Leadership Lessons From Snowflake’s Sales & Marketing Duo | Chris Degnan and Denise Persson

28:05I think we put a lot of effort into that. And there were sometimes times where there was an issue somewhere out in the organization. And then we both took a look at it, right? Not pointing fingers, but really where is the issue? Is it on the marketing side? Is it actually something on the sell side? And then we addressed it to really make sure that everyone really worked as a team throughout every single level, throughout every single region across the world. Did you feel like he was your customer? Absolutely. Absolutely. If you, in this marketing role at the infrastructure company like Snowflake selling, you know, million dollar type of deals, right, sells is my customer.

28:49Right. And that's so undervalued. I think one of the companies I used to advise, the CEO would almost want marketing to come to the table and say, here's all the leads that we gave sales and say sales is not following up on them and create friction between sales and marketing. And we never let that happen, ever. um and you know if by the way there were scenarios where my team wasn't following up on the leads or we weren't getting enough leads that was dealt behind closed doors with us like we didn't need to go to you know bob or shridhar or or slootman and say like this is all messed up we we did that you know and we said okay let's be as frank would say intellectually honest with ourselves and then have that conversation between us.

29:46Was there a feedback that you two would get that was consistent across the different CEOs about the things that weren't working well between you two? But I think we identified what the problems were ourselves. We didn't have to have someone telling us, hey, Denise, you have an issue with the sales organization here. I mean, we dealt with that ourselves. And also, I mean, one of Frank Slootman's big things is about, you know, going direct. And we never had to, I mean, I never had to escalate anything to Frank or Bob or Schrader about the sales organization, right? I mean, and if I would have done that, I mean, that would have created a lot of mistrust with Chris, right?

30:30I mean, he would ask me, Dennis, why do you have to go in and take this to Bob or Frank, right? I mean, it's more effective for me to go and deal with Chris directly. And I think in many organizations, CEOs think it's good to have healthy tension between sales and marketing. It could maybe work, but it's very easy for that to turn into unhealthy tension as well. And then I think there's no back to repair that relationship. The simple way you figure out if things are working between sales and marketing is you go talk to sales. They will tell you. Not me, not the head of sales. You go talk to five, ten different reps, which, again, she did.

31:15But you go talk to five different reps, and they're going to say, yeah, the leads are shit, or the leads are good. And they're going to be the ones that you'll figure it out. And that was the beauty of Denise. I didn't have to go and worry about that. And then she would then hold her field marketing. She would then align her field marketing teams like in the field to each one of my field managers. They would be held accountable to the leads going to each individual, you know, second line managers team. And so like they loved, like it wasn't just like they liked them. They loved them because all they cared about was driving leads to the organization.

31:52And you would hear it. If there was something broken, you'd hear it. And that was when her and I would talk about it. And Denise, there's like probably, I don't know how many areas of marketing. There's a lot of different facets of the job. Do you feel like, given what Chris just said, like there is demand generation, like very specifically, tangibly, SDR is breaking the front door down, creating demand. And then there is a bunch of fluffier stuff, things that are important to the organization, but much harder to quantify. Do you feel like your core responsibility is the demand generation function, and then all the others follow behind that.

32:29And has that changed over time? But here's the thing. Again, of course, on the sell side, they will see kind of, okay, is the demand and the leads coming in or not, right? I mean, it's very quantifiable, but I do think every function is equally important. And I think that's what's been unique as well at Snowflake is that every function has always been seen as equally important. Many companies will say, oh, we are a sales-driven organization. Oh, we are an engineering-driven organization. Snowflake has always been, we are a customer-driven organization. And to be customer-driven, every single function within the organization needs to drive that.

