Amp It Up

Book: Amp It Up
Author: Frank Slootman

Data Domain had a product, but no revenue. Frank Slootman, who came in as CEO in 2003, eventually led to its acquisition by EMC for $2.4 billion. He then joined ServiceNow in 2011, a company bootstrapped with $7 million dollars 8 years prior, operating out of San Diego. Slootman led it’s through its hyper growth phase, where it became the only second company in history to exceed $1 billion in software-as-a-service revenues. Slootman also took it public with a $210 million IPO. He then joined Snowflake in 2019, another hyper-growth company that did well under his leadership, and under his watch, went on to become the largest software IPO of all time.

So it should be clear by now that Slootman gets something right. He’s an operator for hire and it looks like he knows something that others don’t. He is most definitely not Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or any of the other celebrated founder entrepreneurs. He never founded any of the companies he ran. And yet, he knew how to get them to succeed greatly. The only parallel I can think of is Andy Grove, another world class operator who did not start the company most associated with him. Amp It Up is Slootman’s book about what he did in his career that he thinks worked and what he thinks others should do. At 180 pages, one cannot accuse it of being longer than it needs to be. And it is useful, even if it is familiar. Every good management book, after all, is downstream of Andy Grove’s Only The Paranoid Survive and High Output Management.

Like Grove, Slootman’s intensity jumps off every page. There are no wasted words and everything is to the point. Leadership matters. Raising the bar is energizing. A sense of urgency is energizing. You want to kill management by objectives because it causes employees to silo and impossible to pull off projects. Get alignment by ensuring incentivizing sales and product growth. Do fewer things, but make sure those things are the right things. Prioritize hard. Constantly ask: what is it that you are not going to do? What are the consequences of not doing something? Be constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing. 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?

Go fast. Compress timelines. Again, urgency is energizing. High performers crave a culture of energy. Use every encounter, meeting, and opportunity to increase the pace of whatever is going on. Apply pressure. Be impatient. Culture is not a list of values. Culture is something that is enforced by rewards and punishment. You get the culture you incentivize and enforce. Fire the violators. Your competitors can gain access to capital, hire away your talent, and steal your ideas, but they almost certainly can't replicate your culture. 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.

When you join a new company, you want to gain trust. You get that by saying what you are going to do and doing it.

Hyperbolic projections will destroy any form of credibility and trust. So when you set expectations, make sure you have the resources and ability to adhere to them. Not just in terms of deliverables but also in how you treat people. For instance, if you say you have a zero‐tolerance policy on an issue, don't make exceptions. If you say you have somebody's back, then do. Words have consequences. People trust a straight shooter.

Invest in sales. You must sell your product, and keep your customers. 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. Set your people up for success by providing them with a plan and if necessary, mentors, and watch them thrive.

You need to invest in larger strategy, but always couple it with execution. This means that the person strategizing is also the person executing. No consultants. Ask yourself and your team, what should you be doing urgently but not doing for some reason? Ask often so you don’t get too engrossed in day-to-day activities. With new products, aim for early adopters who are willing to take the risk. Another strategic call: attacking markets that have weak, unpopular incumbents is infinitely easier than chasing strong, popular occupants. Customers do not easily part with products that do the job for them. They have enough on their plate already. You need massive, not marginal differentiation, or they will simply filter you out as noise.

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.

Andy Grove said everyone was a CEO of their career. You should think of yourself as a product and aggressively manage your own growth. Frank Slootman, unsurprisingly, echos the same sentiment.

Build your record of accomplishments thoughtfully. Having a bunch of roles on your resume without clear success at each one can become a strike against you. You start to look like a passenger, not a driver. If you are light on experience for a role you want, redirect the conversation to aptitudes. Why would you be great in this position? Smart managers will usually pick someone with less experience but more aptitude.

Nothing puts rocket fuel in your career tank more than what other people say about you. Bosses, peers, and subordinates will all have strong opinions about what you're like to work with. Smart managers know that for anyone well beyond entry level, exhaustive referencing builds a clearer portrait of a candidate than any number of interviews. Think of everyone around you—bosses, peers, and subordinates—as a potential future reference. What will they say about you?

Slootman views business as war. You either survive or die. Kill or be killed. Either you already have a turf, and you have to defend it against all comers, or else you have to invade somebody else's turf and take it. We are playing defense and offense at the same time.

The paranoid do more than survive, they are richly rewarded.

Slootman's assertion that leadership matters should be obvious to anyone who has tracked Intel's fortunes since Andy Grove. In 2024, the company is battling for survival and could very well be acquired by Qualcomm. Culture degrades over time, even if it degrades slowly. The same will happen to ServiceNow and Snowflake without Slootman at helm. So how does one go about ensuring similar success? Reading books such as this is not enough. It is internalizing and embodying the attitudes of people like Slootman and Grove, which seems to be rare. One must make these ideas their own.

Being lucky and going in hard on opportunities that come your way is rarer still, and Slootman had the instincts to bet right when it presented itself.

We all need to be careful what “elevator” we get into early in our careers. Some go up, some go down, some don't move. It's largely beyond our control, so choose wisely. We have seen staggering examples of this phenomenon in Silicon Valley. 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.