This Week in Startups - Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman on moving the needle, win-first culture & managing burnout | E1689

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Frank Slootman joins Jason for another incredible conversation that ranges from the management shift in Silicon Valley (1:08) to how to know if you’re moving the dial in your organization (9:59). Then, they discuss Frank’s hiring philosophy and how to create a winning relationship between an executive and their direct reports (27:05). Finally, they discuss managing burnout and creating security for yourself (46:33). (0:00) Molly kicks off the show (1:08) Layoffs + the management shift in Silicon Valley (8:29) MasterClass - Get 15% off an annual membership at https://masterclass.com/startups (9:59) How to know if you are moving the dial and moving at a fast pace (18:36) Contra - Get $500 off your first hire at https://contra.com/twist (20:09) Dealing with recessions and countering the media frenzy (27:05) Frank’s definition of culture and hiring for enthusiasm (32:32) The relationship between an executive and their employees (35:49) House of Macadamias - Get 20% off at https://houseofmacadamias.com/twist by using code TWIST20 (37:19) Assessing performance, hiring the right people, and being thoughtful (41:56) Starting with a great product (46:33) Managing burnout and creating security (56:49) Consumption-based pricing + acquisitions (1:00:30) Frank’s thoughts on AI FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. Happy Thursday on Twist. We have a treat for you. Might as well be Friday. Jason is joined by the general. That's right. Frank Sloopman, the CEO of Snowflake is here to drop some truth bombs like he does. They have an all-encompassing discussion about the layoffs happening in tech, slightly unexpected takes from the general there. Building a culture of A players, how to move the dial at your startup, or your company of any size, how to manage burnout, and a lot more. going to be an amazing conversation. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Masterclass. Learn from the world's best minds anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. Get 15% off an annual membership to Masterclass at masterclass.com slash startups. Contra is a commission-free marketplace for freelancers and independent creators. Get $500 off your first hire at contra.com slash twist.

And House of Macadamias is the next big health. trend. Get 20% off your first purchase at house of macadamias.com slash twist by using the code twist 20. All right. Frank Slumann's back with us. He's the CEO of Snowflake. It's cloud-based database firm. You all know it. You joined in 2019, took it public in 2020. It's been on a tear growing at a pace that would make growth stocks feel slow. Yeah, right? In our industry, You have the standard companies trying to grow 10% a year. We've got growth stocks growing 20. What is Snowflake growing at?

Because we're in a recession here. Last time we talked, we were in a booming market. So that's going to be, I think, a focus of our discussion. Welcome back to the program. General Sleutman. Thank you. Good to be back, Jason. Yeah.

What's growth like now for Snowflake? And have you been hit by these crazy headwinds in the industry? Or does the mission continue? And you're just battling it out hand-to-hand combat? every day. What's it like in the down market for you? Yeah, we got to, you know, sort of distinguish a little bit between the hysteria and the anxiety that sort of gets,

you know, gets trumped up in the media. And it's not a small thing because it does affect sentiment, you know, out there comes self-fulfilling. After a while, we talk ourselves into it. But, you know, things are, you know, not nearly as bad as it is portrayed out there. You know, things are not euphoric, obviously. I would maybe characterize it more as sober, rational, hard-nosed.

But that's not abnormal. I mean, if anything, this is more normal than, you know, what we've had in the past. People behave that way. You know, obviously, our growth becomes more a function of our scale because we, you know, the type of growth that we have is not just high. It's exceptionally high given the scale that we're already, you know, operating at, you know, over time. you know, gravity will set in and you will gradually, you know, sort of, you know, given a few points a quarter to scale.

And, you know, that's certainly what people have been seeing from us. But, you know, we're still sort of defying gravity in terms of the type of growth that we are, that we are reporting. All right. Listen, when you were on the pod last time, it was when your book, this incredible book came out. It was exactly a year ago. I said, hey, would you please come on a year from now? You said, sure.

and here we are. Thank you for coming back. It was episode 1362. The book, Amped it up, leading for hypergrowth by raising expectations, increasing urgency and elevating intensity. You need to listen to that, founders, capital allocators,

catch up to this discussion because this discussion is going to build on our conversation. But at that time, market was literally at an all-time high. Things were going crazy. Or actually, we'd just come off the peak.

And so when we look at how people received your book, which was kind of your, hey, listen, here's my operating philosophy. And you said, if this is helpful to you, great. But by no means do I have all the answers. But people were a little shook. Hey, this guy's intense. He says, bring energy.

Don't be a passenger. You got to be able to drive here. And it was a little intense and you demand excellence from people. The market collapses. And all of a sudden, everybody realizes in Silicon Valley, hey, maybe we weren't are as focused as we need it to be because our stocks are plummeting. We can't raise money at absurd valuations with very poor performance. We've got layers after layers of management. You've run a tight ship. You've demanded intensity and energy and enthusiasm from your teams.

Let's face it, that's not what was going on in Silicon Valley. Even some of the great entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, his organization got fat and you must have seen the layoffs. You've seen Elon take Twitter from 13,000 people, including contractors down to a fraction of that and company's still operating great. And Zuckerberg said, we got to the point of having managers, managing managers,

I need everybody here to build. So watching this occur, what are your thoughts in terms on the management shift that you've seen in the broader Silicon Valley and in relation to your operating principles? Yeah, one of the most,

you know, absurd things is this whole litany of layoffs across tech because all of a sudden people go like, I'm ripping out 7% or 8% or 12% and sometimes I do it several times. I'm like, what were you doing all this time?

Because we're pruning the tree every day, every week. That's part of a normal management discipline, right? You shouldn't need to have to do layoffs. I mean, layouts usually are thought of as it's a complete reset to bring cost structures, you know, in line with revenue and sort of that. But that's not what this is about. They've basically, you know, we ignored the issues in terms of, you know, a lot of costs building up in their structures. And you reference, you know, the culture.

I mean, there are companies in Silicon Valley, you know, where, you know, taking somebody out of a job is just something that's not done because it's just too disturbing. It's too confrontational. It's too hard on the culture. So we just don't do it. So we have to get to this scenario where all of a sudden we get out of jail free pass. card and now we can do and people actually applaud it for doing it because you know in a climate that we're in people are viewing it as a net positive but essentially if they have allowed bad behavior to build up a long period of time and now the reset comes um i find it really odd

because if you if you're managing an organization day-to-day week to week um you shouldn't have to come to this you know unless there really was a need for a massive reset where demand completely collapses and the cost structure has been has to be broad in the line. That's not what this is about. You should have, if you're running these companies, you should have been looking at each department and saying, hey, is this department optimized for the opportunity and are these A players or are some of these people just showing up at work, hoping to keep their heads down and, you know, maybe low energy, they should have been cutting people on some regular basis.

