How I Built Three Billion-dollar companiesㅣFrank Slootman CEO at SnowFlake

People who are always asking us and they say, hey, you know, you've got three really successful companies. There must be a secret here. Okay, it's terrible. You want great. You want fantastic. You want wow. Everybody is just excited about it. This is how you create energy and organization. So leadership is about, no, we're not going to go slow. We are going to go this fast. This is not a popularity contest. Struggle and failure is not just normal. It's the norm. I mean failure and struggle are very, very common. Successes are rare.

总是问我们“嘿，你知道吗，你们有三家非常成功的公司。一定有秘密在这里。”的人，这很糟糕。你想要卓越。你想要出色。你想要惊艳。每个人都充满兴奋。这就是如何创造能量和组织。因此，领导力就是，不，我们不会慢慢来。我们要这样快速前进。这不是人气比赛。挣扎和失败不仅是正常的，而是常态。我的意思是失败和挣扎是非常常见的。成功是罕见的。

I'm Frank Sloobin. I'm the chairman, CEO of Snowflake. Snowflake is a data management platform that was completely redesigned and reimagined for cloud scale computing. First of all, you know, Snowflake grew from zero to one billion dollars in revenue faster than any company in history. I've been here almost exactly four years before that. I was the CEO of ServiceNow. I've been doing this kind of work for the last 20 years. So it'll be time to hang it up one day, but not now. I was born and raised in Netherlands and Europe. I'm a native Dutch speaker. I was educated there as well. I came to the United States at a relatively young age. Almost all my work experience is US-based.

嗨，大家好，我是Frank Sloobin，也是Snowflake公司的董事长和首席执行官。Snowflake是一款完全重新设计和想象出的数据管理平台，可以应用于云计算规模。首先，你们知道吗，Snowflake的收入从零到十亿美元的速度比历史上任何一家公司都要快。我来到这里已经将近四年时间了。在此之前，我是ServiceNow公司的CEO。我进行这种工作已经20年了。虽然有一天应该会退役，但现在还没有到那个时候。我在荷兰和欧洲出生和长大。我的母语是荷兰语，也在那里接受教育。我年轻时来到美国。几乎所有我的工作经验都是基于美国。

I had an internship when I was still in school with a company called Uniroil. They made artificial leather for automotive applications car sheeting. I just saw the decline of that industry happening in real time and it's, you know, people getting laid off. And I'm like, this is not the future, you know. I learned from that experience is that you want to step into an elevator that goes up. You don't want to step in an elevator that goes down because the elevator is going to either go up. It's going to go down or it's not going to move. You can't do anything about it. So you need to choose very carefully, you know, what kind of an industry you're getting into. You want to be in a growing, expanding industry because that's where the opportunities, you know, will be. If you're good and you picked a wrong elevator, nothing will happen. I knew that, you know, even in the mid-80s, you know, we all knew that computers were the thing of the future. You know, IBM was sort of a gold standard at the time. They rejected me like 10 or 12 times. I finally gave up.

我曾在Uniroil这家公司做实习生，在学校的时候，他们制造汽车应用的人工皮革和汽车遮盖。我看到了这个行业正在现实中衰落，你知道，人们被裁减。我就像，这不是我们未来想要的。我从这次经历中学到的是，你要选择那些正迎头向前的行业。你不想进入一个下降的电梯，因为电梯要么上升，要么下降，要么不动。你什么都做不了。所以你需要非常仔细地选择你进入什么样的行业。你想参与的是一个增长而扩张的行业，因为那里有机会。如果你很出色但是选的电梯不对，什么都不会发生。我知道，即使在80年代中期，我们都知道计算机是未来的大事。当时，IBM是一个金标准。他们拒绝了我10或12次。我最后放弃了。

It's taken me years to realize they did me a favor by not hiring me. I certainly had a number of experiences that were hard because I was a foreigner in this country. I took a lot of jobs that other people wouldn't take. A broken products, failing businesses. But, you know, the irony is you learn a great deal from having to run things that are not in good shape that have problems because, you know, in the fullness of time when you get to run, you know, much better opportunities, you know, you'll know what to look for, you know, things that are right with businesses, things that are not right. You know, in tech, you know, it's a little bit like playing cards. You need a good hand and you need to know how to play the cards. You need both. I mean, if you don't have good cards, it doesn't matter how well, you know, you play them because the cards are no good. Do you have good cards? You know how to play them. That's the perfect combination.

