Amp it Up by Frank Slootman
Raise your standards, align your people, sharpen your focus, pick up the pace, and transform your strategy
These notes were created during my reading process to capture insights for my own reference and were not compiled for the purpose of instruction or summarization. With that said, I get super excited to discuss ideas contained within, but rarely (read never) do I encounter anyone reading the same stuff. I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they attract a shared excitement to discuss or perhaps are helpful to others. Feel free to ask questions, challenge my thinking, and interact.
Opinion
I put this squarely in the category of “mentorship in a book” and I wish more successful individuals would publish these types of career autobiographies. I read this on a flight to Kansas City. It’s fast-paced and direct which I appreciated. I found Slootman’s wisdom to be broadly applicable and I definitely identify with his style of leadership. I also enjoyed learning more about the rise of Snowflake as their business is in direct competition with Oracle. If you have aspirations to lead in corporate America, at start-up, or are an entrepreneur I’d put this on the required reading list along with Principles, High Output Management, and The Effective Executive.
What I’m stealing
Slootman applies “insanely great” as his standard on a daily basis. While I appreciate this sentiment, in reality, I find that insanely great is too high a bar when starting a new project or venture and causes paralysis. I prefer to start with “better than most” and work my way toward greatness via iteration.
proactively help people reach their next station in life
boil everything down to the essential
prioritize hard
operate as if I own everything
create short memorable mantras
execution before strategy
merit and influence > rank and title
rifle shots over shotgun spray
admit quickly when you are wrong (also good investing and marriage advice)
leverage comes from having a strong product and a formidable ability to sell it
prepare and tell them what you think
make the most out of your unique aggregate experience
Dog ears, highlights, marginalia
My basic advice was to keep playing your game but amp things up dramatically. Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus, and align your people. You don't need to bring in reams of consultants to examine everything that is going on. What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.
Human nature being what it is, many people will slow their output to a glacial pace and adopt “good enough” as their standard.
Five key steps in the Amp It Up process: raise your standards, align your people, sharpen your focus, pick up the pace, and transform your strategy.
Try applying “insanely great” as a standard on a daily basis and see how far you get. People lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. Don't do it. Fight that impulse every step of the way. It doesn't take much more mental energy to raise standards. Don't let malaise set in. Bust it up. Raising the bar is energizing by itself.
Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, I ask them instead what they think. Were they thrilled with it? Absolutely love it? Most of the time I would hear, “It's okay,” or “It's not bad.” They would surmise from my facial expression that this wasn't the answer I was looking for. Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.
I would sometimes say in all‐ hands meetings that I was personally committed to help each of our employees reach a different station in life as a function of the company's fortunes. In exchange, I was asking for the best they had to offer. That was the deal: we do the best we can for each other. People sometimes gave me an incredulous look: a CEO who is saying that his goal is to elevate our fortunes? Seriously? Yes, and our companies proved it.
basically a utility company for cloud computing with a consumption model. As with your local electric company, you pay only for what you use. Yet, like a SaaS company, our sales force was completely focused on bookings, or sales contract value, even though Snowflake did not recognize a single revenue dollar on bookings. Only actual consumption causes revenue to be recognized. Consumption drove bookings only indirectly; as customers ran out of capacity, they would reorder. This lack of alignment was everywhere: reps only marginally cared about consumption, and many customers were oversold on bookings, which led to smaller renewals, or what we call down‐sells, in future periods. The cost of commissions was out of whack with revenues because there was no direct relationship between sales compensation and revenues.
sound familiar?
Where alignment matters further is in incentive compensation. We pay everybody the same way on our executive team, and we have a very select, focused set of metrics that we pay bonuses on. Our sales exec does not get paid on a commission plan if the rest of us aren't. Everybody knows what we are aiming for. Another source of misalignment is management by objectives (MBO), which I have eliminated at every company I've joined in the last 20 years. MBO causes employees to act as if they are running their own show. Because they get compensated on their personal metrics, it's next to impossible to pull them off projects. They will start negotiating with you for relief. That's not alignment, that's every man for himself. If you need MBO to get people to do their job, you may have the wrong people, the wrong managers, or both.
nice way to articulate my concern about MBOs
Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard. Even if you're not sure about ranking priorities, do it anyway. The process alone will be enlightening. Figure out what matters most, what matters less, and what matters not at all. Otherwise your people will disagree about what's important. The questions you should ask constantly: What are we not going to do? What are the consequences of not doing something? Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing.
