Frank Slootman Chairman and CEO, Snowflake

Snowflake Inc. appointed Frank Slootman as its chairman and CEO.

Former CEO, Bob Muglia, has left the company after leading Snowflake through five years of growth.

Between 2011 and 2017, Slootman was chairman and CEO of ServiceNow – SaaS provider – taking it from under $100 million in revenue, through an IPO, to $1.4 billion in revenue. Prior to that, he was chairman and CEO of Data Domain, a company he led from the very early stages, through to an IPO and ultimately to a $2.4 billion sale to EMC.

“Snowflake is one of the most significant new companies in Silicon Valley and we believe Frank is the right leader at this juncture to fully realize that potential,” said Mike Speiser, director, Snowflake, “The best time to make a change is when things are going well. We’re thrilled to have Frank take the helm at Snowflake. We also wish to recognize the incredible role Bob Muglia has played over the past five years to get us to this point.”

“Snowflake is a special company,” said Slootman. “There is a lot of software running in the cloud but very little of it fully exploits its scale, performance, elasticity and economics. Snowflake does, and it is poised to become the leading data platform of the cloud era.”

Comments

This is a real surprise, Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake for five years, has left the company replaced by Frank Slootman who becomes chairman and CEO.

Under Bob Muglia's leadership, the company was fast growing and he secured from investors with his team more than $900 million for a valuation today around $5 billion.

Slootman is associated with two ventures beyond old ones, first Data Domain acquired by EMC in 2009 for $2.4 billion, and ServiceNow with a $210 million IPO in 2012. He has named his personal investment firm Invisible Hand, what a name with multiple meanings. Now he has to stop sailing around the world...

Apart insiders, no visible sign could be identified confirming the sudden info. The press release is associated with a board of directors message and both of them are pretty short and of course thanks Muglia. The now previous CEO speaks about the next level in the board of directors note. It happens one month before the very first Snowflake end-user conference scheduled early June.

But this moves invites us to wonder what is the rationale behind this important leader change. Does it illustrate a strategic divergence with IPO for some people, acquisition for others or a private independent journey for the last? For ones who wish to start to discuss, don't approach the team with less than $10 billion.

The other key question is who need Snowflake as a vendor? Google has BigQuery, AWS Redshift, Microsoft is behind with Azure SQL data warehouse, Oracle and IBM suffer on this segment and Teradata has tough time moving from on-premise to cloud and a few others are anecdotic.

We hope this move won't weaken Snowflake as this event will mean change within the company, we'll see in the next quarters. We can expect Slootman to invite again his band to join Snowflake as he did at ServiceNow following Data Domain and Borland.