YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Slootman

lines on the record: 68
first: 2023-08-08
most recent: 2023-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“An incredible shot at changing their station in life, advancing their careers, where 10 years from now they still feel like, well, this is the best thing I ever did. And I get a lot of that from people that have worked with us in our prior companies. And it's very personally rewarding to hear that, that they still have sort of this warm feelings about the experience 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 ever thought they were, right? That success to me is achieving that. My partner ecosystem, I want them to be wildly excited about being our partner. They're succeeding with us, right? So we try to make all parties succeed in their own worlds with us, employees have their own agenda, their families, they have circumstances, they have issues. So, you know, we help them and everybody.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's just not a word that I'm constantly thinking about or thinking about that, you know, at all. 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? I find that very sort of a lot of self-absorption around that stuff. I need to live beyond the grave. I really don't need to. And I don't want to be feel so important that that's even a question. My enterprises that I'm in charge of must succeed. They must succeed because that is the contract that I have with all my stakeholders. They're not just investors. Obviously, I want them to succeed because the investors succeed with us. My employees are going to succeed as well. I'm trying to give my employees, you know.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get that, right? But it's like culture. It doesn't mean that people are bad, you know, when they don't want culture. It just means that they are not a fit. They're just different.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other people will want to follow that. They will do it because they feel like 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. The lack of leadership, you know, people go slow, they go substandard. I mean, it's just a hellish world. 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, all 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 handle it. I need kids from school at 4 p.m.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, having eye standards goes back to the insanely great Steve Japs. I mean, he had really hard time dealing with mediocrity in any realm. It's very hard to live with, by the way, because 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 know treat people that way at all. But at the same time, you know, the leadership needs to really reinforce”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have hiring targets and they're just slamming bodies. And it's the worst thing ever, right? 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, yeah, it's probably okay. No, probably okay is not the 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 got to bring that into your recruiting culture. It's like it's not like a check-a-box see a Monday. No.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of information is manifesting or it's still confusing and contradicting and all this kind of stuff. And then we go outside. We go call people that we know or have known and say, hey, you really want to hear from people that have directly worked with them and say, 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. Because 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. And the thing is, you're going to learn, you're going to get great conviction now because, you know what? I think we're really on to a great person. Or you're like, wow, I'm glad I made these calls because, you know, we were, this was not trending correctly at all. And I find that people rush, especially in growing companies.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Write code that does this. So you can very much test people's skills that way. But in the other roles where people become good at selling themselves because they've learned that over the years and 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. 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 you were a contemporary. And, you know, what was that person's reputation and so on? You learn a whole bunch of things very quickly. You don't even have to go outside of your own company to find out. And then you see if consistency...”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, like they put them in front of a whiteboard and say, here's, you know.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because most people want to lay the bar lower and, you know, not rock the boat, not be confrontational because all that stuff is hard, hard, hard.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to confront your demons basically go after the things that didn't work that were wrong. God, if you can get people to, because most people, you know, they're afraid they're going to defend their decisions. Especially when it's a gray zone, right? In other words, some people are not good enough to keep not bad enough to fire. Those are the worst cases because like, well, person looks nice, speaks well, articulate, you know, but they're the ultimate passenger, they never move a dial, right? And those are the ones that always survive way too long until we have mass layoffs and all this kind of crap going on. But you can get people to say no. 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 of, you know, basically very unyielding, uncompromising. That's hard.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, what you want. And when I do it, basically now it gives permission to everybody else to do it. I'm basically politically neutralizing 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 biggest mistakes are always around hiring. 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 sometimes I talked about this in the book as well. I may make mistakes again and again on the same topic. But the one thing I will tell you is that I won't stop until I get it right, okay? In other words, 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 place that we need to be. So that's very powerful message to people to say, look, this is the behavior.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. But if you can fail fast, 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 moment. Like, hey, you know, I really screwed this up. 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 my dumb decisions now, all right? In other words, fail fast, you know, have urgency around your bone head, you know, positions that you made and the things that are not working.