CIODAY 2019 I Frank Slootman (CEO - Snowflake)

I'll try to keep you awake here for a next couple of minutes in our heart of this after lunch you know especially in the back is a little dark you want to take a nap I feel like it as well Jim forgot to say as I spent those 35 years on the US I know precious little about what it's like to you know to be working in Holland when Rob asked me to to speak which which I wanted to do my first thought was I'm gonna do a blatant commercial for snowflake because you know you're used to being sold to so what the hell right but he's like you know that's people that can't really handle that kind of kind of behavior so I had to come up with a different topic I'll find out to put myself in there somewhere as well but I had a topic that came to mind I've been the CEO for the last 15 years in now three different companies two of these companies we've taken public many of you use service now you probably all do remain products as well and now they're again last six months CEO of snowflake you know in those capacities I've hired CIOs I've also fired a whole bunch of them thank you very much probably because I didn't like them so I want to give you a sense of the perspective of the CEO towards the CIO you probably don't hear that that often so I'm going to give you sort of the unvarnished version so that big dog that is not the CIO that's the CEO okay the little runt that's you okay so I have very simple messages here right we try and narrow it just a little bit the first thing that I sort of want to leave you with is seek alignment now you're like what the hell does that mean seek alignment when I hired Chris Beattie at service now we still the CIO they're really good guy I'll hire him again if I ever get the chance when I interview them I said Chris do you know why CIOs get fired so often and of course he was really intimidated by the question you'd like all this up an interview here and he's asking me why CIOs get fired he's like I better not answer that question it doesn't feel safe and I said oh I'm you answer it for you you see I always get fired because they board their out of the CEO okay you born me and see CEOs live a terrifying life right we live in terror all day long terror is a normal state of being we worry about everything a competition encroaching on us we have to grow we have to employ people you know we have to raise money we got to do all these things and then you have a CIO coming into your office wants to talk about keeping the lights on and what a great job he's doing that I don't give a right I'm expecting you to do that right I mean so the first thing is that Chris you know we have meetings every week because we have to have conversations that engage me right and then this question was well how do I do that well start by asking the question what do I care about what do I give a about what the word is preoccupying me right your job is to help me solve my problems my job is not to help you solve yours right that's the big dogs small dog relationship here so I've noticed that over the years you know there used to be the CIO and now there is all these other people you know chief transformation of I just came from Philips you know met with one of your previous nominees and winners of the CIO of the Year award given to us that was great I was not meeting with the CIA I was meeting with the chief transformation officer ah hint right so could it be that the CEO is finding other people to talk to that are more interesting that's why we've created all these roles all these titles I'm just asking the question okay I'm not saying it but all these roles used to be in the CIO more or less right and then we started to proliferate and pretty soon all that's left for the CIO is keeping the lights on and now you're reporting three layers down on your organization because the CEO doesn't even want to see in the hallway and have a conversation with you the second thing is about risk CEOs have no choice that be out on the curve on risk we have no choice we can't kill risk we can't hide risk we can manage risk we can't avoid it and the conversation is it's thought that the CIO is often the same that's talking to your chief legal counsel or to your lawyers the lawyers try that kill risk right instead useless just advise me of the risk don't try to kill it because I have to take risk so help me take risk instead of a warning I mean I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a number two guy thank you from America in New York and they were like public clouds absolutely not never happening now there's just an insane position to take for one of the largest banks in the world right just they want to kill risk that is one to pretend the world is not moving and it's not happening that's not helpful to the CEO right so you look at the two dogs you know they sit far apart in the spectrum that's not good right so we have to find ways to come to get it right so understanding risk managing the risks helping with risk it's good that's what we want this is how you stay employed by the way the third thing is then we have three thanks this is an easy presentation costs isn't everything I don't wake up every day worrying about cost if I had a business that didn't grow and growth was not an option sure you know the only way to create value is to take cost out and I know many of you are in businesses like that there is no growth okay final cost but most of us we need to grow up we have to grow right so in other words you know looking at things to the lens of cost reduction which is what what CIOs invariably do is not helpful to me I need to grow right so adopt the growth mentality the growth orientation when you talk to people like us now we want to have conversations with you so these three things now I go from the abstract now and I'm going to put this in the context of the experience of snowflake computing contrary to popular belief we do not sell skis and they were not into mountaineering either but snow flakes do fall from the cloud we're a cloud data platform simply said our ambition is to sort of become the Oracle of the clouds - the sales behaviors of Oracle now you recognize that you don't have to read this you know we take workloads on premise workloads Tara data's