The Outsider — How CEO-For-Hire Frank Slootman Turned Snowflake Into Software’s Biggest-Ever IPO

By Alex Konrad in Forbes — read the original.

Highlights

• embarking on a series of meetings that now rank with Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm coding sessions in terms of value per hour.
• Slootman was toasted instead. “The issue was not ‘Do I like the company?’ The issue was ‘How many shares do I get?’” he recalls in his Dutch accent. Of the virtual IPO he says, “I absolutely loved it.”

Connections

• Frank Slootman — the CEO-for-hire archetype: brought in late, compensated in equity rather than salary, and explicit about it.
• Snowflake ($SNOW) — at the time, the largest software IPO ever.
• Data Warehouse — the category Snowflake’s IPO validated.