You're using the word pruning. but people got into a mindset that companies were family. Companies were, there was some culture here that we needed to maintain. Explain to the audience what maintaining that type of culture does to an organization versus maintaining a high-performance culture does to an organization ultimately. Yeah, well, we all know from our own families how dysfunctional, you know, they get, but you can't fire your family, unfortunately. you have to live with them and you have to deal with them.

And that's everybody's cross to bear. But in business, you know, it's not like that. It's much more like running a professional sports franchise. And it's about winning and we're assembling, you know, the best people, you know, we know how. So that, you know, that culture may be very pleasing to people and very reinsuring. But it's not a performance culture, you know, at all because we're tolerating mediocrity. We're tolerating tons of passengers, you know, people that are just on the ship, but not contributing much, you know, of anything. And after a while, it becomes toxic to the culture overall.

So it doesn't lead to, you know, to good things. If you just recruit talent, that's dangerous, you know. But if you recruit talent with character, you got a chance to do something very, very special. All right. If you know basketball, you know that voice. Mike Shashefsky, aka Coach Kay, the winningest coach in NCAA men's basketball history and his point about recruiting, not just talent, but talent with character is so important. We all know that.

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That's masterclass.com slash startups for 15% off masterclass. What happens when somebody comes to and says, General Sleutman, I'm here, I'm at Snowflake, am I a passenger or am I actually driving results here? And how do I know if I'm doing enough? because there are people sometimes who get into an organization, especially big ones, and the machine allows them to do only so much. And how do you know as an individual if you're making a big enough contribution?

And then second part, how do you force that as an individual in an organization that you demand that you can make an impact? Well, if you have to ask the question, the answer is probably no. You're not. Okay. When there's doubt, there's no doubt. There's a very easy way to settle, you know, the question. And by the way, you got to demand more of yourself. You know, you come home on a Friday, Friday night, look in the mirror. Did it matter? Did I was here? Did I move to dial?

Was it important or was it sort of like, well, I can't in the honesty of my own mind really say with conviction that, you know, I really showed up and I mattered to the organization to what was happening here. And if, and by the way, that happens sometimes, you know, we don't have good weeks and we have better weeks and all that kind of stuff. But you keep asking the question and try to be brutally honest about, you know, how you really, really feel. And that's holding yourself to, you know, to a higher standard. Hell, I still do this to myself. And I'm, there are weeks where I'm not happy with the answer, okay? But at least, you know, asking the question is, is what we have to do. And by the way, if you can, you're going to feel really good about

yourself in an organization in terms of your job security, in terms of your career potential. when you're feeling like, man, this was great. You know, I feel extremely, you know, happy with what I did this week. And that people become happier in their jobs and their careers. Because just sort of floating along, not even knowing, you know, whether you're measuring up or not is no way to live, you know. And you do this yourself. You force yourself to write.

I don't know if you still do it. An email Monday morning to your team. Explain what you, yeah, explain to the team, explain to us. What's in that email? When do you write it? How long is it? And what's the reaction to it from the team that you're saying, hey, it's Monday morning. Let's go.

You know, it's interesting because I get a lot of questions about the layoffs that are going on. They're like, are we going to have layoffs? And, you know, I will mouth, I will sound off pretty hard on topics like that. I pull no punches. I say exactly what I mean. And I also try to explain and educate people on, you know, why are these things happening? And then, you know, people very intently read these emails. and they go like, well, what can we do?

And I'm like, okay, here's another question. Okay, and I'm going to get into that one. Yeah, my messages aren't that long and maybe half a page, sometimes a full page. And it's unvarnished, unedited, it's unreviewed, it's dipos and all, warts and all. It comes out. So people feel, okay, this is really coming directly from him. You can tell about a style in which he writes. Yeah.

That nobody, you know, reviewed this. But I get a lot of messages. just in reply, which is sort of becomes your personal Twitter feed in a way where I can, I can really, you know, poison people's minds directly, right? There's no layers. There's no nothing. We're having a conversation. And sometimes, you know, I'm on the same topic three weeks in a row and then, you know, and I always say, look, whatever it was top of mind for me, for whatever reason, you know, I will talk about in terms of its broader consequences to the business. Why does it matter? Why do I want to educate people? Because I always try to,

you know, sort of speak to the lowest common denominator because it's a technical topic. Sure, the engineers know 100 times more than I will, but the people in HR won't, right? So I need to explain things in terms, you know, that they also can relate to. I've got to bring everybody along. I can't speak to just one audience, you know, so. You're defining reality at the start of every week, and you seem to like this weekly cadence. You seem to like a cadence that's days and a week. I think your days are people's weeks.

your weeks or people's months, your months or people's quarters or years. Talk about pace and why the intensity of pace is important for the right person and for the organization. You know, organizations, if you leave them to their own devices, they go slower and slower and slower, right? And by the way, go into a California DMV if you want to know what I'm talking about. You spent a half a day doing the simplest thing. So you can very easily amp up the patient or organization by just sitting different expectations. I always call the compression of timelines, you know, exactly like you just said, you know, why not tomorrow morning instead of next week?

You know, next week might be very comfortable, but how about being uncomfortable? By the way, what are you going to do between now and tomorrow morning? That is that different from what you're going to do between now and next week. But sometimes, you know, you may exaggerate and push it too hard. So what? And we can still come back to it the next day or the next day, right? You just amp up that pace and intensity and expectation and urgency. And that takes on a life of its own.

It's sort of an electrified and energized environment that the right people like to live in. Why do I have to wait a whole week? I'm losing interest in the topic. Okay. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. This level, this type of intensity, it drives away people who are not seriously aligned with the mission of the company.

And it absolutely engages people. who are winners and who love the mission of the company. So by telling somebody, hey, listen, the standard answer to any CEO, any manager is two weeks. Hey, can we make a plan for this? Yeah, two weeks, two weeks, everything's two weeks. I don't know where this came from. Maybe because you give two weeks notice when you quit.

Everything's two weeks. But you say, hey, maybe two days. And I love this point. If two days isn't enough, when we have that conversation, you'll say, hey, it wasn't enough, but here's what we got done. But it also can force people to make a better decision. I saw this up close and personal. I don't like to talk about it too much.

But he spent a little time with Elon when he was taken over Twitter. And the intensity level that he brought in there and the number of meetings and the number of first principal conversations occurring. One night, I'm saying I haven't talked about this at all, but I feel like with you I can talk about it. I'm there at 11 o'clock at night. He's got three meetings left. And I'm like, I got to tap out, man. I'm helping here, but you got three meetings left. We're going to be here to 1 a.m.

It's a Tuesday. It's a Sunday. But that, and that's an extreme example of a takeover, which he's never done and has never, has been rarely done in the history of Silicon Valley. But just a little bit more pressure on the system can engage a bit of creativity. You talk about this, and that's your term, amping up, right? It does drive, it does change a person's mental process, does it not? You know, the whole premise of that book is there's slack everywhere, okay? And you can just beat the system, beat the slack out of it.

all day long in every meeting, every encounter, every conversation. You know, do it better, do it faster, right? And it's like, what is the room up? I mean, you can find room up in almost anything, right? If you go look for it. But people sort of want to go, oh, I just want to get it off my desk and move on to the next thing. I'm already tired.

Yeah. It's like, you want to do the opposite. You want to energize the conversation, you know, even the simplest conversation can be energized. And tempo is important. pace and tempo, people, high performers, they crave energy and pace and tempo. So exactly as you said, the culture start to sort itself, you know, between the people that love it and the people that can't handle it. Well, that's just fine. You know, this is the thing I took from our conversation a year

ago. I started implementing some of these. Thank you. And I realized I have a certain pace. And I was forgiving of people who didn't work at my pace. You know, I fit your pace. Like, hey, well, let's have this conversation right now, or maybe get me something tonight, or let's talk about it in the morning. I don't, two weeks to me is like, you might as well be telling me like when I retire. And then I realized I was forgiving my whole career

of people who didn't hit my pace. And I said, you know what? I'm too old. Enough of the BS. I told everybody who works for me, your job is to keep pace with me and these other people in the organization. We're here to run at this pace.

If you don't want to run at this pace, there are other organizations for you. U.S. Postal Service, and everything in between. Hey, but we're running at this pace, my pace. I am a runner. I'm not a jogger. I'm not a lollygagger.

If you want to be a lollygagger or jogger, please go somewhere else. And that's what got a lot of these big tech companies into trouble. So many companies have had a freeze on hiring this year. Basically, headcount is stagnant industry-wide. But it's only to find ways to grow and innovate. You know that. So check out Contra. It's a commission-free marketplace for freelance and independent

creators. That's right. Commission free. All you have to do is pay a simple SaaS fee and there's no percentage-based upcharges when you hire someone. And on the other side of the marketplace, if you're a laid off tech worker, you've got all these skills, you got a lot of time. Well, Contra is an amazing platform for you. Creators on Contra, keep 100% of what they make. No fees, right? Compare that to other marketplaces that are taking your money. They specialize in design, engineering, social media, video writing an AI. If you need project-based work, you have to check out Contra. Let's say you want to learn about social media. Do you want one person to give you advice? And do you want to hire one person? Would you rather try five different people in Q1? Nour it down to the best three

in Q2. And then maybe in Q3 and four, you get down to one or two specialists who you like to work with best. That's the way to leverage the freelance community, but only pay for what you use. Some of the best people I know will only ever do freelance work. So get $500 off your first hire at Contra.com slash twist. Think about how much you could get done with $500 worth of designer developer time right now. C-O-N-T-R-A dot com slash twist. Contra.com slash twist right now to get five crisp hundies. One of the important things you talk about is the hand you're dealt, the elevator you get on. You know, some of these situations, you're going to get a set of cards. they may be bad cards

and you got to play them as best you can so let's talk about that aspect of it one of the bad cards is this recession and I really want to double click on something you said earlier which is hey the media is kind of whipping this into a frenzy and I've heard you talk on other

media hits or pods about people looking at the stock price people getting obsessive let's talk a little bit about this media frenzy now that every is a disaster, despite the fact that we have all these other data points that are coming in, that, hey, everything's pretty great. It's the lowest unemployment in 50 years. I don't want to play

macroeconomics here, but I want to play as inside of an organization, what impact is this having on people that every day, CNBC, and I'm not picking on them, New York Times, Washington, Fox, whoever, pick your, pick your poison, social media. People are getting like, it's almost like recession porn now. The obsession with recession is nuts. Yeah, it is. I saw Chuck Robbins this morning, CEO of Cisco, and he's talking about, you know, a lot of the CEOs that are in jobs right now have lived through quite a few of these. And to them, you know, this is not earth-shattering. You know, we've got some rough seas, you know, confused sea state.

That's just normal. That's just, you know, part of, you know, being in business. We're going to have these kind of things and they come and they go. but we also have a workforce that is quite young that can't remember a situation like this. And they think the earth is falling and, you know, terrible, terrible things are ahead. And, of course, the media don't help with this because they make us feel like this is extraordinary, you know, and it's hyped up to levels where, you know, people are starting to lose their mind, which is why I get so many questions on it.

But this is actually not abnormal. What is abnormal is living with stratospheric valuations and all that. That's abnormal. But at the time, we were partying like it was, you know, in 2020, right? Yeah. That wasn't normal. But hell, that was the new normal at the time and now it isn't. So everybody needs to take a chill pill and says, you know, just focusing your job.

You know, we sell, we support, we make a customer successful. We're still going to be that tomorrow and next week and a year from now. Okay, nothing changes. This is not as extraordinary as of May. you know, come across to you. It's not. I mean, we need to be a little bit paternal because, again, we're dealing with people that have never lived through, you know, episodes like this. And we've seen some bad ones. I mean, the meltdown in 2000, the IPO market was shut for five years. Okay. You can't, you can't even imagine that, right? And in 2008, 2009 was actually

came in a win. It was like a blip on the radar, you know. It was very interesting, you know, having lived through those three, those are the three major ones of our lifetime. I was 16, 17 years old in 1987, so I don't know too many people who experienced that one in the workforce who are working now. But if you live through the three of them, man, dot com was like a stun grenade going off for like five years. I mean, just everybody was walking around like Omaha Beach, just ears ringing. What do I do?

Like, it was shocking. But yeah, 2008, the media went crazy. The world is over. NASDAQ goes 5,000 to like 16, 1700. It felt like, oh my God, this could be. a change in society, a permanent reset in society. And then three quarters later, we're like, everybody's back to business grinding. Is that how this, which one does this feel like?

You know, my basic belief, you know, based on having been around way too many years, is that, look, there is people can only tolerate so much of this. Okay. And by the way, if you look at history going all the way back to the Civil War, you see that these episodes become, you know, fewer and shorter in direction. So that's actually a very, very positive trend because you go way back in time. This was more frequent and it was more severe. So these things, they come and they go.

And that's because everything is moving faster now, right? And the adjustments come quicker. And I still remember the first quarter of 2009. I mean, deals got stopped at the one yard line by a CFO. No, we're not doing it. I don't care how many signatures you have. Boom. But then the next quarter, it eased up.

And we didn't know at the time. God, how many more quarters of this are we going to have? where the whole thing, the flywheel just comes to a standstill. But it didn't, you know, because people are naturally inclined, you know, they have animal instincts. They want to move forward. It's not their natural state to be down. It is definitely enthusiasm and energy is part of humanity. But when you have the press and social media coming at you and whether you're opening TikTok, Twitter, you know, turning on your cable or reading news or newsletters,

everybody is doing this absolute obsession with recession and the layoffs, and I get it. It's a little bit shocking after this number of years, but it does blunt people's enthusiasm to come to work every day, and I think that is the job of leadership is to counter that. So how does one counter it? I think your email is a great one, which is, hey, we're just, I'm going to, you know this is coming for me because, hey, the comma might be in the wrong place. I'm telling you what's on my mind, and what's on my mind is not obsessing about the recession. did we talk, how many customers are we talked to?

What's in the last email? What's in the email before that? What are you talking about right now with your team? I talk about, you know, what are we trying to do, the companies that we're buying? Why are we buying them? What are they going to bring to us? You know, I talk about conversations that I had this week, you know, with customers. I mean, for example, the other week I was in Palo Alto for, they were like, I don't know, 40 or 50 CEOs, not from tech company, but really mainstream American enterprises.

and they ask all kinds of interesting questions, you know, about the analytics and data and all that. And I'm conveying that to them to give them context because you don't often get an audience like that, you know, I can get a sense of, you know, how people are viewing this from the top. Now, I'm the only person that has that kind of exposure. So I want to share that, you know, I'm bringing everybody along. It's always educational and contextualizing. What does this mean? Why does this matter, right? Those kinds of questions, right?

get people a sense of, okay, you know, we're on the ship, we're moving along. What is the context to what we're trying to do? Why is this so important? So, you know, we're always, I like to talk, and I talk a lot about culture, but not all the time. It's sort of a topic after all, okay, we had enough of this for a couple of weeks. I mean, it can get a little self-referential with the culture posters on the wall and the culture meetings and the off-sites. And you're starting to think, like, is this some HR person creating work for themselves or trying to justify their existence? what's great culture?

What is culture realized and what is culture for General Sludman? Yeah, culture only happens when it gets prosecuted, meaning that when it gets called out. And when I say when it gets called out, it gets called out to the positive. In other words, you know, we're finding ourselves doing great stuff and we want to then amplify that and share that, you know, broadly. It's celebrating and recognizing. And we have, we run special spiffs for, you know, landing particular accounts. especially in the global 2000. Every time we do that, it's like a celebration recognition event because,

you know, not all accounts are created equal. You know, some are really have a huge blast radius in terms of affecting everybody around them in their industry and so on. So we celebrate that. And oftentimes the account teams are like, wow, I didn't realize what's that important. But we do. But the opposite is even more important is, you know, when you catch yourself doing things that are not good, you know, is your organization calling it out?

You know, me calling out means nothing. That's easy, right? But is your organization acting under its own power and saying, this is bullshit? We're not doing that. This is not who we are. Okay. Now that's real cultural power when your organization becomes self-correcting, you know. The organization says, hey, listen, our culture is one of high energy.

We have a pace. We've amped it up. We're moving too slow on this. So we're going to prosecute it here. Hey, let's pass judgment. Did we do our job? Did we close this acquisition? You become a little inquisitive here.

We'll talk about that in a minute. And more, right? It's like, are we excited? Is this the best we can do? Okay. Can we raise the bar? What would we do if we didn't have anything? We had no legacy, no history, no, nothing.

What would we do? Let's have a, let's have a Steve Jobs type of conversation with, like, can we envision something that we would never consider otherwise, right? That's culture when people are saying, no, no, no, let's not just do an inch to the left and right. You know, no, no, we want to be excited about it. care how mundane the topic is that we're talking about it. What is the right way to do this? Challenge the team, right? That's really strong culture. Otherwise, you know, it's, it becomes

mundane and I want to get it off my desk. I'm bored. I need a cocktail. That's the end. It sucks the life out of an organization. You want to do the opposite. Do you want to inject life into the organization? You hire for enthusiasm. This is one of your secrets. People don't know. When you're interviewing people and you're doing your references, my understanding is, I have my sources here, Snowflake, you're hiring for enthusiasm and energy. How do you determine that? You do a reference and you just say, hey, is this person high energy? You just say it straight like that? Well, I like to hire people who have a chip on their shoulder, which is not everybody likes because those people can be, you know, hard to deal with for some, but I love it. Somebody that just has

sort of unresolved issues. Yeah. Show me. I tell people that. All these founders are, are they all deranged and do they all have issues? And I'm like, only the successful ones. Yeah. They have something to prove.

They can't suppress it. They just have to pursue it. And it's whether it's their siblings or their parents or their high school math teacher or somebody that did them wrong. And like, I'm going to prove to you what I got. Okay. And I love betting on that more than anything else. If you're a perfectly balanced person, you don't have no reason to get out of bed in the morning, you know.

That's not the type I'm attracted to, you know, so. I mean, the pursuit of excellence, capitalism and the competitive spirit, and let's face it, you know, we're thankfully, we're not fighting a bunch of wars. But, you know, this is, as you've said, you know, companies are the new warfare and you are being assaulted. You're under many battles from different fronts, from competitors you know, or competitors you don't eat. even know yet. So be paranoid. And you have to bring that energy. You have to fight. And if a rational person who is incredibly well balanced might say, you know what, it would be nice. It may be nice if I didn't have to get up for every day and have this energy. So people who don't have the energy, you don't need to do this for a living. You don't need to be at a startup. You don't

need to be at a high performance organization. So you can just have that candid discussion with them. Is that what you do? When somebody doesn't have what it takes and you made a mistake hiring? It's selecting. I've had people say to me, you know, they were there for two weeks and they're like, I can't take it anymore to the pace, the intensity. You know, people have often said about often, you know, a few times they've said about me, God must be hell working for a guy like you. You know, you, and then and then they point out, look, you know, is glass door rating is whatever, you know, in the 90s. So you have a high approval rating, even though people, you know, view you as being hard on people. But what I do is exactly what people want for me. This is what they want for me.

They don't want to be couted to. They don't want to have lattes and bracrofts. They want a successful experience, a successful company, something that gets them up in the morning. That's really what they want. It's what people have always wanted. And then nothing has changed in that regard. I think Silicon Valley is a little bit delusional that they cater to an expectation

that I don't believe is real. People want to come to come up. What is that expectation? What did Silicon Valley get wrong over? the last 20 years. Where did this mind virus start of entitlement? People need to be pandered to, you know, what money and amenities and all these tanks. You know, what people want is they want an opportunity to be great. They want an opportunity to be part of a great company. That's what they really want. So are we going to give that to them? We're going to, are we going to die trying

giving it to them? So they want to see that we behave as a management group and as a leadership team. We leave it all in the field. Okay. That's what they want. and that's our job to provide that, you know. To provide that opportunity to be excellent. Yeah. And you, the question you ask a lot is, you know, hey, this end of the week thing, what did I get accomplished? But are you doing enough?

Is there more we can do this self-evaluation? And when people come to you as CEO, you are disappointed if they're not driving you and pushing you to do more. unpack that relationship and how frustrating it can be when your reports and your team are not pushing you as CEO founder. Well, that's, that's the correct relationship if they're pushing me. I mean, if I have to push them, we don't have the correct relationship because I basically have a lethargic organization that needs to be whipped up the hill.

That's not going to work. I mean, if I have to rein them in and slow them down, that's a much better relationship, right? Because otherwise, they might drive me off a cliff while I'm not looking. So, you know, it's like wild horses, you know, there's a tremendous power here, and I'm really trying to harness that power more than anything else, direct it, focus it. That's what you want, right? But if you have a pony that won't go or dog that won't hunt, and now we're in a world of hurt, you know, and that's a culture that doesn't operate, you know. One of the great questions you ask, in addition to like, hey, could we do this better, is what do you think?

What do you think? somebody came to you. It's a silly example. They said, hey, here's a t-shirt, boss. What do you think? Your question to that back on this,

whatever, if it's a snowflake shirt, or I don't know which company was at, I just, I heard this anecdote, was, it's not what I think. What do you think?

And the big, long pause, personally, I think we can do better. And then the response is what? Well, you know, as a look,

if you're not enthusiastic about this, then why would I be? You know, right? I mean, it's like luck, I mean, it starts with, you think this is the greatest thing we've ever done in the world T-shirts. Yeah.

And it's not so much that the T-shirt matters, it's that everything matters. If you're going to do it, why not do it in a way that's, you know, energizing, intoxicating, makes us feel good, makes us smile. It's like, wow, this is cool. As opposed to, it's just so-so. There's nothing worse than so-so. Okay, it sucks the life out of teams and organizations. Yeah, good enough. Okay, we got it done.

We checked the box. move it off our desk is the term you used. I came up with a device for this after our conversation, and I've been refining it. I sometimes ask people, like, on a scale of 1 to 10, how good is this? But don't give me an 8. Because everybody wants to give an 8.

And I said, eight is the coward score. Yep. Either it's a 7 or it's an 8.5. I'll give you a half point if you want. I'm not giving you a quarter points because you're going to do 7.75 and 8.25. Give me a 7, 7.5.

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So let's break the tie here. We know when there's doubt, there's no doubt. So we push ourselves to a high conviction mode. You know, and by the way, it's really hard to be high, conviction all day because we're critical thinkers and then we start finding out all the things that are not right about it. So driving towards high conviction is a really important mental posture, you know, to have. When you're hiring people, same thing. It needs to be high conviction hire as opposed to, you know, I'm just, you know, slamming bodies here.

It's really important that every hire gets looked like, is this somebody that we're super excited about or we're just trying to fill the, you know, the open position? You can't just fill an open position. You can't. It has to be a high conviction. Hired, the whole team goes, like, God, we have to have this person. Now we're feeling good about what we're doing. The problem is, you know, and you saw this happening during the pandemic, and this is why we're having layoffs and tech all over the place. We start slamming bodies. I mean, a lot of the companies doubled in headcount during the pandemic, doubled. I don't even know what these people are doing, okay? And so it's like, okay, and now we're saying like, well, they weren't all good. No, of course not.

He can't hire at that pace and have all high conviction hired. It's impossible, you know. You did, though. You went fast. There was a time period. I think you added like 1,000 people in a year. Did you make mistakes? How did you refer on your process?

Obviously, it's not the same as adding 10,000 people, but it's three people a day, including weekends and holidays. How did you do during that period? How would you grade yourself? Could you have done better? Yeah. And we absolutely make mistakes. Okay.

And by the way, the question is, how many mistakes are you, making is it one in ten is it two in ten is it five and ten and so not so the question because but the whole thing is okay are you going to correct your mistakes i mean i don't have a problem making mistakes i have a problem ignoring them and not calling them out right if you because after a while when you make mistakes and you have to clean up your messes it's much more work to clean up your messes than to try and do it right the first time take more time you know to make this decision as opposed so i'm going to do it now i have to fix it later right because that's that's that's a complete We make mistakes. I can tell you, if I look at our attrition percentage is voluntary versus involuntary, and there's a gray zone in there because, you know, sometimes, you know, voluntary really is involuntary because people are self-selecting and things of that sort. You know, we know that we're missing the mark between one and two out of ten hires.

I've got to be honest, general. One in five, if you make a mistake, I think it's acceptable as long as you push the button and you prune the tree in a reasonable amount of time. Because people, some people interview great. Some people come in and they think they can do it and they can't or life. Randomness, right? You know, I see some organizations, they get 50-50. You know, that's a sign of a problem. It's a super level of inefficiency. But one of the things you talk about is the culture of kind of busyness and shoot and then aim,

maybe looking at how, doctors and the healthcare system work, they know what the treatments are, but they spend a lot of time, asking your questions, diagnosing. Talk to us about the equivalent in business and how you train people, or in all honesty,

retrain people to maybe be more thoughtful. Yeah, one of the things we do in business and one of my pet pieces that I think people learned this in business school, those of us, you know, went to business school, they are very reflexive. You know, I've seen this before. This is what we need to do, right? Boom, boom, boom.

We spent 90% of our time, you know, on the solution, not on understanding the problem. Obviously, if you don't understand the problem, whatever you try to do is going to be wrong. So it really behooves you to really spend time on do we understand this problem. What are all the possible explanations for what's going on here, right? for example, in Silicon Valley, you know, what do they do when, you know, sales are not ramping? What do they do? They're going to replace the VP of sales. Are there other possible explanations why sales aren't ramping?

Yeah, interesting. I wonder what it could be if customers don't want the product. Oh, it's the VP of sales. It can't possibly be the product. And then another VP of sales and then another VP of sales. Why? Because that's not the problem. Your product sucks.

Okay, that's the problem. Yeah. And in Silicon Valley, unpack that a minute because this is, you know, being an investor in companies, I'm on board sometimes, and the founders of the product people, and then there's this sales team in some building somewhere in a boiler room who are not at the board meeting. And it seems like they're always up and they're always the problem. And okay, flip, flip, flip. And then I see other organizations where I'll be candid, like maybe this VP of sales does not feel particularly inspiring to me. but the phone's ringing off the hook and we're up into the right

and things are expanding and landing and lighthouse customers. What's this propensity to always blame the sales team versus the product team? Well, the product's kind of untouchable, right? Because it's the founders, it's the golden child. It's what the investors invested in. They're sitting around the

table. It's like, Christ, this product is no good. I mean, that's a conversation. That's like facing your demons. That's like being intellectually honest now, right? It's like I'd or go for an explanation that, you know, is easier to fix and it's going to flip out of VP of sales and find a better one and we'll be off to the races. That's the, that's the explanation we want, but that may not be the explanation that is correct. And obviously, you know, by the way, we see this in Silicon Valley all the time, right?

I mean, they also start, you know, hiring reams of salespeople when they can't even make a single salesperson productive. Now, why would you do that? Because you have an undying belief that, you know, it's marketable, it's sellable. Well, we don't even know that yet, okay? Why don't we prove that to ourselves before we start ramping up here, you know? Yeah, the 12 salesperson, if the first 11 are not ringing the bell, it's not going to suddenly ring the bell 12 times. There could be a leaky bucky here.

The product could need some iteration. And correct me if I'm wrong here, the right thing to do is to just ask the VPs, hey, be candid. But sometimes the sales folks are in some way diminished, but we should look at them, I think, you'll agree, as our early warning system. We should look at them as our research department, our customer research, because they get the objections. But sometimes there's a culture I find where the salespeople either get blocked by management or the product people, they don't get listened to when they have the product feedback. Is that a trend you see and how do you correct for it?

Here's the thing, right? If the product that you have requires a brilliant salesperson, you're already in trouble because there are on very many brilliant. and salespeople in the world. Okay, that's not a scalable model. So you want a product to be marketable by, you know, every Tom, Dick and Harry, you can hire off the street in every random city, you know, in the United States.

That's a model that we can invest in, right? But product people, you know, and founders are often, you know, very visionary, very articulate. They can sell this thing. They can't. Okay, but can the average person off the street do it? A whole different question.

Well, I can do it. So therefore, you should be able to do it. No, actually not, right? Because if it's that hard to sell, I mean, we're going to run into a ton of friction trying to scale this business. And the number one criteria that I look at in companies is velocity. You said the truth is in the velocity of the business. If there is velocity, I don't care what the conversation is. There's something good happening here, okay?

Because this thing is ripping, you know, almost without us trying. When you don't have velocity, I don't care how good your story is. There is a problem here. We need to unpack this in your favorite term and completely look at why is this happening? Why are we running into all this friction, right? That's the grind. That's the grind. Yeah.

But look, you know, I always say, you know, what's worse than selling zero customers? It's selling a few customers because that gives you hope. That makes you think you actually have a, you have viability when you don't. When you have zero customers, you can put a bullet into it and move on. That's much better. Yeah, you don't have this false hope. It could have been a really charismatic salesperson or a customer who is frisky and likes to try a lot of different things.

And that's not true market pull. What you're describing me is the market pulling the product out of you. You know, they're calling you. You give them one email. They're like, yeah, we're looking for that. We need that. Oh, data? Yeah, we got a lot of data.

How do we manage it? Let's talk about managing burnout. We're getting toward the end of our hour here. And I want to be respectful of your time. I know you've got to go talk to customers. I'm assuming we get off this call, you're talking to customers, but you're buying more company. So I want to hit those things, but I also want to talk about burnout.

You watch Bob Eager, he quit, put somebody in charge, he goes out on a bow for 10 months, gets back in the seat. Maybe talk a little bit about burnout, because everybody in the company wants to talk about burnout this, burnout, that. How do you look at burnout? I've had burnouts, and I didn't realize it at time because you never had it. You don't know how to recognize it. You recognize it in hindsight, you know, when you're sort of regain your energy and your enthusiasm and all these things that you need.

And when you lose that, you just want to get away, okay? And that's how you know you have burnout and nobody is immune, you know, to it. But I just learned important lessons, you know, from it. It's like, how do you sustain your, you know, your level of effort, you know, over a long period of time? because in these kinds of jobs you can burn yourself out real easily because it's like, you know, it's just so uncompromising and so unyielding.

If I don't do this and if I don't do that, and you travel to every city and every country and after a while it's like there's no more to give, right? And you do need to have a pace that is sustainable. You need to have a mental model, you know, where you can sustain yourself over time. And unfortunately, we tend to not learn that easily or early on in life.

It's tough. And burnout happens to the best of us, yeah. If you're not burning out, you're not pushing yourself hard enough is another way to look at it. It's a great signal. And all of a sudden, you hit a wall. But look, if you're running a marathon

and you're starting off the first mile, retlining it, you don't know how to run a marathon, okay? I mean, I took a note, and I was being a little soft reflective. I think avoidance is a sign of, burnout. When you're so burnt out that you're like, oh, God, there's six things I need to handle. And you just don't handle them as the CEO. And you previously would have been like six things to

handle. All right, I can triage these four. These are, I'm just going to pick a decision. And these two, I've got to have some really buffle first principle discussions with my team, study some metrics. And really, instead of 95% action, 5% you know, diagnosis, I just got to flip that. I got to spend some time. But if you don't have the energy for it, you're avoiding it. You're burnt out. It's pretty obvious. The thing about burnout is, I mean, you can't go to work every day, just thinking about, oh, if we just do this, you know, we grow this much or stock prices that. Those are things that, you know, that cannot sustain you.

It cannot. Okay. What can sustain you is when you're working on a very compelling vision, you know, of what you're trying to build. because it's the creative muscle now. It's part of being something that is extraordinary. That sort of nourishes the muscle and the soul of doing this kind of work. If it's just about, oh, we all want to be rich and famous. You can't keep that up.

You will burn out, okay? So I really want to direct people to, this is so great what we're doing. Look at what this customer is doing. Look at this technology. So that we're really into the substance of what we're doing as opposed to how, how high is our stock price or people are sitting on their little spreadsheet trying to figure out how rich they are. That's death, okay?

Oh, God, is it ever, man. That's a curse. Explain why. Well, because, you know, money is a demotivator, meaning that, you know, if it's there, it doesn't do anything for you. If it's not there, you get demotivated, right? So you can't nourish and provision drive with money. You can't.

I mean, you get temporarily, you know, I mean, but, you know, what does happen, You know, if somebody is not compensated correctly, they get angrily because they figure like, you know, this is not fair, this is not right. And they become demotivated. This is why it's really important that, you know, we have really competitive compensation because it causes those kinds of situations. You don't want to have that. But if you give them more, it doesn't do anything for it. It really doesn't, you know. It really, it's not why people are doing it.

Michael Jordan, you saw that documentary, I'm sure. You watched The Last Dance. I mean, talk about a miserable guy. guy, you give him another, if you doubled his salary every year on the bulls, triple it. He's not going to change anything about what he does. He came up with the most petty reasons to be competitive, to keep his performance at a high level. It was, I mean, to a point of dysfunctionalness, I mean, and I don't even know after watching

that, my theory is maybe it's just all a put on. Maybe he just likes to have this image of being so miserable. That is actually he's really a nice guy. you ever have this instance in management where there are people in the organization who want to represent other people and their experience and they want to tell you everybody's burning out everybody has this problem they want to be the back channel for everything

how do you handle that these culture killing people these these uh what are you hall monitors hall monitors yeah you know I'm actually I'm not sure that I even know what you're talking about Oh, yeah, because they don't even make it a day. I've just been seeing this in some organizations where somebody says, oh, you know, I got to talk about this person, this person has a problem, that person has a problem. You know, a lot of times we're on the boards.

Let's talk about playbooks. Let's talk about the signaling we get over time. You get a lot of VCs on your boards. Hey, we see a lot of things. We're on a lot of boards. We think we know everything. But we're not in the trenches. We're not talking to customers like you are.

And then there's first principle thinking. How do you know when to apply? signaling things that, you know, you've got a gut for. You talk to customers for 30 years. You're going to learn some things. And then went to just say, hey, let's just think like five-year-olds into first principles. Yeah.

I mean, the thing is we sort of, you got to be like a five-year-old or a fifth-grader, you know, pick one, you know, where you just bring a complete level of common sense to a conversation. You know, I was berating somebody earlier today about applying resource. to a situation that was not yielding. And like, why on God's worth, would you do that? You know, you need to stop and fix, you know, before you apply resource, right? You call a time out and say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you know.

But we're, that's mindless. That is literally mindless, right? And what we want is to be mindful, you know, of the conversation. Let's just really embrace this conversation and just sort of, like you say, unpack it, right? What should we be doing? What is the right thing to do here? That's first principles, and that's just, those yield the best conversations. And it's being inquisitive, isn't it?

Like, as a leader, just ask a question or two and listen. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of common sense that there's low-hanging fruit that we can, and teaching people to think for themselves. That's why I don't like playbooks because they're mindless. Okay, we're just executing the play, whether it makes any damn sense or not. No, we want, by the way, We just came out of football season, right?

I mean, do you let the quarterback, you know, who's on the field looking at what he's seeing what he's seeing, right? And he's going to have to make a call or is it the guy on the sidelines saying you're going to run this play, no matter how bonehead of that play may be. It's different being on the field versus, you know, being on the sidelines, right? Yeah. So it's common sense is not that common, unfortunately. So you have to work on that, you know. A lot of companies have adopted something called. trust and safety.

Building a culture of trust. Seems interesting. Okay, great, yeah, trust is important. You've talked about it yourself with customers inside the company. And then this concept of psychological safety. People need to feel safe at work. What do you think of this concept? Trust and psychological safety as an operating principle for a company.

I think trust is super important, but that doesn't mean that it has a relationship with safety. You know, just because I trust you, doesn't mean you're safe. I'm not safe. You know, I'm a high anxiety person. There's no safety between my ears whatsoever. So, by the way, if I'm not safe, you're not safe either. Okay, well, this is honest, right? So now we can build trust.

What you just did by even unpacking that, you just literally neutered the entire Silicon Valley operating principle for the last 10 or 20 years, which is, oh, we have to make people feel psychologically safe. None of us are safe. Somebody could create a competing product that's the tenth of the price and just totally undermine us. We have to be paranoid. You know, like that, that actually operating principle was the right principle.

Psychological safety is the absolute wrong principle. The CEO can be fired by the board. The stock could plummet. Microsoft, Amazon. These people want to kill Snowflake. And it's, as you said, nobody get fired for picking Microsoft, right? So you got to go in there and convince folks, hey, pick Snowflake. over Microsoft.

The way I try to help people with the safety thing is, look, you come home on Friday night and you knew you moved dials, okay? And that's safety, that's security, okay? There will be a million people wanting to hire you. That's where your safety come from. That is the only place where security comes from, okay? Everything else is make-believe. It's not true.

It's your ability. It's your skill set. it's your enthusiasm. It's what you've done. That's what makes you safe in the world. Build your skills. The peer group, the network, because they all know you, and they're going to vouch for you, okay?

And by the way, if forever reason you lost your job and God forbid a layoff, you get picked up so fast your head will spin, okay? Because everybody knows who you are and they want you. Because drivers are hard to find and passengers are plentiful, you know. Yeah. Hey, you made an observation about the purity of, consumption-based pricing on some hit.

Maybe it was on an earnings call, I'm not sure. A lot of people in the industry were like, hey, SaaS-based pricing per seat is brilliant. You know, like, hey, it's fair. But you seem to think the ultimate honesty is consumption-based pricing. Explain. Well, sort of like the way utility companies, you know,

operate, right? I mean, you buy power and gas and water and you pay for what you use. It's not a new model. It's just in software. It's a new model. because we've been selling use rates, whether you use it or not, you're going to pay. And when I was at service now for all these years, I always felt there was an inherent inequity between us as a vendor and a customer.