33:08No CEO at Snowflake has said that one function is more important than the other. And that's the way I look at marketing as well, right? Of course, again, demand gen has to work. that product marketing, right, is incredibly important. If the sales organization don't have the right messaging or armed with the right, you know, content, right, they're not going to be efficient either. So I don't look at it as one function is more important. Every function needs to be the best it can possibly. Yeah, I think it's such a good point. It's like when Slutman came in, I used to do like from the earliest days, I used to do QBRs and Denise would come and whatever.

33:52But when, when Frank came in, he was like, every one of his direct reports was coming to my QBR. And it wasn't because we're a sales driven organization to exactly Denise's point. We are customer driven organization. And in order to be a customer driven organization, we are going to talk about customer issues. And that was what we talked about in our QBRs, which was incredibly valuable. Denise, when you joined at whatever, three million, it was series E? I think it was D actually, yeah. D? E, yeah, D. Was it? 2016. Altimeter, probably. D? Yeah, okay. When you joined then and you did your tour of the AEs and talked to them, what did you find out?

34:37Like, what were your early impressions that you shared with Chris? Well, definitely the focus back then was around demand. You know, for sure, that was the big, you know, hot topic. That was job number one to address that and then to build that organization. I've said it to you before and I'll say it, you know, again and again and again, is that founders, especially technical founders, fall in love with product marketers. and my opinion is the field figures that out. They'll partner with marketing, but when you're building a company, you need leads. I don't care how great the PowerPoints or marketing decks are, you need leads.

35:26And I think that's the way that Denise focused. And so then eventually she built out world-class functions in product marketing, but that wasn't her initial focus. It was on leads. And I think that's the important thing. That's the number one thing I'd say to, and by the way, it's the number one thing I say to every single CEO that I advise is like, focus on demand gen, focus on demand gen. But I think when you come into an organization, regardless of the function, you really need to understand what are the priorities right now. What are the priorities that I need to address for the next 90 days?

36:00What is my six-month plan? What is my one-year plan? And I think some people fail on that. They come in and focus on the wrong thing. And if you sit down six months later and if you haven't fixed that important dimension issue, you're done. And that's why the tenor of CMOs is so short. One of my partners, to not be named, his failure mode for a new CMO in one of his portfolio companies is he says anytime a new CMO comes in and the first thing they do is a website redesign, he's like, it's not going to go well. Yeah, new brand, new color, new logo. I mean, those things, they don't matter, right, to the sales organization.

36:47And again, your impact is going to be measured on are you helping to drive sales or not? Yeah, especially like the other position that avoid, avoid, avoid as long as you can is chief people officer. That's the worst. Sorry. I can say that, but I'm... Why? because it gets in the way of doing. It's not an enablement function. It's not. Can I ask very, for your sake, I won't continue going down this rabbit hole, even though I really want to. Can I ask you some very tactical questions about how you communicated with each other? Like, was it Slack, text, standing weeklies? Were they in person? Were they remote?

37:34Did you have dinners together? Like, how did you communicate? Was there a regular cadence? Was it email? Just pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. No dinners. We've never had a dinner, actually. But again, we were sharing. Wait, wait, sorry. You've never had a dinner? Well, I mean, like with the group. Not just you two. No. No. But I mean, we were in the same office. I mean, I just had to turn my chair, walk over to Chris, you know, ask the question and then get it done. So it was, you know, talking in the office. And I think we had definitely a weekly meeting. I mean, yeah, it would be a phone call.

38:08I mean, it was also really addressing things immediately. If I heard something that Chris needs to be aware of, I'm not going to wait a week to tell him, right? I would pick up the phone and let him know so he can address it. Yeah. Sorry, no dinner? No dinner. Do you see each other too much? I think we, yeah. We see each other too much. No, and reality is we would have dinners occasionally, like occasionally, like maybe once a year with like a group of people. Like if I had my QBR, she'd come to the QBR. But like we both have families. Like we both travel a ton. When we don't have to go out and socialize, you'll see this someday when you have kids.

