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

by Frank Slootman

To the Man (and Woman) in the Arena:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” —Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

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.

to summarize my convictions, observations, and beliefs about how to lead a mission‐driven, high‐performance company.

but no experience in business compares to being CEO. I love being fully accountable for a company's leadership, strategy, culture, and execution in an ultra‐competitive marketplace.

Without focused leadership, millions of conflicting priorities compete with each other.

Having seen things done is not the same as doing them.

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.

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 w...

We should all be thrilled with what we're doing. So channel your inner Steve Jobs. Aim for insanely gre...

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.

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. 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.

if you can only do one thing for the rest of

the year, and nothing else, what would it be and why? People struggle with this question because it is easy to be wrong, which is exactly the point. If we are wrong, resources are misallocated. That's concerning. But we avoid these pointed dialogs because it is easier to list five or ten priorities. The right ones may not even be buried in there somewhere.

“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many prioriti...

Vagueness causes confusion, but clarity of thought and purpose is a huge advantage in business. Good leadership requires a never‐ending process of boiling things down to their essentials. Spell out what you mean! If priorities are not clearly understood at the top, how distorted will they be down the line?

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. Nobody wants to swim in glue or struggle to get things done.

Some organizations slow things down by design. Change that—

Develop a healthy sense of paranoia about your business model because your competitors are surely trying to disrupt you. That's as certain as the sun rising tomorrow.

My hope is that the chapters ahead will help you see through the fog, establish context, sort out your options, and amp up your organization on the road to success.

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 ar...

and a sense of malcontent hovers over you. You need like‐minded people aroun...

I have since realized that I was destined for a different path, and they were doing me a favor not hiring me.

The big incumbents didn't know what hit them. Babies grow up to become soldiers.

Anybody who spent the last 20 years at Google, Amazon, or Apple would have done spectacularly well, regardless of their individual merit.

And anyone who stayed with companies like IBM and HP would have stagnated during that period.

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.

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.

I still try to hire more for aptitude than experience. We don't always require been‐there, done‐that types. Checking boxes on a resume is easy. Assessing aptitude is harder. 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 ri...

product operations,

I would later get some satisfaction over the naysayers by serving as CEO of three of the fastest‐growing companies in Silicon Valley history.

“Architecture matters”

superior architecture.