用了好几年的时间，我才意识到他们不雇用我其实是在帮助我。因为我作为外国人在这个国家有很多经历都很艰难。我接过很多别人不愿意接的工作，处理破损的产品，经营不顺利的生意。但是，你知道，讽刺的是，当你要经营那些有问题，不顺利的事情时，你可以学到很多经验。因为你知道，不管何时，当你有机会经营更好的事情时，你会知道该关注哪些方面，哪些是对的，哪些是不对的。你知道，在科技行业，有点像玩牌游戏，你需要一手好牌还得知道如何打。这两个方面缺一不可。如果你手上没有好牌，无论你打得多么好，都没有用，因为牌不好。你有好牌吗？你知道如何打好它们吗？那就是完美的组合。

Service Nile and Snowflake had product market fit, but they had to be massively expanded. We couldn't stay where we are for a day of the day. It was about figuring out product market fit. How do you get that? That was my first CEO role and it was a startup. It had 15 people. It had no revenue, no customers. It was unproven. We didn't know whether it was going to be a viable opportunity. You know, I still remember signing the first contract ever, you know, for that company. It's like $5,000. Amped up. It's a title of the book. People ask me, what's the message of the book? I said, the message of the book is the title. You know, I wrote the book really to answer a question that people were always asking us and they say, hey, you know, you've had three really successful companies. There must be a secret here or a playbook or something.

"Nile和Snowflake的产品市场适配已经很好了，但我们必须大规模扩展。我们不能停留在原地不前。这关乎到找到产品市场适配。怎样才能做到呢？这是我第一次作为CEO的角色，是一家初创公司。当时只有15个人，没有收入，没有客户，一切都是未知数。我们不知道它是否会成为一个可行的机会。你知道吗，我仍然记得签署了该公司的第一份合同，那时是5000美元。《Amped Up》是这本书的标题。人们问我，这本书的信息是什么？我说，这本书的信息就是标题。我写这本书的真正目的是为了回答人们一直在问我们的问题：嘿，你们有三个非常成功的公司。一定有什么秘密或者策略吧。"

The premise of the book is this, okay? There's opportunity for organizations to take up in almost every realm, every conversation that you and I have, every email that we write, we have a chance to focus, intensify and raise the quality and the speed and the intensity and the urgency behind it. It's an opportunity that you have, but not necessarily an opportunity that everybody takes because people get tired. They just want to check a box. They want to move it off their desk. They want to go home. They want to have a drink. So they're not concentrating hard enough on the opportunities.

这本书的前提就是说，机构在几乎每个领域都有机会去发掘。每一次你和我交谈，每一封邮件，我们都有机会去关注、集中、提升质量、速度以及紧迫感。这是你的机会，但并不是每个人都会抓住它，因为人们会感到疲倦，他们只想打勾，从桌子上清除它，回家，喝一杯。所以他们没有足够的精力去集中精力在这些机会上。

You know, the first place, you know, where you can amp things up, it's really raised the quality of what you're doing. Are you doing something? It's just good enough and it's kind of okay or is this something that everybody is incredibly excited about and is just blown away by? That's a different standard and it doesn't take that much more mental energy, you know, to do something great than to do something passable. In other words, okay, good enough, you know, check the box and that requires a lot of mental energy because, you know, if you present something to me and I'm bored by it, I'm not energized and excited, I'm not going to want to do what you do because I'm just not interested or excited because it's kind of like, okay, okay, it's terrible, okay? You want great, you want fantastic, you want wow.

你知道的，第一个地方，就是你可以加强的地方，它可以真正提高你正在做的事情的质量。你是在做什么吗？是刚好好的还是每个人都感到非常激动和兴奋的呢？这是一个不同的标准，你不需要比做一件普通的事情多消耗多少精力就可以做出伟大的事情。换句话说，刚刚好，刚刚过关，需要很多精力，因为你知道，如果你向我展示一些令我感到无聊的东西，我不会有兴趣和激动，我不会想做你所做的事情，因为我不感兴趣或兴奋，因为这有点像，“好吧，这太糟糕了，好吧？”你想要的是伟大的，是梦幻般的，是惊人的。

Everybody is just excited about this. This is already a great energy in organizations. The same is true, you know, we just talked about alignment, you know, really important that we bring everybody in alignment to the mission because now we're all working together for real. We're all on the same boat, we're all pulling on the same ore, right? Now we feel like we're together in the mission as opposed to everybody's kind of doing their own thing. That's an opportunity.