38:52Like when you have free time, you want to be with your family. And that's both of us. Both of us are very much that way. How many miles do you think you logged on a given year traveling around for this company? I just did last week. I flew around the world in a few days. What do you mean? I did Korea, Japan, France back here in six days. Yeah. I don't log miles. The most on United that I got one year was 250 ,000 miles in one year, just on United. And how many days is that? 150? Half the days you think you're traveling? You think you travel half the days? Half the work days? Probably. The travel is...

39:45Again, go back to the size of the company. When you're sub$100 million, every company I talk to who's like$50 million, they're like, yeah, we're going to launch. I was just talking to someone the other day. We're going to launch Asia and Europe at the same time. And the head of sales has no concept on how to do either of these things. This company is raising a huge round of funding. And I'm like, that sounds idiotic at$50 million, but hey, it's AI, so maybe things are different. But the reality of it is sub$100, it's US. It's US only travel. When you're like 500 million, it's you're launching Asia and you're launching Japan and you're Korea and you have to have like the Japanese don't speak any English or read any English.

40:31So you have to have websites that are deep, deep, deep in Japanese and you have to hire all sorts of different functions and spend a lot of energy there and go there. And it's a very much in-person place and you have to go to Europe once a quarter because inevitably Europe's a nightmare. And so, like, the international travel at$500 million, it's nonstop. That's part of what I don't miss of being in the job. When you, today, and maybe before you left, Chris, like, one of the stereotypes of the executive that you all are, like the fancy public company executive is that you have an army of people that do the work for you.

41:16And in many ways, the reason you got the jobs that you did was because somebody saw you and maybe in Chris's case, for sure, like doing the work, then they wanted to reward you for that work. Then they believe that you could hire people as a result of others knowing that you did the work and therefore you can be a better teacher and you have credibility. Eventually, 10 years later, you're so far removed from that work. Maybe the question is, do you feel removed from that work? Like, do you still get into the details of marketing copy? Do you like, do you even have the patience for that anymore?

41:52Chris, would you still get into like, I don't know, like coaching an SDR on a cold call? You know, like, like very, very detailed work that maybe you had the patience for before. Will you still go talk to AEs now and ask them like, how is marketing doing? Like, will you go, like, can you still get into that level of detail? Yeah, I do that. But again, and you can't, of course, do it to the extent you did before, because then there's no way you can scale yourself, right? So you have to really understand kind of what is required for me today. And again, that's different from a year ago. Talking to AEs, I would do that when I'm out in the field.

42:29I mean, right now we're on a world tour, 23 cities. That's where I go out and that's when I can spend time with, you know, regional AEs and ask them those kind of questions. I don't have any standing calls on my schedule anymore for that that I used to, but yeah, still do some of that. I do not go through all our copy. There's just no way I can do that. I mean, the most important part of your job is to hire those people who are better than you at doing those jobs, right? That's the only way you can scale yourself. And I have to go in and check copy. I mean, then you're done. And then you don't trust the people that work for either.

43:07Right. If I find out that there are issues somewhere and I'll of course dig in and take a look at it and try to figure out is this a people issue? Is it a, you know, cross company alignment issue? What it is, what is that? But if you go in and micromanage, that is not my thing. I think, you know, Slutman said it best to me. Like, you know, he has all these classic sayings and, but he, he was, he said, Chris, when he, when he first got here and he decided that he was going to keep me and her. I think we kind of figured out at the same time that we were - Who saved me. Yeah, yeah. Keeping our jobs.

43:45You're both on bar with everybody else. Yeah, yeah. But he said, Chris, you're a deal jockey. And that got us to where we needed to go or needed to be today, but it's not going to get us to where we need to go in the future. And what he meant by that was, hey, Chris, you've got to be able to hire people that can do the job for you that you used to do. And that's the hard part. That was the hard part for me of my favorite part of, and that's why, you know, your swim lanes, my favorite part of being ahead of sales is being involved in deals. I'm a transaction person. I enjoy that. And the bigger Snowflake became, especially the last year my job, it was not a deal job.

