Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman has been at the CEO game long enough to learn a few things on how to create a successful business.
The intensity is driven by a rise in the standards. Leaders will set the pace, they will set the standards. If you want to retain talent, it is important that you have an environment that is energized and apolitical. Slootman said on Yahoo Finance Live that you don't want to be in companies surrounded by mediocrity and slowness.
Slootman has the r sum to back up what he preaches in the book.
Slootman came to the US from the Netherlands in 1984 with $100 or so in his pocket, and recalls cleaning toilets in the book as a teenager to make ends meet.
Slootman is worth $2.7 billion a year after successfully selling Data Domain to EMC in 2009, where he took ServiceNow public in 2012, where he was CEO and most recently brought Snowflake to the public markets. Slootman is an avid sailor in his spare time.
But it's data cloud player Snowflake who counted Warren Buffett as an early investor — which many tech experts believe has ground-breaking data analyst technology — that has put Slootman in the spotlight of late.
Snowflake's shares exploded 111.61% to $226 priced at $120 in their first day of trading on Sept. 16, 2020. The stock moved to more than $400 a share by mid-November 2021 after a series of promising earnings reports showing strong wins among large customers and client retention.
The Street is very bullish about Snowflake's prospects despite the fact that shares have dropped to $287 amid a broader sell-off in software stocks.
"We maintain that Snowflake's are substantially ahead of its competition at this time," said Gregg Moskowitz, Mizuho analyst. The analyst sees fair value for Snowflake at $450.
Slootman believes that the sell-off in software stocks is overdone, at least based on Snowflake's momentum.
Slootman doesn't think he is seeing anything in Snowflake's business to warrant the recent sell-off.
Brian Sozzi is an anchor at Yahoo Finance. Sozzi follows BrianSozzi on Twitter and LinkedIn.