Notes and Takeaways from Amp It Up
When I read it: July 2022
Why I read it: This was recent required reading for the Windfall executive team. Prior to this book, I’d never read much about Frank Slootman. His writing style is like his management style: straight to the point, high performance, and all about execution.
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My notes
About Frank Slootman
Frank Slootman has served as CEO of three billion-dollar companies: Data Domain from 2003 to 2010, ServiceNow from 2011 to 2017, and Snowflake starting in 2019. Data Domain was acquired by EMC for $2.4 billion. ServiceNow reached valuations north of $100 billion. Snowflake reached a market capitalization in excess of $75 billion.
About Amp It Up
Frank Slootman wrote Amp It Up to summarize his views on how to lead a high‐performance company. It’s about how to become a more serious, focused, performance‐oriented organization.
In Amp It Up, Frank Slootman argues that the best way for leaders to improve company performance is to raise expectations, urgency, and intensity. He shares a five-part framework that involves: 1) increasing standards, 2) aligning people, 3) sharpening focus, 4) picking up the pace, and 5) transforming strategy.
1. Increase standards
To get things done and off their plate, people lower their standards. Don't let this happen.
Raising standards is energizing. Instead of telling people what you think of their work, ask them what they think. If they aren’t thrilled with it, ask them to rework it until they are bursting with excitement. Everyone should be pumped about what they’re doing.
2. Align people
As a business grows, alignment increases in importance. Alignment is about making sure everyone is driving in the same direction and knows what they’re aiming for.
There are many alignment tools at your disposal. One is incentive compensation. At Snowflake, they paid all executives the same way, and bonuses were based on a focused set of metrics.
When people are aligned on standards and priorities, conversations get shorter and more productive.
3. Sharpen focus
Most leaders spread their people’s focus across too many unclear priorities. People work on lots of stuff, but nothing gets done. Prioritization is hard. That’s why most people don’t do it. “Priority” should only be used as a singular word. When you have many priorities, you actually have none.
To increase focus, think about execution in terms of sequential efforts instead of parallel efforts. Work on fewer things at the same time. Rank priorities. Figure out what matters most and make it clear to your team members. Do this regularly.
Ask questions like “what are we not going to do” and “what are the consequences of not doing it”? Ask “if you can only do one thing for the rest of the year, what would it be and why?”
Vagueness creates confusion and slows pace. Focus creates clarity and increases pace.
Start with the executive team and work your way through the organization. If priorities are not clear to your leaders, they’ll be distorted for everyone else.
4. Pick up the pace
Leaders set the pace. And the pace is tied to people’s mindsets.
Great leaders compress cycle times. When someone suggests they will get back to you in a week, ask them, “why not tomorrow?” This is not a one-time effort. It's using every interaction as an opportunity to maximize pace.
Lower-performing environments lack urgency. There’s no rush. High performers crave an energetic environment. They want to feel a rush and get stuff done.
5. Transform strategy.
Execution is more important than strategy, but the strategy is still important. Think of strategy as a multiplier of your execution effort.
Strategy requires connecting things that seem unrelated. Once you get everyone else focused on execution, it’s the leader's job to confront the needs and opportunities for strategic transformation.
Adopt a mentality of maximizing your potential
Have a mentality of living up to your potential. As long as you work hard and put everything you have into something, you can accept the results. Instead of being paralyzed by the fear of failure, you’ll become motivated by the fear of failing to reach your potential. You’ll worry less about day-to-day outcomes and more about maximizing inputs. You’ll always think you can do better, which is energizing.
This is not easy. You will never feel you are doing enough which leads to an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. You will not be good at celebrations because you’ll already be focused on the next challenge. You need like‐minded people around you to maintain this.
You’ll be driven less by ambition and more by the never‐ending pursuit of self‐improvement.
Adopt an ownership mentality
Always operate as if you own something, whether you do or you don’t.
Develop an eye for talent
The magic that comes from combining capital with talent is the lifeblood of capitalism. The ability to identify and recruit talent is a management superpower.
Prioritize aptitude (innate abilities) and attitude (hunger) over experience. This approach comes with risk, but hiring anyone is risky. When you find great candidates, give them the career opportunity of a lifetime.
When you hire people ahead of their own curve, they come into your organization motivated and driven with a cannot‐fail attitude. And you get better and cheaper talent that is allergic to failure.