44:38It was a, you fly in, you fly out. It's a process job. It's an operations job. And I think in full transparency, I'm probably not the best person to be running a$5 billion organization like Snowflake is today because I don't enjoy it. And I don't enjoy that operational aspect of it. And when you don't - Even if it's best for the business. Right. Right. And if you don't, for me, I've always said that if I'm not passionate about what I do, I'm not going to be good at it. And I think that's where I started to falter towards the end of my tenure at Snowflake is I wasn't passionate about operations, which Shredar is like a monster.

45:14He's so good at it. And so I give him a ton of credit. He loves it. Yeah. When we saw each other while you were still at Snowflake towards the tail end, you look like shit. You look terrible. Like at that point, every mile that you had flown, uh, every operational meeting that you had to sit through, you, it was like the light went out in your eyes and it was physically and emotionally, it was gone. It was actually really hard. I think I said something to you. Like it was, it was hard to see you lose the spark because at that point, the business needed something that you just couldn't give it anymore.

45:54And you couldn't fake that. And I think that, you know, the good and the bad of me is that, you know, I'm very upfront and I'm honest and I'm direct. But you can also see through I'm a bad liar. And so if I'm bullshitting you, Jubin, you pretty much can tell. And that's like when we had dinner, you pretty much were like, yeah, okay. This guy's not in a good place. And I wasn't, you know, I think like I was, I, you know, what, what was super important for me, uh, cause I care deeply about the company is I wanted Shridhar cause I believe in Shridhar. He's world-class CEO and I wanted him to be successful.

46:34I needed him to get his legs underneath him, learn my business. But, um, I, yeah, I was, I was ready. I was ready. When I left, I was ready. On, uh, on hiring Denise. And then I'll go to you, Chris. Like, do you have, let's just like split them into two buckets. Let's just say like for simplicity's sake, skill and will. When you were hiring in the early days, call it 3 million of ARR, how did you think about hiring across those two vectors and has that changed over time? And I hate multiple point questions, but like was there a failure mode that you made on hiring along the way across those two buckets?

47:17I think in marketing in the beginning, I mean, you need to hire people that can wear many different hats, right? That's the difference. Today, you have more specialized functions for everything. And again, that's a special type of person in the early days who actually can roll up the sleeve and be a complete athlete at a lot of different things, right? And then that role is going to narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow. And some people don't want that role to be more narrow, narrow. And then they can't sort of survive in the company anymore, right? And that's what we saw throughout the journey. Again, those people who didn't understand that, okay, my role is going to have to be more and more specialized now.

47:56And those are the people that kind of left the organization. And some people found the role that they were so passionate about. And then they're still here, you know, 10 years later, and they run a very specialized function. So I think that's unique, you know, in the beginning. You need to be an incredible team player, you know, in the beginning, right? You need to be able to jump in and help out wherever you can, whatever it takes. But how do you test for that if you've never worked for them? Again, a lot of people in the early days were people that we had worked with in the past. It was the same thing, you know, for you, Chris.

48:31And if we look at the early people that I hired at Snowflake, I'd worked with all of them before at previous, you know, companies. And then they have done along their journey, right? They have worked with others that you bring into the organization. So I would say in the early days, all recruiting was done through our networks. And then also, you know, that those people are going to fit, right? The culture of the organization. They're going to fit, you know, with the rest of the team, which is so incredibly important. You work so close with 10 people right in the early day. And if there's one person that doesn't fit into the group, it's going to be really, really hard.

49:15Yeah. I didn't have the same luxury. I mean, I like, you know, prior to stuff, like I think the largest team I ever managed was like 12 people. Right. And so when you're building the sales organization at scale, you're hiring hundreds of people a year, maybe a thousand people in a year. And so what in particular for sales reps in our early days, it was super important that we found people that you're recruiting out of organizations that develop their people. So look for anyone, any company that develops their people, then, okay, then does that sales rep have experience opening up new logos in the last two to three years?