“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.
Good leadership requires a never‐ending process of boiling things down to their essentials.
Summarizing well requires the ability to recognize and highlight insight.
Leaders set the pace. People sometimes ask to get back to me in a week, and I ask, why not tomorrow or the next day? Start compressing cycle times. We can move so much quicker if we just change the mindset. Once the cadence changes, everybody moves quicker, and new energy and urgency will be everywhere. Good performers crave a culture of energy. (Location 466)
Leadership is a lonely business. You live 24/7 with uncertainty, anxiety, and the fear of personal failure. You make countless decisions, and being wrong about any of them might let down your employees and investors. The stakes, both financial and human, are high. And what adds to the terror is that there is no manual, no how‐to guide. Every problem has, at least to some extent, never been seen before. In particular, early‐stage enterprises often feel like they're shrouded in a fog of war. (Location 489)
this reminds me of the Marcus Aurelius quote:
“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil."
Lindy sentiment
This mentality of living up to your potential has kept up with me ever since. I am not so much focused day‐to‐day on outcomes; I am focused on maximizing the input side of the equation. Doing everything we can to the best of our abilities. It's like marathons or triathlons, which are 99% training and 1% racing. This is a hard model: you never feel you are doing enough, and a sense of malcontent hovers over you. You need like‐minded people around you for this to work. (Location 521)
Naugahyde upholstery, (Location 541)
just a strange coincidental tie-in to the Ted Weschler Podcast episode, go back and listen to the episode again on Snipd so I can save the notes
I always operated as if I owned everything, whether I did or not. That didn't always sit well with peers or superiors. I have since always tried to increase our people's sense of ownership so they will act as owners. That mentality needs to be nurtured. (Location 566)
I have also tried to take on this mindset. Hearing this from Frank builds my conviction that this indeed is a mindset that sets folks apart
But by now, my career had been about taking on what seemed like long odds, jobs nobody else would touch with a ten‐foot pole. (Location 582)
I have taken on these jobs throughout my career and have to say that I can trace all of the success I’ve achieved is generally because I'm willing to take on the jobs and projects few people are interested in.
driver training, back office, and food cost incentives at Taste
Life Solutions at Philips
Sales Ops Training and Comms
Sales Incentive Comp at Oracle
This goes back to being aware of un-crowded opportunities, contrarian and un-crowded are where value and opportunity live
This also goes for finding an edge in hyper-competitive, it’s not that we should exclude all
We coped in ways I have used ever since: hire people ahead of their own curve. Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime. They will be motivated and driven, with a cannot‐fail attitude. The good ones would grab the opportunity to accelerate their careers with us. (Location 597)
Look for hunger, attitude, innate abilities. Perhaps, look for the same career‐frustrated person I had been all these years. It was quite satisfying to turn this into a high‐powered strategy to drive business. I ended up with better, cheaper, more loyal, more motivated talent than we would have with a conventional hiring mentality. It does come with risk, but there is always risk in hiring. I have misfired with great resumes plenty of times. (Location 601)
Now pushing 40, I was still taking on problem children. (Location 610)
I'm close to this timeline, I don't think I'm as ambitious or driven as Frank but I'm on a similar trajectory
effort that first year and racked up $3 million in sales. The product doubled in size and speed, and the next year we ramped up sales to $15 million. “Larger and faster” became our mantra, like those old commercials for Miller Lite Beer, “Less Filling—Tastes Great.” We never backed off that. (Location 646)
short memorable mantras
Bezos has "Day one"
I was anxious to pick up the phone or open my email in the morning for a good year and a half. There was not only a lot of work to do; we didn't really know how to do it. There was nobody in the company who had ever built a cloud computing platform before. (Location 686)
funny because I have some similar anxiety around my current responsibilities
this gives me some comfort knowing that everyone who is driven likely experiences this feeling to some extent in their career. Don't avoid it lean into the uncomfortable.
admit that I am not the best board member: I get impatient and struggle with the hands‐off relationship boards are supposed to have with management. As I had learned at Greylock, I have the temperament of an operator, not an investor/advisor. (Location 755)
Jill has more of an operator temperament
I am less driven by career ambition than by a hunger for sport, action, excitement, teamwork, and a never‐ending pursuit of self‐improvement. Being retired was great, but the challenge of rising to the occasion is a better match for my temperament. (Location 771)
I feel this same exact way. Being part of a team that is defying the odds is the pinnacle of fun and exciting for me
Danny Meyer mentions the 4 types of competitiveness in his podcast episode with Tim Ferris
a-competitive
motivated by beating the other person
motivated by loss aversion
motivated by beating his own previous best
Believe there is a 5th
motivated to be a contributing member of an exceptional team
the role player, the bad m'fr, the specialist, or the generalist who is able to connect all of the various skills and personalities into something greater than the sum of their individual parts
The first few weeks of my tenure were messy, as I quickly removed many of the department heads from their positions. The previous CEO had more than a dozen direct reports, but I was planning on only five or six. Change was coming fast, and I caught flak for removing folks I didn't know well. Critics said I should have given everyone a fair chance to prove that they could meet my expectations, but I didn't see it that way. I wanted to eliminate uncertainty and doubt by bringing in some sure‐fire executives that I had worked with at previous companies. When you take over a company with a wide range of issues, you have to start solving the more straightforward problems as fast as possible so you can narrow the focus on the harder ones. Bringing in some proven performers was a no‐brainer. (Location 787)
The biggest difference between younger me and older me is that I am now much quicker to grasp what's really going on and what needs to happen to amp up an organization. Years ago, I used to hesitate and wait situations out, often trying to fix underperforming people or products instead of pulling the plug. Back then I was seen as a much more reasonable and thoughtful leader—but that didn't mean I was right. As I got more experience, I realized that I was often just wasting everybody's time. If we knew that something or someone wasn't working, why wait? As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt. (Location 809)
Being on a mission is a visceral experience, not merely an intellectual one. When your organization has a well‐defined purpose, you feel it down to your bones. You feel energized when you start the workday, and you feel good about whatever progress you've made toward the mission when you shut down for the night. Being on a mission unlocks the X factor: an intangible that can drastically elevate performance as people set out to achieve greatness (Location 827)
It makes your working life not just more productive but also more fun. (Location 831)
Our mantra was “Tape sucks”—we were taking on the entire industry's status quo. (Location 850)
My basic advice was to keep playing your game but amp things up dramatically. Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus, and align your people. You don't need to bring in reams of consultants to examine everything that is going on. What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity. (Location 365)
Updated: May 01, 2023
You need to figure out what all the alternative approaches are and make hard decisions about why some make more sense than others. (Location 1149)
Updated: May 01, 2023
If you don't act quickly to get the wrong people off the bus, you have no prayer of changing the overall trajectory. We often believe, naively, that we can coach struggling teammates to a better place. And sometimes we can, but those cases are rarer than we imagine. At a struggling company, you need to change things fast, which can only happen by switching out the people whose skills no longer fit the mission or perhaps never really did in the first place. (Location 1271)
The other advantage of moving fast is that everyone who stays on the bus will know that you're dead serious about high standards. The good ones will be energized by those standards. If others start looking for greener, less‐demanding pastures because they don't want to meet those standards, that's fine too. I know this philosophy may come across as harsh. But what's even harsher is not doing the job you were hired to do as a leader. If you can't find the backbone to make necessary changes, you are holding everyone else back from reaching their full potential. (Location 1274)
Updated: May 02, 2023
This process of systematically upgrading the talent at each key role is called “topgrading,” a strategy developed by hiring expert Brad Smart. I've even told my boards that if they could find a better CEO than me, they should replace me too. Fair is fair, and I can't expect to be held to a lower standard of performance than anyone else. (Location 1293)
Read up on Brad Smart’s top grading. I’ve heard of this approach, and I think it’s actually what Jill bases her process on.
It starts with knowing who is who in the field, how well are they regarded, and keeping tabs on their ongoing status. Status is always changing of course, so it requires tracking candidates over time, checking in with them, having some sort of ongoing relationship until the time comes to actively engage. (Location 1309)
Perform what we call active “calibration” sessions on critical positions in a group format. (Location 1320)
Jill does this and takes them very seriously
Culture is not about making people feel good per se, it’s about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that serve that purpose. It’s unlikely that a strong, effective, and mission‐aligned culture will please everybody. (Location 1344)
Dominant personalities will set the tone in smaller subgroups. That's the pattern in places with a weak culture: lots of fiefdoms that spend their days fighting each other more than they fight the competition. (Location 1353)
R = Respect E = Excellence C = Customer I = Integrity P = Performance E = Execution (Location 1377)
it's impossible to know how good a strategy is until you know how to execute. (Location 1408)
Culture doesn't just happen because of a CEO's declaration or because senior management exhibits the willingness to act on core values. It happens when most of the organization is willing to defend and promote those values and call out deviations on a day‐to‐day basis. (Location 1431)
Updated: May 04, 2023
“Do whatever you want, as long as you make your numbers.” (Location 1463)
Culture results from consequences, good and bad, as well as from the lack of consequences. (Location 1466)
Do most people execute with urgency and pep in their step? Do they consistently pursue high standards in projects, products, talent, everything? (Location 1479)
If you succeed in building and protecting a strong culture, it will simultaneously attract people who admire the culture while repelling those who find it distasteful. That's an intentional feature, not a bug. (Location 1481)
During the interview I asked which team at his current company did he consider to be his primary team. Not surprisingly, his answer was his sales team. The answer I was hoping for, however, was his leadership peer group, meaning his counterparts in engineering, marketing, finance, services, and so on, because that's the team that really runs any company. (Location 1489)
Many companies are plagued by good execution within individual silos but terrible execution across silos. (Location 1493)
The paradox is that any business that's large enough to have functional silos must pull together as if these organizational delineations barely exist. If the leaders of each silo reinforce their isolation from each other, surely no one at lower levels of the organization will feel an incentive to change this aspect of the culture. (Location 1503)
Everybody, and we mean everybody, has permission to speak to anybody inside the company, for any reason, regardless of role, rank, or function. (Location 1512)
while this might seem obvious, it's important to declare and repeat
I've had people apologize for skip level interactions and I think this is problematic
We want the organization to run on influence, not rank and title. We want everyone to think of the company as one big team, not a series of competing smaller teams. (Location 1513)
We also expect that all attempts to contact another person will be acknowledged promptly and responded to thoughtfully. It is not acceptable to ignore a colleague just because you outrank someone or don't feel like dealing with their concerns. I have seen people coming from other companies act that way, and we correct such behavior the moment we become aware of it. To set an example, I personally respond to any employee who emails me. It might just be a brief sentence redirecting them to someone else, but they will get a reply. (Location 1515)
Going direct will only work as a strategy if your people default to trusting their colleagues in other departments, even though they don't have a direct reporting relationship with them. (Location 1534)
Once burnt, twice shy, as the saying goes. (Location 1541)
Words have consequences. People trust a straight shooter. (Location 1571)
I misfired on hiring, in part because I had never dealt with manufacturing before, being a software guy. I publicly acknowledged our failures but also said that I wouldn't stop until we got it right, which we eventually did. (Location 1588)
We had well‐publicized false starts on leadership in this area for which I took responsibility. As before, I told our people that we would not stop until we got to where we needed to be. Making mistakes is tolerable as long as you acknowledge it and seek to fully address the situation until you find the solution. (Location 1591)
It's easy to be irrationally confident in our judgment and anxious to move forward with implementing solutions. (Location 1613)
I am generally not a fan of just trying things, throwing ideas against the wall to see if they stick. We lose time and waste resources that way. Let's try a rifle shot instead of a scatter gun. (Location 1644)
My preferred tactic is to start with so‐called first principles. Break problems down into their most basic elements. Ignore what you think you already know, and imagine you are facing this kind of situation for the first time in your life. The more you have seen, the harder this tactic gets, but it's worth the effort. (Location 1656)
workers find it frustrating that I always want to walk back to the beginning rather than rubber stamp a program or project. They want to jump right into the action phase, so they see in‐depth discussion about possible explanations as a waste of time. Of course, when you end up being wrong about the problem and therefore ineffective, that's a much more serious waste of time. (Location 1660)
“Fail fast” (which I already mentioned in the “Getting Strategy Right” section in Chapter 5). If you find out that you were wrong, correct it immediately. Build a reputation as a rapid course corrector. (Location 1666)
You don't need to be right all the time to succeed if you can admit quickly when you're wrong. This will set you apart from the majority of people who get wedded to narratives too quickly and then refuse to revisit the analysis for fear of looking bad politically. (Location 1667)
Note: This concept comes up over and over and over in investing, trading, business, poker. It's a core competency worth developing.