Develop your talent
Become a training ground for high performers with raw drive and something to prove. Help them develop as leaders.
Career advice
According to Frank Slootman, young professionals should be careful what “elevator” they get into early in their careers. Some go up, some go down, and some don't move.
Make your organization mission-driven
Everyone should know why your company exists and what it’s trying to accomplish. When an organization has a well‐defined mission, everyone can feel it.
According to Frank Slootman, a great mission is big (but not impossible), clear, and not about money.
Distractions are a huge threat to high-performance execution. They pop up every day and need to be defended against. A well-defined mission helps prevent distractions, no matter how well‐intentioned, honorable, and worthwhile they may seem. When topics unrelated to the mission come up, the mission empowers people to ignore them. If people don't focus on the mission, they are not really on a mission.
Avoid “mission creep”, which is when an organization's stated purpose keeps changing. Make it clear that your mission is not to exceed short-term financial targets. Those are just milestones along the way. Align your strategy to your mission. Strategy should only change when there is a demonstrated better way to do things or if something isn’t working despite solid execution.
Treat the mission with urgency. Time is the enemy. It introduces risk. The faster you move, the more likely you are to succeed. Urgency is a mindset that creates energy. Embrace the discomfort that comes with moving faster instead of avoiding it. Being mission-driven is about how you decide to spend your time, energy, and resources. Expect everybody to embrace the mission with everything they’ve got.
Commit to changing your employees’ lives
Your company’s success can have a profound effect on your employees’ futures. It can change the trajectory of their lives. The right job opportunity can lead to career acceleration. Modest equity allocations can lead to life‐changing financial gains. In all-hands meetings, Frank Slootman was known to say that he was “personally committed to helping each of our employees reach a different station in life as a function of the company’s fortunes.” In return, he asked for their best.
Declare war on your competition
Business is war. You defend your market share and attack someone else’s. Conflict is inevitable. While win-win deals are possible, business is closer to a zero-sum game. It’s easier to be polite and resist the metaphor of war, but there are no friendly competitors. Once you start eating into each other’s profits, the real battle begins. In a decade, some will survive and others will die.
Great leaders make this clear to their people. Your employees can’t help you fight a war if you shield them from it. Explain the industry landscape and explain that no one is ever safe from competition. It’s suicide to deny the threat of our competitors.
Break the competition’s will to fight. Hire your competitors’ best talent.
Declare war on incrementalism
Incrementalism is about building on the current foundation. It’s about marginal improvement to the status quo. This approach often feels safer than bold leaps with more uncertainty.
Instead, envision the future state you want to reach and then work backward to the present. Don’t constrain yourself by the past. Act as if you have nothing to lose. How fast can your company get there if you pull out all the stops? Few leaders push the limits of potential. It’s easier to retreat to more achievable goals. Don't settle for respectable mediocrity. Maximize the potential of your organization. Empower your people to drive the business to the limits of its potential. Channel Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech, “The Man in the Arena”:
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Attacking markets that have weak, unpopular incumbents is easier than challenging strong, popular occupants. Prospects do not part with products that do the job for them for marginal improvements. To lure customers away from the competition, you need massive differentiation.
Prioritize execution over strategy
Execution is often undervalued. A weakness in execution is often treated as a reason to revisit the strategy. But, it’s impossible to know how good a strategy is until you execute it.
Great execution is rarer than great strategy. There are many business books about strategy and few that focus on execution. People prefer to talk about strategy rather than execution. Strategy is exciting. Execution is boring. Great execution is hard and rare, which makes it a source of competitive advantage. The world has plenty of ideas. We lack people who turn those ideas into reality. Great execution can make an average strategy go a long way, but poor execution will make the best strategy fail. Execution is king.
It’s impossible to separate strategy from execution. Strategy is no better than its execution. You can’t tell if a strategy is working without solid execution. Therefore, execution should be a leader’s first priority. Worrying about strategy before your team is good at executing is a waste of time and energy.
Execution is teachable, but most people have never observed excellent execution. And with execution, it’s hard to replace experience and the ability to make useful educational mistakes. Good judgment comes from bad judgment if you will. Therefore, new managers have to learn from and through their management line. The most effective way to solve immature management execution is from the top down.