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, of course, and then people talk about this all the time. I mean, social media credit, the fake news phenomenon, because so many people use social media to inform their reality, which I don't recommend that, by the way. I always tell people, turn that shit off, man, because you're distorting how you really should be interpreting things. I don't like that. Is that 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. It can change the realities. How's that going to go? You can see the opportunities for abuse becoming extraordinary. Yeah, we're going to 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?”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's just going to be a renaissance in intelligence and computing and how we mobilize data for purposes. Yeah, it's a great time to be alive. And I think the innovation will drive a lot of new employment. We will also have a lot of obsolescence in jobs and even functions and industries and processes. But that's the nature of a capitalist free economy. Creative destruction is just the nature of stuff. And we do pretty well with that, even though it can be disruptive. I mean, we used to learn one profession and that would last us for our lifetime. Now you need to shift more than once a year 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.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in this state compared to the surrounding states, A, what's going on, B, am I going to have it again next quarter? C, what might I do about it, right? So we just stop underwriting in this geography altogether, which is what's happening in California right now, or obviously it's a pricing issue because how do we price risk? Is it a policy issue? Those are questions that, you know, God, analysts will be launched on, right? Because people would do the reasoning, not the system, that the system becomes like an advisor to you in literally in damn near real time. So our relationship with data is going to get amped up here to use a term in ways that we just can't even imagine. Obviously, content generation is what everybody's looking at and they find it very cool and it is, you know, but how is it going to work in medicine? How is it going to work in education?”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“searches for data. So I really see what data is going to just get catapult into the future here, just unbelievable. We'll be able to ask harder and harder and harder questions of our own proprietary data and get better and better and more valuable answers. I mean, it's fairly easy to use natural language interfaces now, the whole text to SQL has become table stakes. I mean, you can interrogate Salesforce data on Snowflake, what just text a SQL. And it's really nice, by the way. I mean, hell, it's a hell of a lot better than using dashboards for the most part. Not all of it, but for the most part. So fine, that's a step forward. But I want to ask very business specific questions, insurance company may say, hey, I have disproportionate bodily injury claims.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The 24 hour cycle. So every month you would get there. That was already a big deal back then. So things have progressed. Our relationship with data has progressed very, very slowly, painfully difficult. And obviously the biggest change we had until now was really the introduction of search, right? I mean, it's now 25 years ago. I mean, I became a search junkie. I still am to this because I find it so empowering in terms of your relationship with data. But search now feels old because it matches on strings. It's stateless. I mean, it doesn't remember a damn thing from one search to the next. And it has no context. If you search on Snowflake, you might get the weather. You might get the social phenomenon. Or you might get the company because it doesn't know. It just knows the word. So we now have opportunities to massively enrich and contextualize.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 80s when we have what we back then called decision support systems. We didn't even have the term of business intelligence or none of those terms even existed back then. But especially then, by the way, there were only certain verticals that did this, like retail was really big on it. They would be able to sort of break the skews down by location and channel and store and all these things. Very, very granular detailed data. These were massive mainframe processes that would run, usually on a monthly basis, let alone.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It takes many forms. Some things are incredibly disruptive. Some things are marginal. So, by the way, the rest of your organization will not have this posture because you got their heads down. They're very much in a pattern in the mode. So that means that you really, you don't want to have that mode about you as the CEO, as the leader. You want to be basically, you make everybody else work. You got your head up when they have their head down.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the need for transformation people don't expect to because we have a very humans have a very linear attitude about the world. In other words, it's just going to 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 how to successfully deal with that in 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 the 1400, the 1400. I mean, how many companies are still there that were there 20 years ago and 30 years ago and 50 years ago, right? So you got to, as a leader, as a CEO, you got to be extremely open-minded about what is happening, right? And not assume the linearity of the business.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The early adopters in Jeffrey Moore's style of thinking are very, very different than when you get across the chasm and you're dealing with a more mainstream customer because they buy differently. 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 if he was an earlier adopter. Okay. So by definition, he didn't. Why didn't he? So he has different ways of assessing and thinking 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. And then it becomes a question, okay, we have to adjust. We have to change. We got to do all these things.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always told other CEOs, especially people that are sort of first time CEOs and new, 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. The world does change. The technology changes. I mean, you see a lot of that right now with AI, obviously, people's perspectives and 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 in all my years of doing things. But you also...”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 I should be too. So you bring forward. But people see me talk in front of a customer. They go and they see the customer react and they see the customer ask questions. They're like, hey, 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 today. 