50:07because you're like one of the things that Mike Spizer said about Snowflake, you know, that we took to heart was as we built the organization was we needed to get market share before the competition got product. And so for us, it was a race. And so we need to hire these new logo machines. I hired like, ironically, I remember like some of our earliest sales reps that were super successful were people out of places like Softchoice, which is like a reseller, But they trained their people and they sold multiple products and they could actually learn how to sell the technical products. So I didn't have a recipe for where I'm hiring them from.

50:48I'm looking for, do they have experience opening up new logos in selling enterprise technology? And do they understand what it takes? Have they gone on traditionally eight sales calls a week, 10 sales calls a week, or are they going on two to three new sales calls a week? Are they hunters or are they farmers? I don't want farmers, especially early days. There's a story you shared in the book. Was it Waffle Wednesday? Yes. Why did you decide to share that story? And then can you tell it? It was an example from the culture at Snowflake. And I think the culture is really what's incredibly unique at Snowflake.

51:26The values that is underpinning that culture. again just extreme alignment across the the company the the camaraderie you know across the company Waffle Wednesday was created by some of our early engineers and it was just a way for people to to get together every Wednesday morning the engineers came in and made waffles for the entire you know company we had our like Tom Oloy he would have his chef we already had on Yes, everyone. Actually, there was a rotating schedule for this. Every Thursday, there was Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. Yeah, cheesy Thursday. Cheesy Thursday. There was Fruity Friday.

52:10Yeah, Fruity Friday. We did trips, you know, company trips to Tahoe. So there's some behind the scenes that, you know, we can't really talk about some things that happened to AFT, like because we had, maybe people had too much wine at an event or something like that. So those are all things that you have to probably need an HR person to monitor. Probably. Did you feel like maybe were those all of those rituals? Can you create rituals yourself or do they have to be organic? Like if you were stepping into a new organization today, would you be intentional about putting your own rituals in place?

52:50or do you feel like those things just have to naturally evolve in the way that maybe they did? Yeah. So, cause I saw it, I saw it evolve like from the, from the beginning. And so, you know, when I, when I was there, it was me and a bunch of engineers and Nancy Venencia, who was the office manager, she was the mother of Snowflake, like literally like cared for all of, all of us. And she started off with like, you know, fruity Fridays and it was just yogurt on On Fridays, you'd come in the office and you'd have yogurt and fruit. And all the engineers loved it. They loved it. And then we would all get around and I'd be talking to the engineers and we'd get to know each other.

53:28And it was organic in that it created this culture and we got to know each other. And I think the biggest benefit that Nancy created in Waffle Wednesdays, Cheesy Thursdays, Fruity Fridays, all these other things. Number one thing is snowflakes culture would reject the organ if it was bad. And so, you know, we, we'd hire people that just, we thought on paper were really good. They'd walk in and mother Nancy would figure it out in like two weeks and they'd be like, yeah, that's the problem. And yeah, we would get rid of those people. And I think that was the thing is the culture. She did such a good job of fostering you know, we're a family.

54:16And because of that, when there were people that were out for themselves versus the better of the company, she helped us figure that out. And I think that was the benefit of what we saw out of it. Good. And also, I mean, the culture also comes from our founders, you know, as well. I mean, that's the kind of culture that they wanted for Snowflake. And Nancy really, she was the one who made it all happen. She fit with them really well. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have a hard time firing people or managing them out or even managing them if they've been with you for a while? Like, I don't know if you're like Chris, but Chris is, I'll say it, maybe you won't, but like his greatest strength and greatest weakness is that he's like diehard loyal to people.