When we promote inexperienced managers to management roles, chaos ensues. It becomes the blind leading the blind.
Without strong execution, there is no way to know whether a strategy is failing.
Eliminate execution as a potential factor first, and then move on to evaluating the strategy. Great execution cannot save a failing strategy, but it will help you decide more quickly whether it's time to change your strategy.
Execution requires discipline.
Develop your own strategy
A great operator also owns the strategy. They don’t outsource it to third-party consultants. Executives in charge of each business should also be strategists for their business. And the CEO should as act as the chief strategy officer. Executives are informed by reality and have to live with their choices. If you can't trust one of your executives to set the strategy for his or her sphere of responsibility, you’ve got the wrong executive.
People become better at strategy as their execution improves.
Hire drivers, not passengers.
When Frank Slootman was at Data Domain, his leadership team adopted a goal for recruiting to only hire drivers, not passengers.
Passengers are people content with riding the company’s momentum. They offer little or no input on the direction of the company. Passengers are often kind and get along with everyone. They blend in. Passengers can often diagnose and articulate a problem, but they don’t do the heavy lifting to solve it. They avoid taking strong positions at the risk of being wrong, so they can take any side of an issue depending on what’s safest. According to Frankl Slootman, passengers are mostly dead weight and even inadvertently undermine high performance by sapping the urgency and intensity it needs to thrive.
Drivers are people who make things happen. They feel a strong sense of ownership and demand high standards from themselves and those around them. They do not blend in. They exude energy, urgency, ambition, and boldness. Drivers own their responsibilities, take and defend clear positions, argue for their preferred strategies, and make an impact.
Finding, recruiting, rewarding, and retaining drivers should be an organization’s top priority. You should recognize them, promote them, and exemplify them as who others should aspire to.
Talking about the concept of drivers vs passengers with your team members will make people who aren’t sure if they’re drivers uncomfortable. Few people are 100 percent drivers 100 percent of the time. If someone isn’t confident they are a driver, they’re probably too much of a passenger.
According to Frank Slootman, passengers have two options. They can try to stick around without changing their pattern of behavior or they can start changing their ways by emulating drivers.
Becoming a driver is a path to job security. Passengers are the first to be thrown overboard during a reduction in force (RIF) or layoff. (An organization’s execution often improves after a RIF because it rids itself of its passengers and gives its drivers more responsibility.)
Taking on new management responsibilities
When you take over a new company or business unit, everybody is on edge waiting to see what you're going to do. Your number one priority is sorting out the valuable people (drivers) from the deadweight (passengers). Then you have to move the wrong people off the business and put the right people on the bus, in the right seats. You have to size up people and situations with limited information and you need to make things happen fast. When an organization or business unit is struggling, if you don't act fast to get the wrong people off the bus, you have no chance of changing the overall trajectory. An advantage of moving fast is that everyone who stays on the bus will know that you're dead serious about high standards. Drivers will be energized by those standards and passengers will leave.
When Frank Slootman became the CEO of Snowflake, he made all his staff changes in just a few months. He didn't know every last detail of the affected individuals, but it was clear which functions weren’t meeting expectations.
When a leader can't find the courage to make necessary changes, they holding everyone else back from reaching their full potential. Leaders who do not act will have their leadership questioned. People watch what the leader does and what they don’t do.
Leaders are only as good as the people they surround themselves with. Therefore great leaders must be great at hiring and firing.
How to recruit drivers
In addition to getting the wrong people off the bus, you also have to recruit the right people for the right open seats on the bus. Do not rush recruiting. A bad hire costs you time, money, and reputation.
Great leaders have well‐developed networks, the ability to recruit, and good judgment of talent. They avoid relying on acute sourcing tactics such as recruiters and LinkedIn because they attract active job seekers who aren’t typically the people they want.
To maintain and grow a culture of drivers, you must maintain an active recruiting posture. In other words, you must always be recruiting. One of the primary reasons companies tolerate mediocre performance is because they don’t have the ability to recruit an immediate replacement. You want to have a list of prioritized candidates for all critical roles so that when you need reinforcements, you have people to engage.