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. I've seen it. The results are there. It works.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 got to be very, very careful with second and third hand information. And sometimes I got to whip people up the hill. It's like, look, you guys are basically, you're intimidated by the marketplace. Your own worst enemy because you just lack fortitude and confidence and you can't articulate things. And that's, you know, that's all under the header of sales enablement, right? And I personally get after this. I'm very aggressive in terms of really pressing our case in front of the customers in the marketplace because I need my organization to do the same thing. If I'm not doing it, then they're not either or they're not going to go at it with the same confidence.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, it is often a little bit of both, which is what creates the confusion around these topics. But look, I can't tell you how many customer sized prospect calls I've already been in this week. It's Friday. And there were numerous when I was talking to seven or eight banks this week, CIOs, CEOs. I experienced reality the way the salespeople are, obviously a little bit differently because I talk to higher level people and organizations. But, you know, I experience things firsthand. What you don't want to do is sort of, you know, rely on information because you just get a secondhand, third-hand, fourth-hand, and you don't know whether you're dealing with a feeble person that has no fortitude or whether you're dealing with a real issue. So there's no substitute for inspecting things at the front lines and really be part of it. I always tell those people, if I can't sell, I'm not expecting you to sell it. Okay.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like to hire salespeople who have really been in shitfights because that breeds the type of skills and focus that you really want to have rather than people that are good at quoting and picking up orders.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were amazing. I mean, you benchmark these products, and sometimes they were an order of magnitude faster, you know, because of all the architectural breakthroughs and the provisioning of the workloads. So people were like, wow, I mean, that wow experience 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. I mean, we used to see that with companies like VMware as well. I mean, once people were sold on virtualization, I mean, all they were doing is picking up orders, right? This is actually 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?”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've certainly seen that with my own eyes in various companies. I used to say about Snowflake, it's like a two-year-old golden retriever. All I got to do is parade him around and everybody's going to want one. And it sometimes wasn't that far off because it was the benefits”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Product people to a very high standard because we have to make very average salespeople productive in a very predictable manner. That's hard. And that's exactly our, 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.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great salespeople can't sell a bad product, right? But lousy salespeople can sell a great product, okay? And that's very important because oftentimes in Silicon Valley, they think that sales is the problem. And I'm like, no, because if you had a great product, even an average or a below average salesperson will be able to sell it, right? And typically sales problems are product problems, but typically that's not the initial assessment because you don't want your baby to be called ugly and the investors around the table have invested in your technology, so you don't want to openly face your demons and really confront things the way they really are. And that then leads to a focus and solutions that don't work. Like, well, let's hire another VPS sales. Well, I won't work because your product is the problem, you know? So I do hold...”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, there's tension there, sometimes healthy, sometimes not as healthy. And it's a relationship that has to be managed very aggressively, certainly on 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, what the sales organization is succeeding. The alignment, again, is number one. 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? So that dialogue goes on all the time. We make mistakes. We prioritize incorrectly. We're too slow on certain things. I mean, all these things happen, right? But that's a continuous force field that we're working on. The thing about sales is that”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to lay the foundation for the next one and the rest of the year. So you got to think much more long term, much more strategic about your business rather than I'm just trying to hit a number for the quarter.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every single line of business, channel, geography, and so on, right? And if that becomes the culture, the expectation and the reality, you're going to do way better than the rest of them. Because sales tends to be a very unevenly distributed thing and you want to work on that. So the expectation is, you know, I don't care how far ahead of plan you are. You have a shitty quarter. That's now 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 not consistent, you better find a way to get there. Not overnight, but you're going to make moves. What moves are you going to 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 got to do both. It's not just about making the quarter.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sales is harder, which is why the rest of our organization needs to be in alignment and in support of them. So the alignment is really important, right? That we really provision the whole company behind that because they are experiencing reality in the marketplace. And we, the rest of us have to adjust to that. We got to help them. We got to 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 going to do about it? 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. What we can't have is like, well, yeah, the back quarter, but I'm going to 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.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 arrowhead. 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 arrowhead. 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 and the most profound way 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.