大家都对这个感到兴奋。这已经在组织内产生了很大的能量。同样地，你知道，我们刚刚谈到了对齐，真的很重要，我们要让每个人都对使命对齐，因为现在我们真正地齐心协力地工作。我们都在同一艘船上，划着同样的浆，对吧？现在我们感觉像是一起在使命中前进，而不是每个人都在做自己的事情。这是一个机会。

Tempo and pace is an opportunity. Organizations move very, very slowly if you let them because people go slower and slower and slower, but why not? They have to be at the office eight hours a day, so why go any faster? So people become lethargic if you let them. So leadership is about, no, we're not going to go slow. We are going to go as fast as we know how. There's going to be tempo, pace, there's going to be fast follow-up, there's going to be lots of questions. There's going to be intensity behind it. It brings up, you know, the level of energy, the level of focus, and we're going to get to a much quicker result, quicker outcome, a much better outcome, right?

节奏和步伐是一个机会。如果你让组织缓慢下来，人们就会越来越慢，但为什么呢？他们每天必须在办公室待八个小时，所以为什么要加快速度呢？如果你放任他们，人们就会变得懒惰。领导力在于，不，我们不会慢下来。我们会尽可能地快。会有节奏、步速、快速跟进、大量问题。会有强烈的力度推动它。这会提升能量和关注度水平，我们将达成更快的结果、更好的结果，对吧？

When you want to have good people, they really crave an environment that is energized, that has high standards, you know, that's impatient. You know, you and I have been in meeting and we need to have a follow-up because it's like, okay, you're going to say, all right, I'm going to come back to you in two weeks and I'm like, no, how about tomorrow morning or the next day? What are you going to do over two weeks? I'm losing interest in the topic over two weeks, okay? Two weeks is way too long. Two days max. I prefer actually tomorrow morning. So why don't you go figure out what you can between now and tomorrow morning? And maybe it's too soon, well then we'll do it the next day, okay? You keep compressing the time frames because people can move much faster than they think they're capable of and they can do much better than they think they're capable of. The leadership does is they get them there, okay?

当你想要拥有优秀的人才时，他们非常渴望一个充满活力、具有高标准、急迫的环境。你知道的，你和我在会议中，我们需要有跟进，因为这就像是，好的，你会说：好的，我会在两周内回来找你。但是，我觉得不行，为什么不明天早上或后天呢？在两周内你要做什么？我对这个话题的兴趣在两周内就会消失。两周太长了，两天最多。我更喜欢明天早上。因此，为什么不去找出现在到明天早上之间你可以做什么呢？如果时间太短，那么我们可以在第二天再做。你要不断压缩时间框架，因为人们能够比他们认为自己能够快得多并且做得比他们想象得要好得多。领导的工作就是把他们带到那里。

It's no flex mission, you know, and we've set this since the IPO is, you know, we are here to mobilize the world's data and we say mobilize is to extract maximum value from data and you know, we do that through the data cloud, that's our strategy. Data cloud means is, you know, there is an orbit of data, it's unfettered access, you know, I can overlay, blend and join data from unlimited numbers of sources, different data types and I can extract the maximum potential out of data science and data analytics. That's really what we're doing.

这是一项非常重要的使命，我们从IPO开始就设定了这个目标，你知道，我们的使命是推动全球数据的使用，我们所说的推动是从数据中提取最大价值，我们通过数据云进行操作，这是我们的策略。 数据云的意思是，你知道，有一个数据轨道，它有无限的接入，我可以从无数的来源、不同的数据类型中叠加、融合并连接数据，从而从数据科学和数据分析中提取最大的潜力。这确实是我们正在做的事情。

The snowflake is a data strategy, you know, for large institutions, large enterprises. The point of a mission is that you have a precise definition about what you're doing because if it's not precise then it's vague. That means you're going to be wasting a lot of resources because you don't really know what you're aiming for because it's just too vague and too general. Like in the military they have very, very precise missions, right? We are going to take that hill or it's very, very precise. They know it when they do it. In business, you know, we often have beautiful flowery language about things we want to do but how do you even know you're achieving it? Right?

“雪花是一种数据策略，适用于大型机构和企业。任务的关键在于你必须清楚地定义自己的目标，因为如果目标不清晰，那就太含糊了。这意味着你会浪费很多资源，因为你不知道自己到底在追求什么，因为目标太过于宽泛。就像在军队中，他们有非常非常精确的任务，对吧？我们要夺取那座山或者是非常精确的。他们做到了就知道。在商业中，我们经常会用美丽的花言巧语来描述我们想要做的事情，但你怎么能知道你是否实现了它呢？对吧？”

So the second thing is you want a mission to be, you know, relatively narrow, right? Because you can do a lot of things at the same time but you can do, you concentrate all your resources on a very, very specific thing. You have really the opportunity to achieve that and relatively quickly because the narrower the plane of attack and the more resources are applied to it, more likelihood that it actually is going to happen. So this notion of mission posture also protects you against what we call mission creep. But the mission is creeping. It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. You want to keep it very tight, you know. We are going to do this thing and just this thing. So I think it's a useful way of thinking about purpose and how to provision and mobilize organizations against objectives. Otherwise, we're just a group of people running around doing stuff, hoping for the best.