A customer would often buy tons of licenses. They wouldn't even be using them yet. I'm like, this is not right. This is not equitable. And, you know, as consumption models started to come out, I was very, very attracted to that. This brings equitableity into the relationship

between the software vendor and the software customer. And I do think it's, I think the whole world of software will move

to consumption. I mean, already absolutely. The public cloud vendors are already there. And then all the layers on top will be

consumption-based. I still, I mean, we help companies become consumption-based because we're a pure play expert in consumption-based

business models. So people come and ask us, how does this work? How do you do this? So, but it's, I love it because a customer, and in times like this, when the economy looks challenging,

a customer can say, hey, you know, I can decide, you know, whether I fill up my tank every two days or I fill it up once a week, how much I consume, maybe I will not drive,

or I will drive, or I won't drive. So you make all these decisions, so you feel much safer, you know, what a platform that is that way. You can trust your vendor. Yeah.

Hey, they're not screwing me. and that's building that trust right now. Talk to me about acquisitions. We're going to wrap. I know you got to go. I know that you have battles to fight. But you've done, I know of at least eight or nine.

How do you do the culture thing? How do you pick the company? Because you've got a high culture. Not everybody shares this. We punt on a ton of deals because we don't think we're compatible. That happens probably more often than not. But to us, I'm looking to accelerate our roadmap all the time. You can do it in many ways.

You can do that by straight line engineering, which is what most people do. You can hire talent. You can buy talent or you can buy whole companies. And there's, by the way, models in between that we have also employed where sometimes I want to hire somebody. I can't hire that person because that person wants to start a company. Then they go like, well, I want to have a majority interest in your company. Right. So, I mean, we will go any way but Sunday, you know, and because the goal is always acceleration.

We try to buy what we call stem cells that we don't have, okay, things that we can grow ourselves and other body part from. Because we don't have it, but you have it. And we want that so that we can grow, you know, that part of the business and the technology platform around it. And because we're such, our technology landscape is so huge. There's so many disciplines and brand new disciplines, especially in AI and things like that. that we have to get into the stem cell games. So acquisitions are important, but most of if you've seen what we do,

we don't buy businesses. You know, we buy talents first, and we buy technology second. That makes total sense. You think this AI thing is, I mean, obviously we've all been working on it for decades,

but all of a sudden it's captured the public's excitement. And it seems like organizations are like, you know what, maybe if the public is so excited, maybe we need them to let them play with this. Have you play with Chad GPT? Have you play with these things?

What's the initiatives you have internal at Snowflake? And how do you look at it, just writ large? Is it overhyped, underhyped, short term, long term? Well, there's definitely going to be the classic hype cycle, you know, on this sort of stuff. So we get over the moon and then we lose our fascination with it and then it starts to grow for real and it becomes really deployable. implementable real value. But the stuff that is very real that we live with is machine learning, which you could describe as data-driven AI. And because we're about data, I mean, we drive a ton of AI from data, which is machine learning. I mean, we can predict things from data that are,

these are becoming mainstream enterprise business applications that run every single night and produce demonstrable value. And that's, that is really, really high. It's very important. It's very mainstream. So that's sort of a subset of AI, if you will. That's not in the large language models and all that. But, you know, we're seeing now how large language models are connecting to Snowflake. Okay, because they're referencing that as part of the data, you know, to, you know, to build a query set around, which is interesting.

And why not, right? Data is data, whether structured, semi-structured, unstructured, unstructured. So these models will be referencing. structured data like ours. It feels like there's an emergence of a new profession, an individual, a skill set.

We called it on the all-line pod, prompt engineering, just the person, and it used to be people would just write SQL queries in a really clever way. Sometimes they were developers, sometimes they were accountants,

sometimes they were just business people who learned SQL. But there is going to be some position to tell me if you think this is correct where, hey, you got the dataset, stored at Snowflake, okay, now you're pointing some language model at that data set, but there needs to be somebody

who's sitting there saying, hey, tell me about this. Okay, tell me about this group of customers, but take out this group. Okay, tell me about this group of customers during this period of time and it's sort of segmenting things and knowing what questions to ask and knowing which data sets to use. Are people starting in your customer calls? And listen, this is what you do. You're on calls with all these customers all the time. every time we do a discussion,

you're like, I got to get off, I got a call with the customer. Are customers starting to talk about this yet? And what percentage of them are talking about it? And how are they talking about it? So here's the thing. You know, for the last, I don't know how many decades, we struggled just what I call reporting yesterday's news. I just want to come in in the morning and I want to have fresh dashboards and reports

and sort of see what happened yesterday and, you know, then be able to, you know, slice and dice and pivot and do a little. these things and maybe extrapolate, you know, time series and things of that sort. We have broken the back of that set of problems with cloud architectures and things like Snowflake because of all the architectural changes that we've made. Now you can run these processes extremely fast. You know, the transfer to data from transactional to analytical system, the transformation that they have to happen, then the analytical processes and the populations of all the all the output vehicles.

And the machine learning models need to run. The tableau dashboards need to be populated, all that kind of stuff. That was really hard for a long time. Okay. Now it's really, really good. Technology is no longer the problem. You can really build provision. The stuff runs like a bad out of hell.

But now people are saying, is that all there is? They literally ask that question. Is this all there is? You push the rock to the top of the hell and they're just like, kick it down. Start over. No. What are you got from me now? The beginning is.

to understand the past, he says, but after that, it's about understanding your future. Okay? You're trying to mind, forecasting demand, supply chain management, what product grills where. I mean, during the pandemic, inflation, all these things became, you know, very, very, very, very pressing. But, you know, so this is really, really, you know, important. The predictive outcomes, I mean, they're so good, so powerful. Data doesn't have opinions.

It is not anecdotal. just says what it is. Okay. And I think it's a much better way to run enterprises than relying on what I call anecdotal observation. You and I both do it. You know, we talk to people, we read our email, we watch the news, and we form ourselves an opinion. That's anecdotal observation. Data doesn't watch the news, okay? No. I mean, these AIs might start including that as a factor, but who knows? This is clearly where this is going. Thank you for the hour. General Sludman, if you have not read the book, I want you to buy 10 copies right now, amp it up, give it to your team, watch this podcast, go back to episode 1362, you write your notes, your team this weekend

watches both episodes, read the book, and then you come in Monday and you amp it up at your organization and you just take the energy level up to 11 and you don't accept mediocrity, and you may have to do some pruning. Sorry, if you listen to this podcast, you've now been infected with reality. General Soutman, thank you again for coming on this week in startups. I salute you. And we'll see you next time. Pleasure.