#56, Bob Muglia, Former CEO of Snowflake — Having a values-based vs. performance-based company, r...

Welcome to From Startup to Grownup, the podcast. My name is Alisa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors, and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. Welcome to From Startup to Grownup. My guest today is Bob Muglia, who is the former CEO of Snowflake. Prior to that, he was a longtime Microsoft executive, and Bob is also the author of "The Datapreneurs: The Promise of AI and the Creators Building Our Future." We had a really great conversation. We talked about Bob's adventures at Microsoft, including getting fired by Steve Ballmer not once but twice. And Bob also shares what it's like to work directly with Bill Gates. He talked about the transformation of Microsoft culture and how instructive it was for him when one of his leadership teams went from being super functional to super dysfunctional, all because of one bad apple on leadership team. We then cover how Bob got to Snowflake and decided to join as CEO, how he approached getting his arms around what was going on there, and then the step-by-step process of how he changed the culture. Bob is a great manager and leader, and he shared the specifics of some of his techniques, like how he keeps his finger on the pulse of the team and how he holds people accountable without making them feel bad. A pretty important trait for a leader. This is a really fun conversation and it's filled with very actionable tools. So please enjoy my great conversation with Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake. Bob, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Great to be here, Alisa Cohn.

I'm super excited to talk about you and your background and your new book. And I wanna start, uh, at the place where you started with me when we had our pre-call, which is that you were fired by Steve Ballmer twice. Amazing. Tell us what happened. You may be the only person who was fired by Steve Ballmer twice, but tell us about that.

I bet that's not true, actually. Yeah, in a way, I think it's a little bit of a badge of honor. A little bit, I have to say. The first time was 2001. I remember it was right after 9/11. In fact, I remember shortly thereafter. And I was running part of MSN, and that's when Steve went to separate P&Ls. And I was the logical guy to run the MSN P&L, but he decided he didn't wanna do that. And instead, I essentially went and started a new team at Microsoft. I went from 3,000 people reporting to me to 1 in a 24-hour period, and I started a new team that was focusing on storage. I think one of the things I did there that was interesting was that when that happened, I was obviously knew a lot of people at Microsoft, was well known. I called just about everyone I knew at Microsoft to tell them what happened.

Yeah. What'd you say?

And I said it was a very odd phone call. In every case, I said, hey, Fred, I just want you to know that I've got a new role. I'm moving out of— Steve decided to not have me do this one job, so I'm now going to start a new team and I'm beginning this thing and I'm excited about doing that. And the response was always pretty uniformly a strained, "Oh, I'm really glad to hear that, Bob." You know, thinking like, what the heck is this? But you know what was interesting is a month or two later, a ton of those people came up to me and said how impactful that was, that I had reached out and talked to them about what was happening. And they really said that that taught them something. And it certainly taught me something.

Totally.

And I guess I've always tried to do that one way or another.

Yeah, that's great. So that was the first time, and it wasn't quite being fired. It was more being like passed over and handed one person instead of 3,000 Yeah. So what happened the second time?

That was interesting because after the first time, I did a little bit of analysis, correlated my career at Microsoft. And at that point, I'd been there like 12 years, 13 years. And I realized that I was very successful for 11 of those years and I struggled for 2. And the correlation of working directly for Steve was perfect. I struggled when I worked for Steve and I struggled a lot, and I did very well when I was not. So, for the next 4 years, I did big jobs at Microsoft. I was starting and running Teams, beginning the storage group, picked up the system center team, the management group. I had Windows Server, for goodness' sakes, underneath me. It was a $4+ billion business. And I was making sure that I was one level below Steve Ballmer. I was working first in Jim Allchin's organization in platforms, and then I actually wound up working for Jeff Raikes. In the Office group, and I moved some of the stuff to Office with me. And there was a story for why we were moving it, but the truth was I just didn't really wanna work for Steve directly. And then when Jeff left Microsoft, I had no choice, but I was gonna report directly to Steve. And I remember a friend of mine, Tracy, said to me, "Congratulations, you work for the CEO." I said, "Tracy, don't congratulate me. The clock starts ticking today." And it went off 3 years later. And ultimately it was a disagreement about a person. Looking back, I was right, but that's okay. It was, as these cases often are, there are disagreements about people. But there were a lot of disagreements I had with Steve around how he was running the company and values. And truth be told, I probably should have left the company because of my disagreements with Steve. And Steve just gave me the context to leave. And he would've given me another job at the company. I wasn't willing to do that at that point. It was time for me to leave.

You felt, sounds like the clock stopped, expired for him on his end, but it also, you had an internal clock which really expired.

And as I said, if I look back, one of my challenges, if you look, is in dealing with difficult things with people are hard. I think that's one of the things that managers have to do a good job on. I think that's an area where I could have opportunities for improving. I, in general, have good relationships with the people I've worked with. And sometimes you can't, sometimes you just can't. And in retrospect, like I said, I probably should have left the company earlier.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. You said that Steve Ballmer was a great leader and that you learned a lot from him, but that you had a difference in values. I'm curious, what did you learn from him? And when you said— we're gonna talk a little about values later in terms of how you brought them to Snowflake, but when you say you had different values, what does that actually mean?

It literally means that I thought about how to build products and thinking about what the company matters differently. Let me give you an example of something I disagreed with Steve on. At Microsoft, both Bill and Steve were very focused on managing the intellectual property of the company. And Steve was famously quoted for talking about Linux as a scouge and a cancer and things like that. And I never viewed it that way. I always viewed it as a product. It had a different business model we needed to compete against. In fact, I was famous for saying that's how we made Windows Server. All my time at Microsoft, Windows Server was gaining share against Linux, gaining share. And this was in the early 2000s. And that's because we built a better product. But at one point, Steve wanted to sue Microsoft customers in the server business that were using Linux. And I was like, no, no, we can't do that. To me, that's an obvious values thing. It's right. You don't sue your customers unless they're doing something really serious, right? Certainly not for using a competitor's product. That was an outrageous thing to do. So that was an example of a values difference between Steve and I. And it manifested itself in a number of ways through how the organization was run. What happened in the case of this person that I had disagreements with is I had a leadership team in the server and tools group that literally was the most functional leadership team I've ever had. People were working incredibly well. And when we brought the Azure team in, the manager of that group came in. And I knew it was going to be dysfunctional because this person had challenges. And I worked it for a year. I did everything I knew how to do to make this person successful for a year. And within a year, my leadership team had devolved into the most dysfunctional leadership team I'd ever had because this person was causing all the problems. And I basically said to Steve, they've got to go. And he said, no, in fact, they're going to stay, but you're going to go. That's what he basically said to me. Now, turns out he left before I did. Unless you give him my job, he's not gonna stay. And, and Steve thought, rightfully gave my job to Satya, much to my relief, and frankly, did the company and customers benefit because Satya, of course, did a fabulous job. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, that's really powerful. That's very interesting. So sounds like what you're also saying is that with this person, maybe there was maybe intellectual horsepower or some strategic sense. That Steve thought was valuable and you were like, I don't care.

I've learned over time, and I have to say this is one of the things at Microsoft, Microsoft was historically very tolerant of poor behavior.

Yeah.

Okay? Some of it came from the top sometimes, but in general, Microsoft was very good at managing challenging people. And that's a really useful thing in technology because frankly, there are a lot of challenging technology people and the most brilliant people tend to be somewhat challenging. And I got pretty good at managing those folks when at one At one point at Microsoft, they had over 20, 22, I believe, of the most senior technical people. They called them technical fellows working for me. And most of them were super easy, or you could work with them occasionally. You had some really challenging things. But what I learned over time was that I can tolerate a fair amount from a brilliant technical contributor that is not directly managing people. They typically indirectly manage things, but they don't directly manage things. And there's some level, you could get over the top, but some level bad behavior can be tolerated. From a general manager, I came to the conclusion that this— I cannot tolerate that. And that was an example in this particular case where Steve and I came to, came to blows.

Yeah.

Because a general manager, a vice president, you cannot have operating in any way other than but with the highest level of integrity and, and to the benefit of the customer and the product and the company.

Right. And to the people. What kinds of bad behavior do you mean? What kind of is tolerable bad behavior for technical experts who aren't managing people, and then what's not tolerable for a leader or a manager?

I think it depends on how you interact with others and your style of interactions with others and the way you— are you working to resolve problems or are you creating problems? And again, a senior technical person, in my experience, and again, this can go all sorts of directions and any individual can be there, they usually have a gem of a good technical reason why they're being a pain in the tail.

Yeah.

Even if their perspective is is not correct and they don't really have the right, they aren't looking at the big picture. They almost always are coming from a place that has some rationality to it and is worth diving into. In a management situation, it's more about how people are interacting and it's not as clear. It doesn't tend to be as clear that way. So that's probably one of the reasons. And I guess the other thing I've come to learn is that these senior technical people, they tend to be savant-like. They are one in a million. You can't replace them, basically. They're irreplaceable. And while managers and great managers are not a dime a dozen, they're a little easier to find than some of these brilliant technical people.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. How do you know? When you talk about this, I think it's so interesting because many people— so as an executive coach, I regularly see managers, leaders, employees, fighting for their point of view, and it's usually two— there's two reasons they're fighting for it. One, they genuinely think it's the best answer. And two, in some way it's better for them. Let's face it, right? It's better for their team or it's better for them. And right. And there's like a different— like those are almost like different dials, right? Like very much better for me and better for the company as compared to very much better for the company and kind of better for me or those kinds of things. How can you tell? Because I think it takes a lot of perspective and context to really be able to suss out what is politics and what is actually trying to do the right thing, maybe in the wrong way?

That is, of course, the $64,000 question or whatever. That's the real key thing. And honestly, in my experience, it takes time and energy and drill. One of the things that I learned, and this again, I learned at Microsoft, I practiced it at places like Snowflake, was drilling deep when you need to. And if you look at my management style, I would say by and large, to me, leadership is really 3 things. It's a great— it's the right strategy or a great strategy. It's a functional and effective structure, and it's the right people. And as a leader, your job is always to put those 3 things in place. Always. If you have those 3 things in place, hopefully 90% or more of what you're doing is just on autopilot and the teams are operating. Occasionally issues come up. By and large, things are functional and you can leave them to do their job. And then the 10 or 15% of things where you have problematic situations, where you have business issues, you drill into and you drill deep. You go as deep as you need to go. And I learned that at Microsoft. And you asked what I learned from Steve. That's the kind of stuff I learned from Steve. Steve was never afraid to drill to any level of depth. And in particular, if it came to business issues and financials, watch out, because there was no one better than Steve. Steve had a, he, Steve had a photographic memory for numbers and could compare and contrast businesses by country and product across Microsoft's product line and essentially expected the rest of us to operate at that level. And, and that was a real, that level of discipline was excellent.

And you were able to role model that. I think that's so powerful that you say that, uh, so many founders and new leaders are like either they're accused of being micromanagers by what I consider to be sometimes misguided, let's say, people around them. And then also sometimes they don't wanna be micromanagers for their reasons, either that's not their style, they're told not to or whatnot. And I really take the point of view that you just said, which is you can let folks run and do their thing as long as it's working. But when it's not working, you have to be able to zoom in and help them identify what's not working. And if they won't do it, to do it yourself.

Yeah, I think one of the challenges I would say that's common in founders is micromanage— is control freakishness. Like, they want to have a lot of control over things, and as you grow, you lose the ability to do that. One of the benefits of having 10,000 people working for you and you're working for a bigger con— big companies, you realize you don't control all that much, really. You— in my case, you— 10,000 people, you have senior vice presidents who run multibillion-dollar businesses. These could be companies. Each one of them could be an independent company and have a material value on the stock exchange. And the leaders of those businesses are very senior. They know what they're doing. You can generally let them run as they need. And so you have to give up quite a bit of control in situations like that. On the other hand, you have to also recognize when signs that things are not on track, and you may not be hearing it from that person. Often that may not be where you hear it. You hear it from other places. So part of it is building networks and things where you can get back-channel information in. But when you get that back-channel in or you hear information that there's a problem, you really need to drill into it, in my experience.

Is it— so it's back-channel in terms of you get signals that things aren't working. So it's probably some sort of metrics that are beginning to cause you doubt.

Metrics.

That's also—

Talking in the hallway.

Yeah, talking in the hallway, right. For sure. Signals around people, you begin to hear it. Are there other things people people need to be aware of for them to recognize, aha, there might be something here that I do need to dig into before it's too late?

Well, I think you, you, you've gotta look at it again. I, I, a lot of good signs are, are employee health. That's a really interesting sign. Most companies are doing these internal feedback mechanisms and those are very valuable to understand what's really going on. I actually think Glassdoor is a place you can look and, and find out a lot today. Yeah. There's a lot looking there. So to me, it's about what your employees are saying and how they're thinking. And I think that can tell you an enormous amount. Yeah.

Um, about the company as a whole.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's really powerful. I'm definitely gonna ask you in terms of moving to Snowflake, how you did that, but I can't leave the mic. We'll talk about Microsoft more, but I can't leave this moment without asking you, what did you learn from Bill Gates?

Oh, Bill was, Bill is one of the most amazing technologists I've ever worked with, certainly one of the brightest guys I've ever dealt with. Can also be very demanding, sometimes quite difficult. But generally speaking, I would say that I never had a bad one-on-one with Bill, but I had one-on-ones I spent 40 minutes standing and yelling at him. Okay, that was—

we yelling at him and he was yelling at me, both ways.

It was definitely both ways. He did plenty of his share, believe me. And but in the end, it worked out okay. It's like we agreed to, to We agreed to move forward with whatever we were saying.

But that was the culture of Microsoft?

Yeah, yeah, very much so back then. Not so much maybe today. Satya has changed a lot of that, but that's where it came from for Steve and Bill. But I think if you look at Bill's ability to recruit senior people, his ability to have vision for the future, I talk in this book, The Datapreneur, is about information at your fingertips and how Bill was so far ahead of his time in thinking about things like that. I was always— I watched him. I watched how he moved the company very directly in 1995 and 1996 to face the internet issues. Eventually got us into a bit of trouble, but he turned the entire company. And that is something I learned from for sure, the way he managed to move the team forward. Bill was very good at moving people forward in a way to gain their agreement, even though, like I say, his style was fairly combative. I'm much less combative in my style. Bill's quite combative in his style sometimes to the extreme. But again, in a way that I think pushed people to do better work.

So what's an example? Can you imitate how he would do that?

He would just probe on issues, right? He was very good at talking to senior technical people and going deep and finding flaws in their way of thinking. One of his famous lines is, in his combativeness is, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard." And he used it so many times that we were once at an offsite and one of the brightest people I know, Edward Young, was up there talking about some topic and Bill made the comment and there was like 20 of us in the room, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard." And all of us just broke out laughing 'cause we'd heard it so many times. And Bill said, "I guess I used up all my superlatives early." early in life, which very much states the way it is because he would make these very over-the-top statements. And eventually, if you took them, if you never heard it before, you'd be horrified. But if you're a Microsoft person, it's, "Oh." I got to the point where I would tell people, in particular, Bill had a rough period after the DOJ trial. He was still involved in the company. Steve was running the company. Bill was the chief software architect. And project reviews in like 2003, Bill were no fun at all. He was not in a good mood, by and large. And what I always tell people is, "Look, the first 10 minutes is gonna be miserable. He's just gonna be difficult. We gotta get him to laugh." The way you get past this is you make some— you say you agree with him about something, and then make some kind of joke about it, at which point he will laugh, and you can change his demeanor and get him to be productive. And the goal would always be, how do you get the productive side out of him? Part of it is how you manage these people too.

That is some of the wisest advice I've ever heard in my life. So tactical and so specific. And also you have to figure out what's someone's number. You've gotta get someone's number to be able to, to your point, make them productive, to get the most out of them, not to manipulate them, but to get the most out of them in this situation. Right.

Because you wanna hear his feedback cuz he can provide really useful feedback. But if he's just in a bad mood and he's, he's talking about stuff stuff, you're not gonna get much.

This is no fun. So you left Microsoft, you were, you finally, you realized your expiration, your, your own internal clock recognized that you had to go and you got some support on that and you went to Juniper and then you went to this little company, a 30-person company called Snowflake as the CEO. How did that happen?

This was in, in 2013. I was leaving Juniper. I knew it was time to leave Juniper. And so I, and left Juniper. And I knew the cloud was the future of everything. In fact, I even talked to Meg Whitman about running HP's cloud. And I thought that was what they would do. I think she's great and a lot of positive things, but HP's cloud, I couldn't see being successful. I just didn't see how it could succeed. And so I was looking, I decided to do something in the cloud and I really wanted to build something. What I learned at Juniper very clearly was that I was in there to fix a bunch of things. And I'd done a lot of fix-it at Microsoft too. And I came to the conclusion at Juniper that I really prefer to build things instead of fixing somebody else's mistakes and see what you can do from the beginning. And that in a way is the most impactful things you can mostly do. Turning around big companies can be impactful, but creating something of import to the world is very impactful. And so I was looking for a small company that would have that impact. And when I met with Benoit and Terry, and heard what they were doing at Snowflake.

And they were the founders, right?

They're the founders.

Yeah.

Binod Dajeevil and Terry Kruins were two of the founders. Oshin Zachowski, there was also the third one. And when I realized they were building this data, this SQL data warehouse in the cloud that would eliminate all these limits that had held back previous databases, I realized that if this was successful, it would make a very major impact in the world. And while it was too early to say that it would succeed, 'cause there was no proof at that point, What they described to me, again, this is about going deep, right? I went deep with them and what they described to me made total sense and I thought it could work. And so it was a good bet. I thought it was a good bet. And that's why, so I went that way.

That's great. So they said, "Hey, come and be our CEO," or you said, "Hey, I think I should be your CEO," or like how did that—

They were looking for a CEO.

How did it actually get— they were looking for a CEO.

The structure, this was the structure, Snowflake was a Sutter company. It was founded by Sutter and those two founders. Mike Speiser, who was the founding VC, had been the initial CEO, but the plan was always to transition to an operational CEO.

I see. Okay, great. So you were there for full—

So the transition was really straightforward. That was an easy transition. Yeah.

It, right. Cuz it sounds like it was set up in, in, in advance for that. It wasn't like I came in and took over for the well-loved founders. It was like that was part of the design.

And the founders were still there and they're working their tails off. Right.

And everyone knew that was still, that was like, had been meant to be.

Right.

No, I think that's really interesting, by the way. So many companies are not set up that way.

It's a good model. It's a good model. It has its pluses and minuses, but it's a good model. And it's worked in this case. Yeah. Because the founders, neither of those founders had aspirations to be a CEO.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. So you came in again to this 30-person company, um, over a 4, and by the way, I think $0 of revenue, literally zero. And you built it with the team. Over a 4-year period to a $3.5 billion company.

Yeah. We, I got out a little before then, but I was, I left in 2019 and, and it's gone, it's gone since then. The value of it was 3.5 billion. We were valued at that. We were valued at that. Yeah. We're valued. No, we were valued at that. Actually, 4 billion. We're valued.

Oh, excuse me. 4 billion. Bob, don't charge me for the extra half a billion. I got it. I love it. Tell us your playbook. What, what did you, how did you, when you walked in, in that first, those first days, how did you think about gaining traction? How did you gain thinking about figuring out what was going on? Like, how did you get started?

I think part of it was really understanding the culture of the company and taking a little time to understand that culture. Culture. Part of it was really looking at what they were doing right and then trying to understand where there were challenges and where I could add value. Immediately I came in and we had our head of sales, Chris Degnan, who is still running sales at Snowflake, which is remarkable. Remarkable. Chris has hired every single salesperson that the company has ever had was hired by Chris Stegman. That's incredible. Which is really incredible to go from zero to a couple billion in revenue and have one leader do that is remarkable. In fact, there was a point where the board tried to— told me it was time to remove Chris and replace him with someone. And I went through a multi-month process of working with the board to understand what their expectations for a chief revenue officer was. And I kept saying, I don't know what Chris is not doing. And he's never missed a number. And he's— and anyway, their big deal was, could he hire? And I think that was the right question for the board to ask, was, is he able to hire senior people? Chris turns out to be the best recruiter I've ever seen. So the answer to that was yes. And so he passed that test. Remarkably, he's passed all of Frank's tests too. And like I say, he's still there. Yeah, incredible. So he was— he's a good guy. And that's one of the decisions I'm most proud of is really going up against the board and saying, no, we really should keep Chris Degenhardt in this role. And I, I think that was clearly the right decision in retrospect. But when I joined Snowflake, I, I was looking and trying to understand what was going on in this small company. We were still trying to build our first product that was generally available. As I said, we had zero revenue. One of the first things was to work with the sales team to understand how they were selling the product.

Um, what did you do? Did you actually go on calls with them? Did you ask them to walk you through their process?

I did tons of calls. I did so many customer calls, I can't even count how many customer calls I did.

Yeah.

And I always had a salesperson with me without exception, except when a customer wanted a one-on-one with me for some reason. There was always a salesperson in the room so that they— and as I said to every salesperson, you want to share what I learned from Steve? Steve always used to say, when I go out on a sales call, I'm working for the salesperson and I have a quota. Tell me what my quota of the day is. What am I supposed to accomplish for you? And I love that. I love that. And so I would always say when I would talk to salesperson, I'm working for you. What do you want me to do today? What's my quota for today?

That's amazing.

And you learned a ton from talking to them. My favorite thing was flying to Illinois or something, or Atlanta, and getting in the car with the salesperson. And as they, as you go on customer visits, it's even more fun in Texas when you get in the truck and there's the— these pickup trucks are pretty, they're pretty jazzed up and there's the shotgun shells running, rolling around in the back of the pickup truck for your sales guy. But you're going out there, that's Texas. You're in Texas. But what did I do? I learned about the customers. I looked at how we were pricing it and I helped to put in place the pricing model. That model is still being used by Snowflake today. It was unique at the time it was put in place and it's now being copied by others in the industry. Industry. So I helped to put that in place, and that's helped to scale the business. Our first couple of deals were not structured that way, but everything subsequent was, and we were able to convert them. And then the other thing I did is I watched how the developers were building the product, and they would run through these milestones of every couple of months. And they ran a couple of those, and I watched, and they would say this is what they were gonna accomplish during the period. And mostly they didn't accomplish what they said they were gonna accomplish. They did some other things, but not what they said. And I said, hey, we're never going to ship on this at this rate. So I took control of that process. And no, I took control of that process. And I basically worked to define— I'm an old product manager, program manager. That's where I came from. Defining a product is my specialty. And so I helped the team to come up with the right criteria for shipment. And to determine what needed to get done. And then I literally turned our weekly all-hands team meeting— I would do an all-hands every Monday afternoon— and I turned that team meeting into a project review discussion where I would say, Jason, you were going to work on— I see that you were going to get done with the role-based authentication on Friday. What's the status of that? Are we— is that checked No, I'm delayed a little bit. And you have a little conversation, maybe, Benoit, do you think anyone could help him out? I'm trying to get this done. And so, we'd have the discussion. And it wasn't a negative conversation, but it did put people on the spot. And so, they realized they were accountable for what they were signing up to do. And through that process, we were able to ship the product in June of 2015. So, it took about 6 months. And we shipped it meeting our criteria. And then subsequently, since then, the product's been growing. And the customer base has been growing.

That's amazing. Bob, how— that's so interesting that you say that you put them on the spot, but it wasn't a negative conversation. And I can tell with your tone that you're not blaming and you're a little bit cajoling, but also you're being pointed, like, actually, this needs to get done. So I, I wonder what advice you have for people to set that tone. It's a very fine line with accountability and people recognize they're on the spot without making people feel bad and wrong.

Humor is— I mean, I'm not a funny guy necessarily. I don't think of myself as a comedian by any means. But you'll joke a little bit. You make fun of a few things. I was known for making fun in these team meetings of myself and of people. You got to make stuff fun of yourself. And then people would make fun of me too. They were never afraid to do that. They were not afraid to yell out, hey, Bob, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in the middle of the meeting. And then I'd laugh or whatever. So if you can keep it light, if it's super heavy and everybody's uptight and, oh my God, I'm being called. There's a— the Andy— Charlie Bell, in— in— it's a classic in Amazon, who worked for Andy Jassy. Charlie's now at Microsoft running the security group. Charlie, they— in a— in one of the most classic, in my opinion, driving things that managers do, every Wednesday Amazon has all morning AWS has a review of the website, a live site review where they review anything that happened in the last week. So, if you had any incident at all, you knew every single general manager comes together in this review every week. They have this discussion about everything that went wrong. If something was wrong, you need to be prepared for it. But if there was time at the end of the review, Charlie would take wheel. He had a wheel of fortune wheel, and he'd spin the wheel with the name of all the different groups that are on there. And if your name came up, you had to present at that moment your status and everything else. So everybody had to be prepared to come into that meeting ready to talk every week. It's not my style, but I can see why it would be effective. I can see why it would be effective.

I get it. Wow. So it's like finding the different ways, almost like the different rituals also that people can expect to create camaraderie. It almost sounds— Yeah.

And of course, I was raised in a timeframe where a lot of it wasn't camaraderie, right? A lot of it was the whip. And it's a very effective way of running teams. This is where I talk about the difference between performance-oriented cultures and values-oriented cultures. And the performance is always about the What are you doing? What did you accomplish? What were your objectives? How did you accomplish your objective? What was the revenue, et cetera? Values are really about the how you accomplish these two things. And ultimately, I've come to the conclusion that they are just intimately related to each other and totally correlated. I actually draw it as infinity is the way I actually draw it. And as you become more and more successful as a company and you have performance, you are measured by society and by your employees. And the more successful you are, the more focus you get. And so values become progressively more important the more successful you are. They're always important. They're always important, but they're particularly important for successful companies because those are impactful at a worldwide level. And what's really interesting is that in technology, and this is a unique thing about technology, is the products that we are building, in particular, the services we're creating are imbued with our values are in those services. And you can see them. When you work for a company and you know what's going on, you can see the values inside there. Or like, like I used to work for Microsoft, I can see Microsoft values creeping through in the products that Microsoft builds.

What's an example?

Just let me give you an example. Focus on— they're really focused now on winning against and driving Bing search. And especially now they have some things. So the sorts of things they do to encourage people to not change their search page, those are all values that are being put inside the product. Now, we went through a major lawsuit with the Department of Justice essentially over those values. Essentially, right?

Yeah. Tell us, get more specific about that. What do you mean by their values specifically, and what do you mean by that lawsuit and how that sort of showcased the values?

When we built Internet Explorer in the 1990s and were competing against Netscape, Microsoft used a number of tactics to do that. We thought we were— what we were doing was fine. We thought it was legal, et cetera. What we learned through that process was that when you become a certain— what we did would've been fine 5 years ago, 5 years earlier when Microsoft was—

What specifically you said, what we did, what do you mean what we did specifically?

Contracts were put in place that, that were viewed as exclusionary contracts. We had put in place contracts with OEMs that prevented Netscape from shipping, things like that, which the Department of Justice ultimately viewed as anti-competitive. Now, those laws were created in that trial. Okay. There, there isn't direct laws on that, but that law was created as a part of that trial.

Yeah.

And so, we didn't understand that the values that we were speaking to were essentially illegal. They were viewed essentially as being illegal by the government. And it was a real learning lesson, right? It was a huge learning lesson. And I saw how important it is that the what, the how is just as important as the what. And the question is, could Microsoft have been just as successful with Internet Explorer if they had not done all that stuff?? And I think the answer is probably yes, actually. That's the funny thing is I don't think much of that needed to be done and would it have been that bad if Netscape had stuck around? Do we have to defeat Netscape entirely? Probably in retrospect, no, because other browsers picked immediately. As soon as Netscape went down, WebKit came up and Mozilla, we have all kinds of different solutions that are available. Google ultimately took over really with their Chrome browser and Microsoft kind of let that happen. So again, these come back to values and how you're actually operating on things.

So in that case, what do you, because we think of values as a little bit like integrity and collaboration and teamwork and yeah. So what Microsoft, are Microsoft values here that you were talking to like kill the competition or like customer? Like what do you mean?

There was no value in Microsoft. We gotta kill the competition. But that was the posture. That was a posture.

Win at all costs.

And in the 1990s, and I think important lessons were learned. Microsoft's not that way today. It's not that way at all. Right. It's totally learned the lesson. And Satya, between Brad Smith, who's the president who has helped to dig Microsoft out of all of these situations, he was the former, the general counsel, now he's president there, and he's done amazing work. He's an incredible man. And, um, Satya's just done an incredible job of moving that company forward.

Definitely.

So these are not, these are not current issues.

For sure. And so when you went into Snowflake and you, did you think through what are the values we need to embody to help us win, right? To build the business. And did they change over time? Like, how did you think about that process?

See, I went into a values-based— Microsoft's not really a values-based company. It really isn't. It's a performance.

Performance.

If you really look at it, it's a performance company. Performance. It always was a performance-driven company. It's a bit more of a values-based company, but it's still a performance-driven company. I went into a values-based company at Snowflake. The founders were values-based. We had an— our office manager, Nancy Venecia, is an incredibly values-based person. And Nancy set so much of the tone of how that company operated. So it started out as a company where people were treated well and the internal values of the culture were very important. After it was there about a year, there was a growing desire by a number of people to codify the values. And I was super supportive of this. It actually was driven out of our engineering team. Some of the most senior engineering people, who are still there, by the way, were some of the initial drivers of this. But we went through a process that was a multi-month process that ultimately involved every group in the company that contributed to create the initial 7 values of Snowflake. And then a year later, we added an 8th value. We decided we missed— we weren't as clear on one area, which is the diversity sort of area. And so, we added an 8th value, which is embrace each other's differences. And the thing is that those values are the way the company has lived. And you can always tell, in my experience, there's a couple of signs about a values-based company. My first sign is their values are on the website. Not on the website, they're not a values-based company, period, end of conversation. I mean, unless they're very early in their development and they just haven't posted it yet. But even if they are on the website, most companies aren't values-based companies, really. You can tell if a company's values-based if the people inside the company talk about the values. And in particular, if the people think about the values as they make decisions. One of the best examples of this is Amazon. And I don't love everything about Amazon's values. I'll start by saying that, but that's a values-based company. And Amazon has the leadership principles that Jeff wrote, which are darn good. They're very good. And people live by those leadership principles in Amazon. Similarly, people at Snowflake live by the Snowflake values.

So what is that for? I guess I'm just curious. Why do people say we need to codify our values? Actually, I'm gonna back up and ask you even a better qu— a different question first. When you talk about values-based company, and I came into as a values-based company and the office manager was very values-based, it feels like you're talking about the values of we like and respect each other. Like we're nice to each other. We appreciate humanity because you know, one of the way you talk about it, it's, it's a good thing versus a bad thing. People are treated well. As well. And I'm just curious if other— what are the other elements you came into originally that were values-based?

So, like, an example that, that Snowflake's first values is put our customers first.

Mm-hmm.

And the first line of that says, we only succeed when our customers succeed, which is just true. Mm-hmm. Which is just true. Cuz Snowflake doesn't make money unless the customers are using the product. Right. Um, and that's an example of— that's not being nice or something like that. That's talking about how you treat customers. Customers and where customers come in your focus. And again, I, I, I, this one, I take some credit for this one. Also, Chris Degnan was very strong on this, but I, I learned this one directly from Jeff Bezos because he is a customer-based guy. I gotta say that he is customer-focused and he means it when he says it. And you can see it in a thousand ways of what he's done. And we sought to build a company that was like that. That.

Yeah.

So that was a case where we sought to do that. Another example that's a little— that's different from what you're saying is one of the Snowflake values is think big, do things that matter. And, and that's not being nice to each other or something. That's, that's taking risks. That's taking risks, right?

No, go ahead.

Another is get it done. It doesn't matter if you don't get it done.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's really great. So did those ever ever live at odds with each other in terms of all of your 8 values? Did everyone really know your 8 values? Did everyone really articulate them as in, "Oh, because of this, we'll do this"? And did they ever come into tension with each other?

First of all, everyone's always a big word, right? Everyone. I'm sure I can't say yes to everyone, but it was a big part of the culture. All the time I was CEO of Snowflake, once we'd done our values, I said I did team meetings every week. I think we went to twice a month eventually. I never did a team meeting without talking about the values, ever. I never did a customer meeting. I never did a customer meeting that was just not— that wasn't a focus customer meeting. That was like an introductory, here's Snowflake. Values were part of my discussion about Snowflake because I cared. To me, the customer didn't want— it was important to me that the customer not want didn't just want to work with the product. They needed to want to work with the company. There's some products you love, but you hate the company. I didn't want to build one of those. I didn't want to build one of those. I wanted to build a company people loved in addition to a product people loved. And that's where values, I think, comes in because it's really about— and we would make decisions that put customer first. You get— talk about conflict. It's— let me give you an example. A customer left a virtual warehouse, a large virtual warehouse running for a weekend or something, and it was $50,000, $100,000 of, of price of cost. They had some reason, there was something that happened inside the system that caused this to happen. It was, yeah, you could argue it was easily their fault.

Yeah.

But they could make a case. We chose to eat that. We would choose to eat that. And, and that's an example of putting customer first. Another example of a company that I always, I look to companies that I admire. Amazon's That's one. The other one that I always talk about when I think about putting customers first is Nordstrom. Hmm. Nordstrom is the only company I know where you can buy a pair of, of jeans and wear 'em for a year and have a hole in 'em and return 'em and they'll take 'em back. Um, whether that's sensible or not, I don't know, but they will do it. And it's, that's about putting the customer first.

And then people tell stories about it over and over again. Mm-hmm.

That's right.

So then it builds the brand. That's amazing. So what else did you have to really think about as you scaled Snowflake, when you, when you le— it was 30 people when you got there. When you left, how many people was it?

1,200, 1,300.

That's a lot of people. So like what you would see—

3x in one year. That was crazy. Yeah, I can imagine growing 3x from like 30 to 90 is tough, but growing 3x from 400 to 1,200 is really hard.

I felt like really hard.

I felt like I was in a hurricane, literally. It just every day there was new people coming in every day. You didn't know with these people and things were, you know, growing so fast. And the hardest part was scaling. Here's the thing that happens is when you have a hypergrowth comp— most companies don't have that kind of hypergrowth. It's very unusual for a company to grow as fast as Snowflake grew. When you have that kind of hypergrowth, everything breaks, right? Everything.

What, like what specifically? What?

Let's start with people.

Yeah.

People break because what happens is you have somebody in a role and they're quite competent and effective in the role when you hired them. But now 18 months later, the role is different and they're still in it and they no longer— they haven't scaled. The role scaled. What happened is most people can scale like this. They scale.

Yeah. Like linear, like incremental, incremental.

If you scale like that, you got that delta. And so we very frequently had to, we very frequently had to take people and say, it's time. You can stay at the company, but you're not gonna be able to do, you're not gonna be a leader of this organization anymore because we need somebody who has the capability of doing a lot more. But everything else breaks. The system broke all the time. I always used to say that the service we were, the, that I never, that there was, that Snowflake was made up of a combination of silicon and carbon. And I never could quite tell where the silicon ended and the carbon began, because the service is alive.

Yeah.

Okay? Services have their own life of their own. Customers are constantly doing things, stuff's happening, things are going wrong all the time. Things are breaking underneath you, subsystems break that you don't even control, and then things you write can break all the time. And so you're constantly running to keep up with it. And I used to talk about, in the case of customers, like, there's a pack of dogs chasing us and we have to stay ahead. 'cause otherwise you just get trampled. And, and we were never very far ahead. So everything breaks that way. The other part that breaks is all of your business systems break. And here I think we're in a very fortunate sense in that, that we have these SaaS systems and any new company is gonna be built on SaaS. It's crazy to do anything other than that, to your HR system, your sales account, your sales customer system, your business, all your different systems, your ERP system, etc. We stayed on, we stayed on QuickBooks way too long. So that was an example. QuickBooks is easy to stay on QuickBooks until it becomes a real problem. And we got there. It took us a while to get some of these systems in place. And that's a big, that's a huge part of what you're trying to do is scale your systems.

Yeah. Oh my God. And scale your people and also hire that many people and hire consistently. And you make mistakes.

You hire that many people that fast, your, your probability of making mistakes is quite a bit higher.

Yeah, for sure. So you are in the hurricane and you are leading the hurricane, right? You're the CEO of this hurricane. How did you, how did you discern what— there's so many fires around you, what fires you're prepared to let burn, what, and what fires you're like, this is a disaster fire. I need to trench this out.

I mean, I guess I've gotten pretty good at that at some level over time, understanding. And partly it is you listen to volume because you're hearing it from your people and the volume quickly determines it. If 10 people are screaming at you about something, you probably need to— it's something you need to focus on. I always tried to focus on the systemic problems that were long-term that needed to be addressed, transitional sorts of investments that you needed to make, whether it was in securing your system or scaling your system or moving to a different, some, you know, incorporating some new capability. Transitioning off of QuickBooks is a big thing. Anyone transitioning in your business system that your CEO is probably going to get involved in that, something like that. Focusing on things like that. A lot was scaling the people and helping people to scale and then hiring people that, to bring in people that, that can achieve that level of scale, that have experience at scaling from, from instead of going from 0 to 1, you're going from 1 to 3 or whatever, you're to that next stage. So a lot of it's that. And then looking at where there are people, where there are people conflict issues and managing the people conflict.

Like, how did you figure that out? You probably— people told you. Yeah.

When somebody says there's a problem with somebody, in my experience, you have to surround that issue and come at it from every direction. Certainly HR plays a role. Plays a role, but that's not enough. You need to really look at it and talk to a number of people. Quite often, you know, you get conflict between organizations and senior leaders, and the first indication of what's wrong is not necessarily the real issue. If somebody says it's Fred is messing up or Mary's messing up, maybe, but maybe not. Yeah.

So can you give an example?

And sometimes it's really interesting. I'll give you an example from work. Way early on, which is— I remember this vividly. When I had taken over, this is 1995, I had taken over the Developer Tools Group at Microsoft. And it's interesting, back then, the C++ team and the Visual Basic team, which were the two big dogs in the Developer Tools Group, they were fighting each other. They hated each other. They were just at each other's throat. And I remember I went to my boss, Paul Moritz, who ultimately was the CEO of VMware, and incredible guy. And I said to Paul, I think I need to fire one of these guys. And he said to me, you may need to fire both of them. And in fact, that's what we eventually did. I had to remove both of those people, put different people in those roles. And then we built Visual Studio from that.

Yeah.

Visual Studio was the result. That literally came out that year. We were able to create Visual Studio. Ultimately .NET became the centerpiece anchor of it. That was before .NET. But essentially, by taking out the contagion— I don't know how to say that— of the senior leaders that were fighting, the teams were able to work together and find ways to begin to build a cohesive product that, of course, was very important to Microsoft in the long run.

Totally. That's interesting. So it sounds like you're really just saying you have to get personally involved, and you have to really listen to the people around to try to do the diligence to figure out what's going on around here. I think so.

I had a similar situation. Some of the companies I'm on the board of, and I've told them that the CEO, you gotta dig in. Just gotta dig in.

Yeah. Gotta dig in. Totally. So you spent your time at Snowflake. Oh, the last thing I wanna ask you about Snowflake specifically is it was, you were talking about scale and hire and going tripling in a year and hiring all those people, as you said, is really challenging and mistakes get made. How did you approach trying to at least give people a chance? Listen, I'm gonna try to train you in high— on hiring, or at least you know how to hire this fast.

My failures are not being fast enough to terminate, not being too fast to terminate. So I would give people the chance and maybe I gave them too many chances sometimes. Yeah. If you were to criticize myself, that would be a criticism I would make of myself. And I, it's interesting cuz as a board member, I'm so much more ruthless. It, it's so much easier when they don't work for you directly. You know what I mean? You say, you gotta get rid of this guy and it's not working. I can be super, I can be super hardcore on it now that I'm not the direct, I'm not the direct, uh, person doing it. But when I was involved in it, it was, I was, uh, that was an area where I could have been better.