所以第二件事是，你希望任务相对窄一些，对吧？因为你可以同时做很多事情，但你可以集中所有资源在一个非常非常具体的事情上。你真的有机会迅速实现它，因为进攻的平面越狭窄，应用的资源越多，它实际上发生的可能性就越大。因此，任务态势的这种概念还可保护您免受我们称之为任务蔓延的影响。但任务正在蔓延。它变得越来越大。你要保持它非常紧密，知道我们只会做这件事。因此，我认为这是一种有用的思考目的的方式，以及如何针对目标提供和动员组织。否则，我们只是一群人四处奔波，希望一切都能顺利。

Conviction, half conviction. You cannot be half-hearted. If the answer is not hell, yes, it's hell, no. So conviction number one, number two is courage. As a leader, you have to have courage because you'll be doing things that people may not like and you're not here to please or appease, you're here to lead. You have to bring people along even when you're doing things that are not popular. This is not a popularity contest. And then the third sea is really clarity. You got to bring great clarity to situations. How to think about things. What is going on? Right? Because everybody gets confused, you know, because conflicting information, what does it mean? How do I think about it? Leaders explain things in terms that people don't understand. That's what I mean by clarity. Courage, clarity, conviction. If you do all these three, you're well on your way to being a great leader.

坚定，必须做到毫不犹豫。如果答案不是肯定的就是否定的。所以，第一点是坚定，第二点是勇气。作为领导者，你必须有勇气，因为你要做的事情可能不受人们的喜欢，而你不是为了取悦或安抚，而是为了带领大家。即使你正在做不受欢迎的事情，你也必须带领大家。这不是一个人气比赛。第三个重要的是明确性。你必须对形势有很清晰的认识。如何思考？发生了什么事情？因为每个人都会感到困惑，因为矛盾的信息，什么意思？如何思考？领导者要用人们理解的语言解释事情。这就是我所说的明确性。勇气，明确性，坚定。如果你做到了这三点，你便是一个伟大的领导者。

What's really important for entrepreneurs is struggle and failure is not just normal. It's the norm. I mean failure and struggle are very, very common. Successes are rare. Here's the important thing. Failure and struggle are formative. They teach. They make you become the person that you need to become. In other words, you need to embrace struggle and failure as opposed to, well, you know, I'm no good at this. I should go do something else. No, you should use it as a learning experience because that's really what it is. That's somebody the other day who wrote me an email and he was fired from its CEO job and he's 32 years old. He was devastated. I'm like, this is just learning. You know, you're 32. You know, you're a baby. So, and he felt much better when I said, I said, when I was 32, I was nowhere. I'm like, really? I'm like, the text time. You know, so you need to be patient. You know, there's some people, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and famous entrepreneurs. They're very successful at the young age. That's not the norm. That should never be your expectation. Those are exceptional situations.

真正重要的是，创业者要经历挣扎和失败，并且这不仅是正常的，而是常态。我的意思是，失败和挣扎非常普遍，成功却是罕见的。这里最重要的是，失败和挣扎是形成性的，它们教育人、塑造人，并让你成为你需要成为的人。换句话说，你需要拥抱挣扎和失败，而不是认为自己不行，应该去做其他事情。你应该把这些经历看作是学习的经验，因为这就是它们真正的意义。最近有人给我写信，告诉我他被解雇了，他只有32岁，他很绝望。我告诉他：这只是一次学习。你只有32岁，你还年轻。当我32岁的时候，我也什么也不是啊。所以你需要有耐心。有些成功的创业者，像马克·扎克伯格，很年轻就获得了成功。但这并不是常态，你不应该期望这样的结果。这些都是例外的情况。

So, struggle is formative and embrace it rather than I hate my life because I'm not being successful. I mean not being successful is actually you will realize later on how formative and educational that was. You just can't see it right now. That's really a very important advice. When you fail, it's not a signal that you're no good. It's just means that you need to learn. And now you are.

所以，挣扎是有形成作用的，你应该接受它，而不是因为自己没有成功而讨厌自己的生活。我的意思是，不成功实际上是你后来会意识到它是多么具有形成和教育意义。你现在可能看不到它，但这真的是很重要的建议。当你失败时，这并不意味着你不好。这只是意味着你需要学习。而现在你正在学习。