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very, very rewarding in a very deep 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 amazing, okay? Especially when it comes from me as a CEO. And they're like, my God, you're taking time out of your day to tell me this. I'm like, yes, we are.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's recognition and celebration. We, for example, we have equity awards in sales for people that are landing designated customers that we desperately want. And they're often surprised because they may have forgotten about it because it's not just something that only happens when you land certain customers. We all get on it to send notes, have conversations, reference it in other conversations. All of a sudden everybody knows the whole company like, wow, this guy, this team did this. And they're like, wow, you know, they're bathing in glory. And salespeople live for that. I mean, you have to live for money. I know. They're coin operated, but they also live for recognition because that is just, you know.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Possible. Again, that's a merit performance culture 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 part of how we go about doing that.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 they can really give a credible message back. And employees will also ask, hey, if I wanted to have 150% bonus or whatever number, what do I have to do? 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, don't beg on recognizing great work. I think great people need to be celebrated and rewarded and singled out in every way.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All your people. There needs to be a bell court. We want to know who was deserving of 2x3x versus who is deserving of zero so that we see the full spectrum, the bell curve, if you will, of people that are performing incredibly well and the ones who are not in good standing. This is not so much about, oh, I don't want to give money 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 to feel like they're treated the same way as people that are obviously not in good standing. That just, you know, that creates a, that's not a performance culture. So we do this every quarter and in the beginning when people have not lived this life before, it's very challenging for them. It's like, oh my God, I got to have a conversation like this about money and performance every single quarter with every single person. How do I do that?”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, the relationship with the people around you, your team and your managers, like are people driving you to higher standards or are they not? Are they accepting of the way things are? But one way we do this, this is throughout your organization. All our employees that are not in sales because salespeople are on commission plans. But every quarter, the company has to earn the bonus pool. In other words, the money that we're going to use for bonus, we have to earn it. And we tell people how we earn it, exactly what the metrics are. And we share all of that so they know, hey, none of us are going to get bonuses unless the company gets paid. But once we earns it, now we're starting to allocate the bonus money to managers and departments. And we just say, look, you use this money to send messages to...”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They start from scratch. Well, they're going to get the better of you unless you develop that attitude in your own company, in your own business as well.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, depending on what happened in between. But I generally like people who sort of constantly are very, very strongly aware of where they are versus where they could be. I rarely use the word proud or pride because that signals a profound happiness with the status quo. And I don't have that 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 currently experiencing. If we could do it all over again, what would we do, right? Those kinds of conversations. So it's very refreshing. You're constantly sort of reinventing 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 existed.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This stuff, and that's very powerful. 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, you know, we were a bigger exit than the next 10 competitors combined all this kind of stuff. But then people started saying, oh, you're just lucky. You know how that goes, right? Well, that just puts on the afterburners for me. It's like, oh, I'll show you luck. And that's attitude. And attitude is something I like in people. I like people that have attitude that have a chip on their shoulder, that have a burning need and desire to prove something. Over the years, that will wear off a little bit. That is just the nature of things. I mean, when you're 18, you have a very different life experience than when you're 40 years older.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm probably one of those people myself. But, you know, yes. I mean, look, what does drive come from? Where does ambition come from? 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. But 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.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not 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. 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 got to go get that back fast.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's your role in that? Yeah, that's a really important observation because larger companies, 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. 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 to the companies like, hey, we have to hang on to our youth, our innovative muscle, our audacity, our daring. And, you know, I always say, look, hierarchy, orc church mean nothing to us. We operate through influence. If you can convince people, great. And if you can't, well, then you just can't. It doesn't matter what your title is or what organization 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.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grinding down to a halt and things are too slow, momentum is not happening. Revisiting 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 based on what we're seeing. That's okay. You don't know everything ahead of time, right? So you learn day by day and you calibrate and adjust from there.”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, greatly depends on what it is. 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. Sometimes it's not. And then we can address obviously more than one thing. Most product organizations obviously have lists of projects and maintaining, moving all these things along with the focus and velocity and momentum. Yeah, that's the art of management. You will know when things are”
2023-08-08 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT