other words, they can’t reduce it to one because they’re afraid they’re wrong.

I just said, “Yeah, I’m worried you’re wrong too. That’s what this exercise is all about, that you could be wrong.”
but if you have 5 or 10
one, you’re out of it, so at this point you’ve already lost.

It’s all about building up resources on as few things as possible, and that’s when you gain momentum. You spread your resources a mile wide, and that deep, and you’re dead. You’re always shrinking what I call the attack surface, which is a concept in the cybersecurity world. A lot of organizations can’t get out of their way because there are so many things going on at the same time.

Don’t ask customers for solutions, ask questions

You don’t want customers to hand you the solution, you should want them to hand you the problem and we come up with the solution. When they say, “Here’s what you need to do”, it’s not healthy. They need to say, “This is the problem you need to solve”. Otherwise you have prematurely limited the possible outcomes. In other words, they have a view of the solution, rather than we might have come up with a very different approach.

Steve Jobs would say “when I show you it, I’ll tell you what you like”, in fact he may have listened to the questions and requests, but how he does it, can take any form, that’s innovation and where the spark occurs.

sales organization

We have been running a very high velocity sales organization in the past
20
most of the year. We think it’s a core competency and developing your own distribution capabilities is a very, very high value. If you master your own distribution, you become very powerful.

We’ve really proven this in the data world: we sell it ourselves, and we’re getting really good at selling it ourselves. We learned how to manage channels and all the dynamics in that regard. Our exit was bigger than all other companies combined, and we were 15 times the exit of the next company in the space. The point is that there is tremendous value in mastering and controlling your own distribution. You own your own destiny. If you try to lease your distribution rights to someone else, you are at the mercy of another entity. I think that is very unwise. I think over time the market has found that the whole OEM model has been eliminated.

I am here
Snowflake
The one problem with that is that when I added it, it was clearly over the chasm, but they acted like they were still in the chasm, so at that point they didn’t recognize when they had to shift gears to accelerate.

How different is your sales structure in the three companies? There is still a general structural principle

There are some principles and ways of thinking that can be generalized, but there is no blueprint or playbook that can be used out of the box. Management is the most important thing in sales, and front-line sales are what really constitutes a sales organization. On top of that, I call them the Post Office for News. They’re just sticking organizations on an org chart, and that’s not how you add people to a sales organization. Because when you put people in districts, they need to have all the capabilities and leadership, and the resources around them, in order for them to be successful. You can’t just give someone a bag and a quota and say, “Tell me what you’re going to accomplish next month.” But that’s what people do.

Instead of mindlessly executing a blueprint or a playbook, we should understand how things work when we have a problem. “Be our playbook” is the worst thing I’ve heard because it’s like we just came off the Super Bowl and they think it’s like a football team. You just throw a game playbook at a company and, poof, they make it. You need to throw away the playbook and get the facts about things based on first principles and the status quo, not, “Well, I’ve seen this before. I’ve done this before. Bang, bang, bang. Here we go. .”

Data
Domain was a very successful company, and it still is today. Founder of Data Domain at Data Domain
Then another company started, but we’re no longer there because we’re already in Service Now. They’ll say, “We’re just going to
Same thing, hire the same people, do things the same way. “
It’s unbelievable. I did it for 10 years and burned a lot of capital and sold it for asset value and they just thought, “How hard can this be? Let’s do the same thing and it will work.”
No, it won’t.

What Board Members Should Ask the CEO at Quarterly Meetings
what

Growth is incredibly important. Not just because we like being a high-growth company, but because growth is what separates winners from losers. So it’s a pretty damn important question to ask, “What’s a limit to growth and what’s not?”

What can you do to drive your growth to a higher level? when i first chat
Service Now, their annual growth is close to
100%, which is a huge number. But I still asked, “Can you guys grow faster?” They were very pissed off at the question from this guy from Silicon Valley. I don’t mean to offend anyone, I just want to understand how they view this issue. Well, they didn’t think about it.

At that time they deposited in the bank
1500
$10,000 in working capital, but not investing in the business. There is also no change in the number of their salespeople throughout the year. It doesn’t matter, the business has doubled and the sales are very efficient and they are proud of it. It’s actually pretty stupid, you know? In high-growth companies, sales productivity should be sideways or downwards, which is how you know you need to hire fast.

I’ve never gone overboard, I’ve done it many times afterwards because I’m just like everyone else, a little timid, afraid that we pour so many resources and then we can’t transform on it. That’s why people don’t. But you need to explore these boundaries, how far can I go? And what are the signals I can’t possibly get, where am I going too far? What are these restrictions? Can you push these restrictions away? As you move closer together, if you find those boundaries, you are now also learning how to move those boundaries.

why do you think
Snowflake raked in over $1 billion and is still trading at 100%
growth rate? There has never been a growth of this magnitude in the history of enterprise software. There are many reasons why this happens? Because when you break down growth and all the different elements, all those elements have to be considered, managed and resourced.

For example, one of the things that we insist on is that everyone shows up every quarter. One of the things I don’t want to hear is, “Well, in Australia, in January, everyone is on vacation. Or in
8
Month, everyone in Europe is on vacation”. Don’t care about that, everyone should show up every quarter. There’s no excuse for not showing up. It’s a discipline, it’s a mindset, it’s a commitment. This is not to say , “I can make it up later this year”. We don’t have years, we only have quarters, and a quarter is like a year.

excuses, you know, when
When COVID happened, very quickly, I started getting messages about COVID, COVID, COVID
if. So I don’t want to hear that word anymore, okay? As far as we are concerned, COVID does not exist. By the way, the company has put the COVID
It blows up like there is no tomorrow, because when you allow it to come to your mind, you are already dead. There are many ways an organization can know what to expect. You end up on a higher growth trajectory than you could possibly imagine because growth isn’t mystical, it’s just mechanical, it’s just what can you do? How fast can you do it? What is productivity? What is the growth rate? What is the conversion rate? This is something you can break.

compare business to war

The government can print money and the rest of us have to get it from others. Once you realize this, you’ll also find that they won’t be happy that you take money from them. So, the bigger you get, now you’re an imminent threat and they’ll fight back with everything they have. It does feel like a war, and not a war where people will die, but companies will die. Companies are dying every day.

It’s a pretty intuitive battle, but you know how you win, first of all, you need to define what winning is. I always quote American Grant and others who define victory as breaking the enemy’s will to fight. It’s not just killing them, it’s breaking their will to fight. You can do this in a number of ways. But in a software world, when you hire their people, you break the enemy’s will to fight because they’ve given up. They’d rather be with you than with other companies because it’s too hard, too painful, and they’re not making any money. So, “I’m going to join the winner instead of sticking to delusions”. This happens a lot in our world, if I hire a top salesperson, top engineer from another company, I’ve now brought their power into my organization. Not only did I gain their power, but they lost their power as well. So it’s a double effect, I weaken them and strengthen myself.

What is the kindest thing someone has done for you?

Hire me. My personal experience, being a foreigner in this country, speaking with a fat accent, or
30
Years ago more than now, they couldn’t even pronounce my certificate (foreign language), let alone understand the meaning. People need to give you a chance. I’m a fierce performer, and one of the reasons I have to take very bad opportunities and then massively exceed expectations in order to be commercially viable as a person. That’s where that ferocious mentality comes from because I don’t have mainstream credentials and I can’t get into the business world in this country like everyone else. So when people take their chances on me, they’re really taking a walk on the savage side.

Is this the kindest thing ever? Yes, it’s because they take personal risk. when i was in my first
When a CEO gets hired on the job… I’m still incredibly grateful. At Greylock at the time, he was the CEO and founder of Workday, then NEA’s
Scott
Sandell. They decided, “Yeah, this guy, he’s not going to lose.” They took an opportunity, and things started to get better from there. My career after I got my first job
CEO
It’s not a coincidence that it took off after work, it’s because of my natural intuition and conditioned reflexes. In other words, I don’t need to be tied down anymore.

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