To build a “bench” of candidates, you have to know who the players are, how they are regarded, and keep tabs on their employment status, which is always changing. Create a vetted list of prioritized candidates for every role you are responsible for. Review these lists as regularly as you review the performance of your current team members. To track a candidate’s status, you have to check in and maintain an ongoing relationship with them until you’re ready to engage them. If a strong candidate has a change in status and might consider a move, consider making a proactive move. Don’t wait to react to a need.
Frank Slootman recommends performing what he calls active “calibration” sessions on critical positions in a group format. In these sessions, each executive highlights ascending stars, those who are struggling, and people who are serious concerns. The peer group then provides feedback. This helps identify a lack of management congruency on people issues, serves as a catalyst to address performance and talent gaps, and helps eliminate blind spots.
It's forgivable that some hiring decisions fail, but what's not forgivable is refusing to recognize and take action on hiring mistakes. Be a rapid course corrector. You don't need to be right all the time to succeed if you can admit when the minute you realize you’re wrong and reset. This is hard because most people are scared of looking bad.
Build a strong culture
According to Frank Slootman, culture loosely defines the dominant and persistent patterns of behaviors, beliefs, norms, and values of a workplace community.
A strong culture can become an enduring source of competitive advantage and act as a force multiplier. Your competitors can't replicate your culture.
A weak culture can destroy organizations from within and become a handicap.
The culture should align with the mission and serve it. It’s not as simple as aiming to make employees feel good, secure, and safe in their roles with a virtuous leadership style. Culture is not about making people feel good. It’s about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that best serve it. A strong, effective, and mission‐aligned culture will not please everybody.
Every company has a culture whether or not leaders attempt to manage it. Great leaders drive culture toward a desired state.
Culture doesn't just happen because of a CEO's declaration. It happens when most of the organization is willing to defend and promote those values and call out deviations daily.
People are the main influencer of the culture. People learn from consequences. So, culture results from consequences and the lack thereof. If you want to drive a more consistent set of behaviors, norms, and values, you have to focus on consistent and clear consequences. You have to demonstrate serious consequences for gross violations of your values. You only get the culture you desire if you actively pursue and enforce compliance for misbehaviors.
Frank Slootman believes that people should be removed from their roles faster for bad interpersonal behavior than for bad business performance. Misaligned behavior is cause for immediate dismissal because you need to signal to every employee how serious you are about your values. On the other hand, you should be willing to work with people to improve their underperformance if their values and character are aligned with the desired culture.
When someone disregards your values, it affects the culture which affects everybody. A strong culture requires you to make hard decisions to let certain people go for the greater good.
You need to make your cultural standard clear for all new employees as soon as they join. If they want to work with you, they have to take your values seriously. If they can't agree to that, they should save everyone a lot of time and frustration and go somewhere else.
The smaller the organization and the fewer people, the easier it is to affect culture.
Five questions to evaluate culture
Frank Slootman suggests asking yourself the following five questions to help you evaluate your culture:
When you talk to frontline employees, do they seem energized, or does it feel like everyone is swimming in glue?
Do people have clarity of purpose and a sense of mission and ownership?
Do they share the same big dreams of where the organization might be in a few years?
Do most people execute with urgency and pep in their step?
Do they consistently pursue high standards in projects, products, talent, everything?
The “RECIPE” acronym
At Data Domain, the leadership team codified their desired values in the acronym “RECIPE” to make them easier to communicate and remember.
The R stood for Respect, which was about being genuine in their interactions with others. This covered being responsive and helpful whenever possible. For example, you should never ignore someone who reaches out to you and never sit on a colleague's email or phone call for days or weeks.
The E stood for Excellence, which is about trying to be great at everything they did. You have to work at pursuing excellence by holding each other to high standards and not give a pass to mediocrity.
The C stood for Customer, which is about making the customer the center of everything. We don't have a reason to exist without our customers. Their outcomes are our outcomes, so act on their behalf and help build a customer‐centric culture.
The I stood for Integrity, which was about ensuring all stakeholders could trust the organization’s commitments without exception.
The P stood for Performance, which was about maintaining a high‐performance culture by confronting any lack of performance based on data and facts, not negative emotions. Accountability is uncomfortable because it generates anxiety about not being good enough.
The E stood for Execution, which was about focusing less on strategy and more on execution. It's hard to beat a well‐executing organization, even if the strategy isn't perfect.