That's really challenging. But at the same time, I mean, you as CEO going from, I don't know, 90 to triple, basically just like tripling in a year to a, a big number. You aren't the one that's supposed to be managing performance of every single person.

No, it's true.

How did—

True. And, and there's the flip side of it, you know, the, there's the hardcore and there's a viewpoint and it's a very rational performance-driven viewpoint that says somebody's not performing, get rid of them and move somebody else in. My experience is that very often it's a little more complicated than that. And quite often, probably if it's a, if you think the person is a good person, there's probably an 80% chance that if that person had a different manager or was in a different role, they would be successful. And that would be—

Totally.

—much easier to do that. And again, I guess what I might say is that yes, and that makes more sense at a Microsoft or a big company. In a smaller company, maybe being a little bit more ruthless is more appropriate. That makes sense.

Because you just don't have time. You just don't have time. Right. Totally. You've hired a lot of people and you've supervised the hiring of a lot of people. What advice do you have for founders and other leaders about hiring?

People? I would say always look for data as much as you can. So find out as much information as you can. F, always do references. And as much as you possibly can, do blind references so you're not just getting spoon-fed what the person wants you to hear. So I think those things are really important. I would also say trust your gut on these things. I know, honestly, usually I can tell in an interview pretty quickly. Whether something's likely to work out or not.

Do you worry that trusting your gut, it means hiring people like you?

I think that's a potential problem. And I think one of the, one of the other sides to this is to be very focused on hiring people that are diverse and that have different backgrounds. I was very intentional about that as I built my leadership teams. And I think it's really important to do that. I have learned over time The only technique that I know— and again, I'm going to come back to a few things that I know that work. The only technique that I know of that is successful in growing and maintaining a diverse population is hiring diverse leaders. Mm-hmm. Just that simple. You hire— if a woman is running a group, that group will almost certainly have a higher percentage of women in it than other organizations in your team. And likewise with people of color and things. And, and so I think that's very important and I always focused on doing that. So that's a first thought of that.

Yeah, totally. That's very powerful. And you just, you can see that play out time and time again. It's just so important to recognize that and then to make the effort upfront.

It's because somebody's not the same as you still, your gut may be very positive. There's a lot of people that are different that I have very positive relationships with.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. You left Snowflake and I guess I'd love to hear from you what happened. When you left Snowflake? What did the board call you? Did what— tell us, give us a little slice of life on you leaving Snowflake.

I think what happened fundamentally is what often happens in these things is there was some conflict between myself and one of the board, at least one of the board members. I probably could have done a better job of resolving that in retrospect. And I think the board also saw that Snowflake had this attribute that it was literally the most valuable company in most of the VCs' portfolios. Portfolio. So they were very focused on it. And the board thought they had the opportunity to have an explosive, super successful IPO. And they had been— they were close to Frank. They had a relationship with the current CEO and they were able to bring him on board. I think they made the decision to do that. I think that's pretty much the whole story. It wasn't an easy transition. I'll say that. That was a tough one. That was a tough transition. But ultimately, I'm glad the company's doing really well. I stay very close to the people I work with at the company. I literally just got off a call with, uh, uh, my, the, the head of security at Snowflake, Mario, who I had brought on board early, and we're talking about the growth of the company and what he experienced in the 2014 and 2015. And now of course it's, he has 120 people working for him now in the security group, and it's just, oh my gosh, that's crazy. So it's, it's great to see that the company's continued to go on and succeed. And I continue to support.

Yeah, that's great. And Bob, I appreciate that you're so honest about, hey man, that was hard. That was hard for me. And yeah, and what were the first 6 months or a year like after that?

You know, I'd say the first week was really difficult because I took— because I didn't— what was hard is like when I hit the transition with Steve, I didn't— it wasn't a surprise, okay? This was a surprise. I was honestly stunned, and that was really took me because it just, it's like all of a sudden everything changed for me and, and getting through that and understanding that was somewhat difficult. I'd say it took 6 months. I think I was, it took 6 months of me understanding and thinking that through before I was really ready to do something else. And I, I decided that I didn't want to do another operational role, um, for a variety of personal reasons. I want to stay close to home. And now I'm focusing on helping a bunch of different companies be successful in the data space. And that's quite rewarding as well.

Yeah. And also starting a literary career with your new book, Datapreneurs.

My one book. I think it'll be a short career.

I think it'll be a short career. Tell us about Datapreneurs and specifically what I— I know the description that it's been said is it's part memoir and part history of the people and technologies that made the data analytics era possible. So tell us about why you felt moved to write the book and, and who it's for.

Yeah, so I just felt like I had something to say, to be honest with you. It's, I felt like there was information I had in my head that would be useful for people to hear. And I wanted to figure out how was the best format to try and put that down. I started working with my co-writer Steve Hamm a couple years ago, almost 2 years ago now. And, and we did our first couple of sessions, we just talked. And coming into this, Steve said, hey, I think there's enough here to put a book together. As we thought it through, I suggested that there was this realization I had, which is that although I worked for one of the largest companies in the world, Microsoft, for 20 years, I was working with entrepreneurs the whole time. Steve and Bill were certainly entrepreneurs. But what my role at Microsoft, and if you look back, was consistently to go in and manage projects which were in Typically in the early stages, occasionally they were turnarounds, but typically they were the early stages, and managing these brilliant technical entrepreneurs that were building the product. So I realized that even though I was at Microsoft, I was working with entrepreneurs the whole time. And so I had this concept. I said to Steve, I'd love to talk about this in the context of the data entrepreneurs that have actually built this. And Steve said, you mean the datapreneurs? I'm like, yeah, that's perfect. And so that's where it came from.

That's so great. And what are you hoping— what dent are you hoping to make with the book?

I think it's already making the dent that I hope for, which is giving people a way of thinking about the world we live in as, first and foremost, this didn't just happen, this AI insanity that we're in the middle of right now, the incredible opportunities that exist. That's new, certainly, but it's built on a foundation that's going back decades. And there's been work by people that have created this foundation that have made this made the whole thing possible. The other thing is that given the importance of AI and how it's become such a consumer-relevant topic, the realization that while these are these systems and they're these foreign systems in some way, they're created by people. And this is the point I wanted to get across, that, again, the values of the people are being imbued in the products. That has been true in software for a long time, but with machine learning, it's more true than ever before. And the values become completely apparent by the answers you see these bots giving. So, this idea that they're gonna go off and we're gonna get a Skynet or something like that, could happen, but only if we let it happen. 'Cause it'll be people that create these things. I'm more worried about what people do with AI than I am with what AI is gonna do with us, to be honest.

Yeah. By the way, understandably. That's so true. Bob, I appreciate that you say that. And I think the book feels like it's a lot of historical context. The notion, if you don't understand history, you're doomed to repeat it.

