It was great to talk to my friend @balajis a few weeks ago. He is a quintessential futurist, living maybe 10-20 yrs in the future & has been right about so many things that sounded ridiculous back in the day. Genomics, Crypto, DeFi, Covid. Highlights in thread. #EE21 (1/11)
We asked Balaji - why is he the way he is? He responded by explaining that there are 2 types of CEOs - a COO type (those who ensure the trains run on time) & a CTO type (those who think & live in the future). While both have their merits, he gravitates towards the latter.
As the CTO type, he spoke of his interest in identifying powerful secular trends & behaviours e.g. rapid adoption of internet applications that are revolutionizing humanity - from meeting to mating! Being aware of these ‘curves’ helps in hypothesizing where we are headed.
We @LightspeedIndia are thrilled to host Frank Slootman, CEO of @SnowflakeDB as the inaugural speaker for our #MastersOfSaaS fireside chat series w/ global SaaS leaders: RSVP@ shorturl.at/hDMZ8. As a fan, I've collected Frank's quotes ("Slootisms"? :-) for yrs; some favs👇:
Frank is an absolute master of speed. As the CEO of Data Domain (acqd:EMC), ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW), & Snowflake, Frank’s track record of execution + strategic vision is globally in the company of one. There are none like him. shorturl.at/avzL4. Img credit: @patrick_oshag
Frank on running fast and lean: Img credit: @Altimor
Speed of execution is the moat inside which live all other moats. Speed is your best strategy. Speed is your strongest weapon. Speed has THE highest correlation to mammoth outcomes. Those who conflate speed w/ 'thoughtlessness' haven't seen world class execution @ speed. E.g.:
Many confuse speed w/ impatience. Impatience is your boss pinging you @ 9pm then calling @ 6am to check if a task is done. Speed is strategic. It is a permeated sense of urgency built w/ a shared belief that what you are doing is important & if you don’t do it, someone else will.
AMZN defines speed. Their 2015 SEC filing (shorturl.at/xDEU1) is a must-read: (1) deliberate irreversible decisions (~10%?) (2) expedite all else. Founding teams need to learn how to apply judgment w/ <70% of data (<50% for early stage cos). Move fast, “disagree & commit”.
~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇
By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.
We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏
SaaS growth investing is on 🔥 the last few quarters. If you are a SaaS founder in the market to raise a growth round, here’s a quick summary of what to expect & how to prepare for these conversations, based on chats we’ve had w/ a bunch of growth funds in US and SEA recently👇
Some highlights:
+ SaaS public mkt multiples are, for the 1st time, ahead of private mkts; we are seeing >20x NTM rev, 30-40x ARR, pretty regularly
+ Y/Y rev growth & mkt leadership valued a lot
+ 1st check DD down from 90d to 2wks!
+ Clear post-covid narrative v. imp to raise
Before the raise 1/2:
+ Educate the market on your long-term story; PR/AR, 3rd party sources talking you up, etc. You want data points others can search & find.
+ Get customers prepped to talk and offer a few up front once the funds are looking to dig in. Why?
🤯 chat w Snowflake founding investor @laserlikemike last night - some gems: compounding effects of doing just *1* thing right over & over; 0 tolerance on ethics; look for 100x better solns* then ignore non believers; & conversational "gradient descent" to build conviction. 🙏
* as an example: snowflake could do a computational job in 2mins what took ORCL 30 days 😲. Conventional wisdom: "database is a solved problem".
On conversational 'gradient descent': Mike spoke to 300+ global DB experts to continually narrow down the problem scope in DB, TAM (entire DB market), and the technical soln. Over time when he met the snowflake founder, he knew he was (1) the best (2) got it exactly right.