Declare war on functional silos
Many companies have silos of good execution, but terrible execution across silos. People stay in their lanes and get good at managing up and down the org chart. But then they flounder when problems require cooperation across silos.
When you expect people to stay in their silos based on the org chart, it enforces power structures and incentivizes leaders to hoard power. This results in reduced trust across those silos.
Too many managers and executives are insecure control freaks. They try to maintain a shield around their silo and require those inside to obtain permission to speak to anyone outside. You want the opposite. You want everyone to think of the company as one big team, not a series of competing smaller teams.
You want everybody to have permission to speak to anybody inside the company, for any reason, regardless of role, rank, or function. Frank Slootman’s saying for this is, “go direct”. If you have a problem that cuts across departments, identify the people in each department who can best help you address the issue and reach out without hesitation.
You also want everyone to acknowledge and respond to others’ requests promptly and respectfully. People shouldn’t ignore a colleague just because they outrank them or don’t feel like dealing with their concerns. You should correct this sort of behavior the moment you become aware of it. Frank Slootman personally responds to any employee who emails him. It might just be a brief sentence redirecting them to someone else, but they will get a reply.
The natural tendency for most people is to go vertical (indirect) rather than going horizontal (direct). Therefore, leaders need to stress the importance of going direct to make it a habit.
This applies to the leadership team as well. Business leaders should bring department heads together and use them as the governing body of the company. The role of the CEO is to facilitate their initiative and encourage them to reach creative solutions, not simply tell them what to do. You want executives to be comfortable working with each other instead of bringing problems to the CEO for dispute resolution.
Building trust across an organization
The elimination of functional silos requires a foundation of cross-functional trust. Trust is foundational to team effectiveness. Trust doesn’t just happen. It must be earned and developed. You have to aim for it and work on it with consistent intention.
Business provides regular opportunities to build and lose trust. Most people begin relationships with low trust and one bad experience can make it hard to cover.
In low‐trust environments, people play defense. They become preoccupied with their personal survival, not the company’s. In his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni provides a conceptual framework you can use to assess how functional you are as a team. The primary point is that trust is the basis for high-performing teams. In the absence of trust, the other issues affecting team performance are difficult to address.
To build trust in organizations, leaders must be trustworthy.
Trust can be earned by following through on your words and acting consistently. People trust a straight shooter.
One of the ways people assess your trustworthiness is by monitoring the variance between what you say and what you do. They detect the slightest patterns of misrepresentation.
You don’t need to be perfect every time to garner trust. But you do need to provide an honest accounting of our behavior. Trust increases when people believe you are self‐aware of your own shortcomings and areas for improvement. Making a mistake is tolerable as long as you acknowledge it and seek to fully address it. Leaders can signal to others that it is safe to admit mistakes by declaring their own mistakes.
Exaggerations destroy credibility and trust. To inspire trust, underpromise and overdeliver. When you set expectations, make sure you can meet them.
High trust leads to high performance. In a high‐trust team, people call each other out for the good of the business. People don't defend bad decisions. They can acknowledge a failure and move on.
Don’t race to solutions
People tend to spend most of their time discussing solutions instead of diagnosing problems. We race to conclusions based on our personal experiences. And then winning the argument becomes more important than being correct. This is intellectual laziness. If you diagnose a problem incorrectly, your solutions won’t work and you’ll waste time, effort, and money.
It’s often better to study issues from a broader perspective. Act like a doctor. Slow down and examine the situation and the problem before settling on an explanation. Consider the full range of possibilities. This requires intellectual honesty—the ability to stay rational. Use first principles to break problems down into their most basic elements. Once you start examining and pulling a problem apart, the perspective often changes the solution set.
Whenever there are glaring discrepancies in evaluating a problem, double down on analysis rather than jumping to a conclusion. With enough time, you’ll get to the bottom of it.
Align incentives around what’s best for the customer.
Customer satisfaction ultimately drives customer retention, word‐of‐mouth, profitability, and the long‐term survival of the whole company. Therefore, everyone's incentives should align with what's good for our customers.
Frank Slootman isn’t a fan of customer success departments. His thinking is that if you have a team focused on customer success that makes other departments feel less ownership of customer success. Customer success is the business of the entire company, not one department. When a problem arises, every department should feel responsible for fixing it.
