Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

by Frank Slootman

No offense to my VC friends, but they often think that their investments give them the right to lecture entrepreneurs at board meetings, even though many VCs have never been in the combat seat themselves.

So let's start with an overview of the 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.

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.”

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.

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.

First, think about execution more sequentially than in parallel. 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.

Most people have a relatively easy time coming up with their top three priorities. Just ask them.

“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.

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.

Apply pressure. Be impatient. Patience may be a virtue, but in business it can signal a lack of leadership.

Walk straight, shoulders back, don't slouch. Proper meal etiquette: Nobody chowed down until everybody was properly seated, and somebody said, “Eet Smakelijk,” the Dutch language equivalent of “Bon Appetit.” Quick correction on improper use of silverware. Greet people with a firm handshake and look them in the eye. Never address elders by their first name. Don't let them catch you doing nothing, or they would find a chore for you to do. Play outside, never inside.

So their strategy was to acquire scale by merging with Sperry. We have since learned that size isn't everything and often is a liability when things are changing rapidly. Every company I later ran would compete against much bigger companies, and our lack of size was an advantage. The big incumbents didn't know what hit them. Babies grow up to become soldiers.

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.

I demanded plenty of myself but also of others. You can go far with good people, but they demand and deserve real leadership.

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.

We were a hosted service, meaning that each customer had their own hardware and software instances. ServiceNow was not what was called “multi‐tenant,” where customers share computing resources.

Snowflake had an amazing product, but its execution was increasingly questionable. The P&L revealed that this was a company with a lot of funding but not much discipline.

The previous CEO had more than a dozen direct reports, but I was planning on only five or six.

focused missions helped us relentlessly pursue each company's promise and potential. Being mission driven helped our people become motivated, focused, impatient, and passionate—maybe even a bit zealous.

three criteria for a great mission: big, clear, and not about money.

People use the term mission creep when an organization's stated purpose keeps changing and/or being redefined. We must show constant vigilance against the risk of mission creep.

For instance, a few months after D‐Day, the British had attempted to win World War II by launching the largest airborne operation in history, to take the City of Arnhem in Holland and four bridges over major rivers leading up to it. It failed due to poor execution, with even more loss of life than the Normandy invasion the previous June.

We even see this competition approach in existing Snowflake accounts, buy out everything under contract with us, fund the migration, and provide all matter of bundles and free computing credits that can be applied to workload execution. (Antitrust enforcers get upset if you overcharge customers, but they are fine with giving things away, even if your intent is to put your competition out of business.) It's not just about winning business, it's also about inflicting maximum public embarrassment on us. If they ever take one of our key accounts that way, they will parade it around the entire industry. Like it or not, that's also a part of warfare against your competitors.

industries such as aviation, where change has to come very slowly because there are so many regulatory hurdles to dramatic change.

Teach your people to drive the business to the limits of its potential. So what if you don't get there? At least you went for it! Don't settle for respectable mediocrity; seek to exploit every ounce of potential you are entrusted with. If you want to win big, imagine a radically different future that is not tethered to the past.

At Snowflake, we offer a clear career path and professional development for sales staff. We assign recent college graduates to follow up on inbound leads; their goal is to qualify and set meetings for our more senior salespeople. It's a hard job being on the phone all day, talking to strangers and trying to set up meetings, but it gives them a bedrock foundation for their sales skills. Next, a business development rep gets promoted to selling to smaller enterprises and institutions. Talented reps can then graduate to full‐fledged enterprise sales. These are elite sales roles, highly compensated when done well. The final upward step is to our so‐called Majors team, where dedicated account managers take care of our largest 200 accounts.

Passengers are people who don't mind simply being carried along by the company's momentum, offering little or no input, seemingly not caring much about the direction chosen by management. They are often pleasant, get along with everyone, attend meetings promptly, and generally do not stand out as troublemakers. They are often accepted into the fabric of the organization and stay there for many years. The problem is that while passengers can often diagnose and articulate a problem quite well, they have no investment in solving it. They don't do the heavy lifting. They avoid taking strong positions at the risk of being wrong about something. They can take any side of an issue, depending on how the prevailing winds are blowing. In large organizations especially, there are many places to hide without really being noticed. Passengers are largely dead weight and can be an insidious threat to your culture and performance. They inadvertently undermine the mojo of the organization. They sap the animal instinct and spirits you need in business to thrive. Drivers, on the other hand, get their satisfaction from making things happen, not blending in with the furniture. They feel a strong sense of ownership for their projects and teams and demand high standards from both themselves and others. They exude energy, urgency, ambition, even boldness. Faced with a challenge, they usually say, “Why not” rather than “That's impossible.” These qualities make drivers massively valuable. Finding, ...

think it's easy to assemble a committee, agree on a set of values, print up some posters, put them up everywhere around the office, and voilà, there is our culture. The problem is that people don't learn from posters. Like children and pets, they learn from consequences and the lack thereof. If you want to drive a more consistent set of behaviors, norms, and values, you have to focus on consistent and clearly defined consequences, day in and day out.

Life is much easier when all stakeholders believe you are telling the truth because you have been truthful at every turn previously.

But if you want a great company, you can't give out free passes for mediocrity. Good enough is never good enough.

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.

Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems: “Fail fast”

Here's why I was so opposed: If you have a customer success department, that gives everyone else an incentive to stop worrying about how well our customers are thriving with our products and services.

One big challenge of early‐stage selling is insufficient demand, so 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. Conversely, if you skimp on resources for lead generation, your sales reps will end up having only a couple of meetings a week. That's demoralizing; they are literally dying on the vine. High levels of activity are essential to boosting morale and driving results.

It's quite common in early‐stage companies for a small group of reps to be driving most of the revenue, while a larger group of flatliners are failing to contribute.

Part of the problem was that Snowflake's recruiting had been mostly outsourced, a mistake for any sales organization in my view. If there is one skill a sales manager must have, it is recruiting. It has to be done in‐house because recruiting is so core to successful sales management.

In a static, low growth company, increasing sales productivity is viewed as a positive development. But in high‐growth scenarios it's a negative metric because it means you aren't hiring fast enough. ServiceNow's sales productivity was too high when we got there. Our hiring spree caused productivity to level off for a few quarters. But that was fine, because our furious rate of staff growth would soon pay off with dramatic revenue growth.

Unlike the law of gravity, there's no law that momentum naturally has to slow as your revenues climb higher and higher. It's the size of your addressable market that dictates limits. Growth tends to slow down when you are starting to become well penetrated and saturated.

We hired new salespeople who came from HR backgrounds and changed our terminology; for instance, what IT people call an “incident,” HR people call a “case.”

It took ServiceNow 12 years to get to $1 billion in revenues but only two additional years to get to $2 billion.

There is an organizational element to this: you simply cannot let your sales function run their own compensation plans. That's like letting the proverbial fox run the hen house. Compensation plans need to be precisely modeled against revenues to see what the effects will be at various levels of performance.

For instance, in the early days of the pandemic many companies announced that they were suspending nonessential travel. Why did it take a global crisis for them to look closely at various practices and decide which ones had no significant impact? Any company that stays scrappy, at any size, will constantly be eliminating non‐essentials of all sorts.

Creating so‐called new categories out of thin air is a favorite cocktail party topic among marketers, but it doesn't happen that often.

If you can't sell close to home, you will surely fail farther afield.

The sale to EMC was a great outcome by any economic standard, but a CEO can't help thinking he or she aborted the mission when a company gets sold. (I had never sold a company before, or since.)

When we took ServiceNow public in June 2012, the perception of our constrained market opportunity limited the value of our IPO. Many investors simply did not believe this company had legs. Gartner Group was hosting so‐called fireside chats during our IPO roadshow, telling investors that our entire addressable market totaled just $1.5 billion.

1.5bn market cap

Running a company is somewhat like playing a hand in poker. You may or may not be dealt good cards, but what matters even more is understanding the potential of the cards you were dealt. They will dictate your strategic options—whether you should call, raise, or fold at every round of the hand.

When you're interviewed for a job, some of the best questions you can ask are, What types of people succeed best in this company? And which do not? And why?

Your peer group will try to influence your career decisions, but be your own person. Steer your own ship. Never put your personal decisions to a vote.