It's forgivable that some hiring decisions end up as failures, but what's not forgivable is refusing to recognize, acknowledge, and take action on hiring mistakes. (Location 1673)
Whenever there are glaring discrepancies in evaluating one of our executives, we double down on analysis rather than jumping to conclusions. There must be a reason why people are having very different experiences with this person. With enough time devoted to discussion, we always get to the bottom of it. Analysis first—especially when someone's future career is at stake. (Location 1688)
we decided that we had to give our new reps a ton of leads they could follow up on, right away. A busy sales funnel boosts productivity and energy within a sales team, while allowing management to study the biggest sales challenges and see how the top performers are overcoming them. (Location 1780)
Who are likely to become gunslingers? Or who are your current gun slingers? (Location 1818)
Note: Conklin is a gunslinger. Good question to ask sales managers when discussing talent.
After we stopped outsourcing our hiring function, taught our sales execs how to hire better, and improved our training in best practices, Snowflake's sales productivity began to broaden and climb significantly. We started hiring stronger candidates and giving them a proven, consistent path to productivity, rather than dropping them into the deep end of the pool, to sink or swim. (Location 1821)
We lured quite a few away from my former company, EMC, which ruffled a few feathers there. (Location 1832)
Putting gasoline into a car's tank won't matter if the engine isn't working. Likewise, you can hire all the salespeople in the world, but they won't pay off until you've figured out your product, your market, your demand and lead generation systems, and the kinds of selling motions that will convert prospects to customers. (Location 1842)
Accounting can become the bastardization of economics when it obfuscates the inherent profitability of the business by focusing on current period income and expenses. (Location 1885)
I often ask other CEOs to explain their growth model—in other words, how fast could their company grow if it optimally executed? (Location 1905)
This is a good question for anyone involved in the operations side of the business
What constraints would limit or enable their growth? Surprisingly, the response is often a blank stare. “Growth model? Not sure what you mean by that.” (Location 1906)
I recall a conversation with our sales leaders at Data Domain years ago discussing the next year's growth target. I wanted them to develop the target first so they would feel ownership of it versus having it imposed on them from on high. As we discussed their estimates, I asked what it would take to increase that initial estimate by, say, 25%. The team then rattled off a laundry list of things they had to do to get to the higher number. Well, why don't we just do that then? (Location 1919)
In my case, every company I led was a super grower, but in hindsight I could have productively applied even more resources, even more aggressively than I did. All my experiences have taught me that when in doubt, you should lean in and try to grow faster. (Location 1928)
Fast growth separates great companies from their competition. You can psychologically leave everyone else in the dust when you outstrip their growth rates by a considerable margin. It's intimidating and demoralizing to your rivals. (Location 1933)
If you're not growing you're dying
your leverage comes from having a strong product and a formidable ability to sell it. (Location 1943)
Note: This is important for a variety of reasons. This should be a top consideration when deciding where to work. All problems in business stem from this.