At all three of his companies, Frank Slootman made technical support owners of all customer issues under the umbrella of engineering. Similarly, sales owned the customer relationship (not a customer success person).
Growing sales is about timing
There comes a time when every venture must pivot from conserving resources as long as possible to consuming them as fast as it can.
How do you know when this time has come? There's no simple answer, but Frank Slootman provides the following questions to help you think through it:
Are you happy with your current sales productivity metrics? If not, how can you improve productivity before adding more sales headcount?
Are you happy with the metrics of your lead generation pipeline? If not, how can you improve it?
Are you being realistic in your timeline of sales targets? Are you projecting too much too soon, or too little too late?
Are you being aggressive enough and thinking big enough to outpace your competition?
Is your sales team buying into your targets and timeline? Are they owning the goals and fully committed to hitting them?
Common managerial mistakes include prematurely staffing a sales team, failing to identify what distinguishes top sales performers from weak performers before ramping up headcount, and hesitating to invest major resources to scale up your sales effort after all the conditions are in place.
You need to establish a systemic, repeatable sales process that produces consistent results. You can't brute‐force a sales effort if the underlying conditions aren’t in place yet.
A busy lead funnel boosts productivity and energy within a sales team. If you don’t invest in lead generation, sales reps will only produce a couple of meetings a week and become demoralized. High levels of activity are essential to boosting morale and driving results.
If a small group of “gunslingers” are driving most of the revenue while a larger group of “flatliners” are failing to contribute, it usually means you need to improve your hiring practices and sales enablement. You need to figure out what kinds of reps will succeed and you give new reps enough guidance about best practices to drive productivity.
Recruiting is core to successful sales management.
Good sales managers are constantly hiring and firing, which helps them develop a clear sense of which candidates are most likely to succeed.
The biggest predictor of sales is the quota you have assigned to your sales reps.
In a high-growth situation, you prioritize increasing the number of reps over improving each rep’s productivity. In low-growth situations, you focus on improving productivity.
Make sure your salespeople have the resources they need. Never set them up for failure. That will hurt your reputation as a manager, which will make hiring harder and set up a vicious cycle.
Investors invest in growth.
When a company starts showing profits, its investors conclude that leadership doesn't know how to invest in further growth or that it has run out of growth opportunities.
In high-growth organizations, profitability is distorted because so much of the current costs is associated with future revenue. Pay attention to unit economics to measure inherent profitability and how operating efficiency will benefit from increased scale. Expenses don’t scale linearly with revenues.
Leaders are often scared to grow.
Many operators have anxiety about growth. Leaders are often afraid to burn too many resources or to make hard choices about where to invest capital. They fear losing credibility with the board of directors, so they play it safe.
You need a growth model.
To understand the many factors that will enhance or limit your growth opportunities, you need a growth model. When in doubt, push the model to set a more ambitious target. It’s better to ratchet up expectations and fall short than never reach for it. Behavior is driven, by expectations. Goals are powerful. They change behavior.
Align sales compensation to company objectives.
It is important to have financial oversight and discipline around sales compensation. Model compensation plans against revenues to see what the effects will be at various levels of performance.
The size of your addressable market limits your growth.
Growth tends to slow down when you saturate your market. When this happens, consider leveraging your strengths to adapt your offering to adjacent markets. This avoids the risk of entering a new market and having to strike gold a second time. Warren Buffett refers to this as the “snowball effect”.
It's not simply a matter of how large your current addressable market is. It’s about how big your market will be in a few years.
Companies that run out of new markets to grow into are often forced into acquisitions or other desperate measures.
The three main phases of a company
In the embryonic stage, seed capital is applied to assess the feasibility of an idea followed by subsequent rounds of funding to build the initial product. The CEO job is more or less a part‐time position for someone who is also the leader of a key function, such as technology or operations. Everyone is working, not managing.
The formative stage starts when there is enough product to begin testing the market. The goal is to find out if you really have a viable product. The leadership challenge is bigger because you have to make huge decisions about how to price, position, sell, and promote your product. You are trying to cross the chasm and generate repeatable growth.
The scale stage is about maximizing growth by building repeatable, efficient processes and models of execution.
Be paranoid about what you are not doing but should be and vice versa.
Ask your team members questions like this:
If you could do just one thing for the remainder of the year, what would that be and why?