the peas as Oracle sequel server we bring it to the cloud we're not a start-up anymore we're processing 350 million queries a day Google processes about five billion searches a day we're growing data about who you X it's all pretty simple being that same facility over where Google was that so a lot of data management is moving through the cloud that's really the point of this now why do people do this why why do you care right so number one this I want to tell you what's good about this I'm going to tell you how cio is reacting how CEOs react anticipated number one the scale right not one benefit of the public law this I can address petabyte scale and larger effortlessly you're gonna run out of money before they run out of capacity right secondly you know performance is now going from hours and days to seconds of ministry because that can apply unlimited amounts of compute - were closed this is bloody amazing huge and incredibly fast the third thing is that's amazing is it's completely elastic I mean I can stand up massive clusters massive numbers of clusters and I can use them for the duration that I need them and then I just get rid of it wow this is amazing is cool unlimited concurrency you know I can run 70 80 100 as many clusters as I can think of executing on the same data tens of thousands of users hardware is no longer limiting what I can do and then it's a utility model rights just like the energy company you just pay by the Machine second or all the way back to time sharing in the 1970s we just pay for what we use I was asking for a longest time software as a service we don't license offer any more minutes on the cell phone you use them and you buy support and what people find out yet they're doing 10 20 times as much work because no more constraint you know on what we can do this is pretty good pitch I like it that's why I joined the company now who took on snowflake it wasn't too traditional see IEPs that goes for them it was too high-risk public clouds you just say the word public clouds and a lot of them started sprinting out of the room the early adopters are what we call digital companies data first companies not companies with sales forces and call centers they don't really talk to people at all it's completely 100% software and you probably recognized a lot of the names on here we also scaled mountain all the way to zero inches all to get sort of a basic computing state out there so you probably recognize picnics certainly one of our first adopters they're all it's really really great people so they got us they moved they went but a lot of times these people don't have CIOs they have VP of engineering they have CTOs and they're aggressive on the risk aspect of things thought these people came later as our customers this is the traditional cloud they're kind of shoveling in and they're coming along well this shows you that the general attitude and posture towards new technologies is very different than established companies so one snowflake talks to you CIOs and seriously I hear this every day of the week it's it's us biased I think I've had a lot of conversations here over the last two days you're a great bunch of people and you know in many ways I'm kind of energized and really feeling good about the conversations I had here but the number one thing is yep we're need to modernize I have workloads running a really old Chet you know bringing it forward to the cloud gives me all the benefits that we just discussed so it's a lot of lifting and shifting and you know you get exhausted just talking about topic but we got to go and do it existing we're close to the clock the second thing is you know the lens of cost I just yeah I'll do it I want safe morning how much money do I say right I was the CIO extremely large insurance company the other day in New York and there was all about how much of my Oracle estate can I take out how much can I save right that is the conversation that they want to have I find that I don't find that particularly exciting that they do risk right it's always about which data sets you know am I going to move for it right I tell you there's one word or one abbreviation that CIOs find incredibly scary word it's called PPI right you say PII they also stops printing for the doors because that's the scariest data of them off the PII is also the data is typically the most impactful to the business so saving money avoiding risk modernization now we go to the Big Dawg the conversation is different it's really dramatically different it doesn't have to be the CEO oftentimes these are people are running business units and businesses in larger enterprises instead of modernization we're talking about transformation very different words like what can I do differently to grow faster destroy my competition change the balance of power this is the stuff that's between the years of the CEO that's the conversation that we want CIOs to have with us and we're looking at a new sex right the self saving money we're thinking about making money that's what we want to talk about making money not saving money right you can save money that make my day but we want to make money and when it comes to risk right let's not go for the safest better let's go for the most impactful that right so I'm telling you this to give you a sense of this is really what what we're experiencing out there but you sort of want to make your dialogue your relationship with the CEO more energizing or interesting now instead of then asking you to give you money back they're gonna start throwing money at you right you've got something that I want I want you what I won't bite right so the CEO start throwing money at you now you know you're doing great they want money from you yeah now it's good a conversation so this is really what what I'm suggesting you give some consideration to let's just be pals let's have alignment let's talk the same language right let's be single purpose right and I think we'll be happier was the big dogs and I think the little runts will be doing a lot better kid that's all I wanted to share with you today thank you very much have a good afternoon thank you Frank

Channel: Rob Beijleveld

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Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019