A higher‐probability path to growth at scale is to leverage your proven strengths to adapt your original offering for adjacent markets. Don't venture too far afield if you don't need to, though. You can expand your capacity to sell while at the same time increasing your addressable market—without trying to strike gold a second time. (Location 1964)
Compensation plans need to be precisely modeled against revenues to see what the effects will be at various levels of performance. Incentives also need to align with the company's objectives, not just the salesperson W‐2. The company did not at that time permit multi‐year contracts, something we changed almost immediately. Because of all these dynamics, we often oversold customers, contracting for more than they needed. (Location 1998)
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have strong financial oversight and discipline on sales compensation. (Location 2006)
the most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a start‐up leader with the organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company. (Location 2090)
I 100% agree with this statement and it's the reason I spend so much time studying start-ups and high-grow companies. I believe all the strategies and ideas can be repurposed to an extent to create something novel and potent within a mature corporation.
Those who can scale up or scale down as required. Those who can set aside their experience when necessary, apply first principles, and think through situations in their elementary form. (Location 2092)
Your mission as a leader is to figure out how to hang on to your early‐stage dynamism and avoid the lethargy of mass and bulk. One technique I use is to challenge key people with this question: “If you could do just one thing for the remainder of the year, what would that be and why?” (Location 2097)
Similarly, I ask our teams what's the one thing we should be doing urgently that we are not doing for some reason? This is to avoid getting too engrossed in day‐to‐day activities and failing to see the forest for the trees. Always be paranoid about what you are not doing but should be. (Location 2102)
It was viewed as a sleepy, boring category. (Location 2283)
Note: Sleepy and boring should prick your ears. Sleepy and boring is contrarian.
Finally, the company's venture investor showed me the highlights of a transcript of every conversation the VC firm had had with customers over the previous year. This is fairly standard operating procedure for investor due diligence. (Location 2303)
something valuable to ask for when entertaining a new position at a smaller firm
Your resume is your shingle. Buff and polish it. Make sure it carries some punch. (Location 2493)
Conversely, I'm always intrigued by candidates who once crashed and burned with a company and learned something from facing those serious challenges. (Location 2526)
Speak credibly and insightfully, in detail, about your experiences, no matter how disappointing they were. (Location 2528)
Experience can help reveal your aptitudes, (Location 2532)
People literally never asked me in interviews what I thought I was good at. But that's always one of the first and most interesting questions I ask from the other side of the desk. (Location 2533)
But good managers know it's impressive when people are confident enough to be candid. Self‐awareness is compelling. (Location 2539)
What types of people succeed best in this company? And which do not? And why? (Location 2554)
We always sought low maintenance, low drama personalities. We valued traits such as strong task ownership, a sense of urgency, and a “no excuses” mentality. People who get things done rather than explain why they can't. This personality type lines up with our obsession with hiring drivers rather than passengers, as we saw in an earlier chapter. (Location 2564)
I start with the messages I want to convey and then fold in stories to illustrate my assertions. Stories are easy to digest, fun to tell, and often what the audience remembers most clearly. Start a running list of useful anecdotes, and keep adding new ones so your material doesn't get stale. (Location 2590)
In your work life, try to embrace your struggles rather than avoiding them. Yes, they may be hard, painful, even terrorizing. But hardships are incredibly formative and educational. They are ultimately the experiences that shape and make careers, and future employers will value your hard‐fought struggles. Try to take roles and assignments where the rubber meets the road, where hard but essential problems have to be solved. (Location 2630)
The company doesn't owe you a promotion. Employment is a two‐way agreement; both sides need to be satisfied with the deal. (Location 2656)
Yes, it's nice if they love you, but you can't let yourself get rattled if they don't. Your mission is to win, not to achieve popularity. When you win, paradoxically, you will gain popularity with everybody. But if you get distracted because the founders don't love you, and (Location 2733)
Conceding the board's authority for every major decision isn't playing it safe. In fact, in the long run it's much riskier than asserting your own authority and legitimacy and taking responsibility for your own decisions. (Location 2774)
Note: Pick the right time to show your contrarian colors
never go into a board meeting, tee up a topic, and ask them what they think. Instead, prep carefully with your team in advance, and then go in and tell them what you think. (Location 2794)
I would say this goes for 99% of meetings
Instead, make the most of your unique aggregate of experiences. Apply those experiences, and the insights we've discussed in previous chapters, to become a truer, more honed, more effective version of who you already are. (Location 2827)