Doomed to repeat it. Yeah.

I think that you provide a lot of the historical context. And I'm also thinking about Charlie Munger and how he constantly reads biographies in order to learn from the past and learn human nature. Is that in some ways what you're hoping people will get from it, that kind of context.

Again, these are about people, and you can see, again, the attributes of the people are present in the products that they create. I'll just keep saying that again and again. You used to be able to say you could tell a Microsoft product by the org chart. You could tell by the org chart, and there's truth to that, right? Where they get created based on how they're structured.

Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. What did you learn about yourself writing the book?

I learned first and foremost that I'm definitely not an author that's going to do this a bunch of times. That's for sure. This is not my core strength, but I'm not surprised by that. You know, I guess I probably— what I'd probably tell you is that writing a book is actually a pretty hard job. It's actually a lot of work. And what I didn't realize was that after you finish the book, the promotion of the book is really a whole nother job, which is, you know, tell me about it.

Yeah. How have you found that?

It's been fun. I've really enjoyed— a lot of that has been doing podcasts like this one, and I've really enjoyed doing those.

Yeah, that's great. You, you wrote the book and, and the other thing that you do is you can't, you right now advise and coach other entrepreneurs. And I'm just curious, what are you, how are you advising entrepreneurs right now in the current macro environment? Like how to lead, how to think about their business?

Well, first thing I would say is it's very different than the world that I was in when I was building Snowflake. It turns out that very low interest rates are very helpful in building technology companies. So it's a very capital— difficult— it's a difficult time for capital right now in companies. So being cash efficient is really important right now. And in general, the companies I work with are trying to solve hard problems. That's my number one focus is I'm not focusing on how much return I get or anything like that from the investments. I'm really focusing on helping people build products that will make a difference in the world, that are doing things that are new and different. So those are challenges to build and they take a long time. Partly it is just helping them hang in there and helping them work through the challenges, build companies that are successful, making sure that they know what it takes to ship a product. Some of them are good at that. Some of them have a little bit to learn. Then figuring out how to build the business and doing the go-to-market. One of the things that's changed since I was starting Snowflake is that the cloud has become much more mature. The data platforms are much more mature. Platforms like Snowflake are essentially now cloud platforms. Platforms you can build on top of. And so the opportunity to leverage some of these things for distribution is quite significant. And I pretty much— because I'm in the data space, I pretty much encourage everyone to figure out how to leverage the big players in the market as well. And there's a tremendous opportunity for people to do that right now.

Yeah, that's for sure. That's great. And they must be so lucky to have you. You have so much wisdom. Do you feel like you're sometimes like the listener and therapist and sometimes the advice giver? And how do How do you navigate that?

You're mostly listening, right? You're mostly listening to what they say. And then I just try and make sure I give them some useful feedback. I hope to— if I spend an hour with somebody, I hope to give them at least 2 or 3 nuggets that they can walk away with and do something with.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Bob, over your long career and successful career, have you ever experienced imposter syndrome?

Yeah, all the time. I think. Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would say is I have always tried to be true to myself and be honest about everything. My statement was when you talk about you're running a company, you're running a business, you have different constituencies. You've got your customers, you've got your employees, you have your shareholders, potentially you have society as another constituency. I would always say the same thing to everyone. Okay, maybe you say it differently, you might put a different twist on it, a different focus, but the points are still the same. I always only had one message to everyone, and I always just say I was not smart enough to manage different messages, different people, keeping— I said this to this person. I'd never do that. I just never do that. I was always as coherent as I could possibly possibly be and simply told things the way I saw it. I wasn't always right, been wrong many times, but whatever I saw, whatever I believed, I tried to be clear about that. My way of doing it is very often to speak aloud. It is not unlike me. People are used to me in meetings where we'll talk about something and I'll tell them, I will give them a narrative of my thought process on something. It is not uncommon that in a meeting, I might have a thought process that starts out one way. By the end of the meeting, I might be in a very different place, and I'll be clear and something like that and say, hey, I came into this meeting thinking this, and here's why I thought this. Now, here's what I heard in the meeting. And because of what I heard, I've changed my mind, and now I think we should do this. And so, I allow people, I provide people with the breadcrumbs to connect those dots. So, it doesn't look like I was random, right? Bob didn't just randomly change his mind. Literally heard something that caused the mind. And I'm a big believer in data. Data-driven companies make more effective decisions. And I do say trust your gut, but I have learned to trust the data more. And if the data is different than my gut, I always go with the data. Yeah. Because the data, if it's accurate data, the data doesn't lie and it's telling a story. And it's worth listening to. And that's why data is so important, because our instincts as people are not always correct. Sometimes they are, and I mean, it's great, but the data will always keep you honest. Totally. And that helps with imposters things and things like that, because if you're operating in a data-driven way and you're being honest and high integrity and truthful, screw them if they don't like it.

I love it. That's so great. Thank you. Just a couple more questions. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

I guess the— I guess what I wish I would have known is a little bit more about my weaknesses along the way, my willingness to try and make things work longer than I probably should. Sometimes that's one thing I've learned over time is being a little bit more hardcore is important, especially in, in situations where you don't have a lot of time. So that's probably one thing I would learn. I'd say, again, terminations were sometimes slower for me than they should have been. I would also say that— and this comes back to my Microsoft experience— that if something isn't working out, it's really time to move on too sometimes. If you're not in sync with your boss, you got to move on. You got to move on.

Yeah. Yeah, so true. And last question, what advice do you have for founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

Focus on what your passion is first and foremost. Do something that you think that you're passionate about and things that really matter and find people who share that passion and have the capabilities, that have all the capabilities that are needed to deliver it. I don't know how with these small companies to build them if they're not in some kind of mission-based way. You have to have a vision and an outcome you're trying to achieve that is meaningful and that people will follow. That is always what I have seen which creates followers, is when you have people believing in what you're doing because they believe it's important. I learned that at Microsoft. Microsoft, I used to say to everyone, come to Microsoft to change the world. You want to change the world? 1992, come to Microsoft. It's the place to change the world. It was true. It was true. I mean, the world was— the technology world moved from Silicon— the center of the technology world moved from Silicon Valley to Redmond, Washington for about 10 years in the '90s. It's back squarely in— I'd center it in Palo Alto, California, but in general, the technology world is much bigger now than it ever was before. But you've got to— but the thing is Microsoft always had that passion. For doing something that mattered. And they still do.

They still do. Yep. Yep. Beautiful. Bob, you have a lot of passion, and it was so great to talk to you. I really enjoyed it. Everybody should go get the book Datapreneurs. It is a fascinating read, not just for datapreneurs, for everybody who wants to understand the historical context. So thanks so much for joining me today.

Great. It's great to talk to you.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review an Apple Podcast so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.