What's the one thing we should be doing urgently that we are not doing for some reason?
What are you doing that's of marginal value but crowding our more essential ways to use our time and resources?
9 takeaways from Data Domain’s growth strategy
In Amp It Up, Frank Slootman shares nine takeaways from his experience leading Data Domain’s growth.
First, attack weakness, not strength. Don’t attack popular incumbents. Attack weak ones. For example, no one really liked tape automation systems.
Second, either create a cost advantage or neutralize someone else's.
Third, it's much easier to attack an existing market than create a new one. When a new market appears, it's usually due to a number of factors and circumstances, not the innovations of just one company. When you attack an existing market, you know who to market to and how much they’re spending. And the buyers are knowledgeable enough to give fair consideration to a potentially better solution.
Fourth, early adopters buy differently than later adopters. Older, more conservative professionals often fear that an upstart technology will threaten their job security and livelihoods. But more forward‐looking younger professionals often get excited by breakthrough innovation and can't wait to try it out. Don’t try to sell to both groups the same way. Aim for early adopters first because they (and their companies) are more comfortable with taking a risk.
Fifth, stay close to home in the early going. When your early customers are nearby, it’s easier to communicate with them and gather useful feedback. For example, the local tech companies are classic early adopters. They're also well connected and prone to talk to their colleagues at other companies.
Sixth, build the whole product or solve the whole problem as fast as you can. If you offer a partial solution that requires your customers to seek the rest of the solution elsewhere, you leave a gap for competition to enter. Deliver a complete solution so you won't be so vulnerable to displacement.
Seventh, bet on the correct enabling technologies.
Eighth, architecture is everything. Think through your product’s ideal architecture before you launch.
Ninth, prepare to transform your strategy sooner than you expect. Think ahead of the current dynamic in your market. Anticipate how markets—and your position in them—will evolve.
Random anecdotes
The most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a startup leader with the diplomatic discipline needed in a big company and can scale up or scale down as required.
No business experience compares to being CEO. As CEO, you are fully accountable for a company's performance. Seeing things done is not the same as doing them.
High performers demand and deserve leadership. When leaders are weak or get distracted, performance gets bad fast. Without focus, conflicting priorities compete with each other. Low performers slow down and adopt a “good enough” standard. High performers get frustrated as their talent and energy go untapped.
Leadership changes can have an immediate impact by creating focus, raising expectations, and allowing team members to start executing basic blocking and tackling.
In business, patience can signal a lack of leadership.
Leadership is lonely and filled with uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. Your fundamental job is to make decisions that affect other people. The stakes are high and there’s no how-to guide. Each situation you’ll face is unique in some way.
One advantage for startups is their small size. It allows them to make rapid changes.
If a venture firm is replacing the founder CEO of an early-stage startup, things are probably not going well. Frank Slootman got his first startup CEO job with Data Domain in 2003. It had no revenues and no customers.
Appearing as a more reasonable and thoughtful leader doesn’t make you a great leader. To be a great leader, you have to be right about the decisions you make.
During the early days of rapid growth, you’ll hire and fire a lot of people.
There are times you need to bet on others’ convictions.
As a leader, it’s your job to eliminate uncertainty and doubt. Sometimes this requires letting people go you don’t know well in favor of bringing in proven performers.
When you take over a leadership turnaround situation, you have to solve straightforward problems as fast as possible so you can narrow everyone’s focus on the hard ones.
Don’t try to fix underperforming people. Pull the plug. If you know someone or something isn’t working, don’t wait. When there is doubt, there is no doubt about what you need to do.
Investors and executives take huge risks on startups. They need to be rewarded when a company is successful.
Don't listen to what leaders say. Watch what they do.
You need both innovation and discipline in an organization for it to succeed, but those two things rarely go hand in hand. A common mistake is relying on innovators to provide discipline.
Employees should feel like they matter to your organization and that they contribute in significant ways. They should feel their absence would stall results. This makes them confident and secure.
You want constantly being upgrading the talent at each key role, including the CEO. This strategy is called “topgrading” and was developed by Brad Smart.
Your primary team should be your leadership team because that's the team that runs the organization
Groupthink discourages new, creative, and unexpected ways of thinking.
Slow, patient business development isn’t easy to replicate or scale.
Random quotes
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” —Theodore Roosevelt