55:00Like he, if you're, if you've been with him, come hell or high water, he will ride with you because he just, there's a kinship there. Um, and you know, we've talked about how at times like that puts blinders on because you feel such an emotional relationship to them that detaches you from their performance. Did you, did you struggle with that at all? I definitely have, you know, loyalty towards, you know, a lot of people as well, but you're not loyal to them either. If you're putting them in a job when, where they're failing. Right. I don't think that's not, that's not loyalty either. and again it is definitely the hardest part of the job is to to um you know let someone go right but if you don't do it first of all then you will let go you know eventually you know clearly but that that is a part of the job and if you can if you hire someone you also have to be able to fire that person as well it's awful i don't care like i don't i wouldn't say that denise or i are wonderful at that.

56:00Right. And I think it's, it's one of those things that she would say things and I'd be like, yeah, you know, she'd give me feedback on someone and I'd, I'd go and figure it out and I'd act on it or vice versa. Um, but it, it's not like where these, like, we can just put on this like face and just be like, you're fired. It's not great. And I, you know, I've lost sleep, plenty of sleep over it, stress, um, especially for those that were with me for long periods of time. So if you were to do it all over again, would you bring, like would you continue to bring the same people that you've worked with along with you?

56:44Or do you feel like at some point you need a fresh set of energy that injects itself into the organization with you? Like how do you think about team building if you were to do it over again? I do think it's fun to put different people together. So I don't think I would ever put the same team together again. And also every company and situation is different and it's going to require different experience, skill sets. And I like that part to really kind of start from scratch and put the new team together. And it wouldn't be the same team. And some of our team members, they're retired today, right?

57:27They're not going to go back to work, you know, anyway. So I would say no to that question. Do you think you're going to be the person that gets Chris off the golf course? Do you think that finally, well, whatever it is, 10 years from now, you do something new and you call Chris and you say, all right, this is our ride. Do you think you're going to be finally the person that can get this guy away from the first two bucks? No, I don't think so. No, I don't think he's going to do this again. I tell you what, the thing that - I disagree for what it's worth. I'll take the other side. So, you know, it's, you know, it's funny is one of your portfolio companies, I sat, I went to their offsite and I did it in their two day, two day, two and a half day QBR.

58:12And there was a lot of me asking very direct questions, you know, and the head of sales was like, you're not done. And, and, and cause I was like needling people and I didn't need to need them. And I was like, whatever. And so I will never say never. What I think I would love to work with Denise again, 100%. I think what's most important for me is that I love the founder because that's why I joined Snowflake is I love the founders. And what's super cool for me and now being in position I'm in now is I'm meeting a ton of awesome founders. And a lot of them are super young, but are incredibly smart.

59:05And I love getting to know them. I love helping them. Some of them are super stubborn, but they're willing to listen and they'll take feedback and they'll act on that feedback. So what I think it would take for me to get up and do it again is I need to find a founder that I believe in, maybe I'm the one recruiting Denise, right? So, you know, maybe it's on the reverse. And you guys would be an expensive duo, but yes. Yeah. I mean, everyone's expensive. So I was on a call yesterday with a like rising star and he was figuring out what he wanted to do next. And every question to your point, Chris, that he was asking me was like, you know, this AI companies, I just can't tell what's real, what's not.

59:51and he had all these checklists. And the one thing that wasn't on his checklist was the CEO, the founder. And I'm like, dude, you've said like 50 things about what you're nervous about, what you want, what you don't want. And I feel like you left off probably really the only thing that matters more than all the other ones combined. He's like, who are you working for? Because I'm like, dude, at the end of the day, they are gonna fire you even if it's not your fault. They're gonna fire you. and so you better hope that they have your back. Like you just better hope that they have your back. And if you go to one of these high growth companies, you're gonna spend like 90 hours a week with them.

1:00:31Like, do you even like them? Like you have all of these weird criteria around things that I don't think matter. Because at the end of the day, if this person doesn't have your back, you could check every other box, it doesn't matter. No, there's a company that is in the AI space and the coding space that their CEO has got a pretty bad rap. And I'm going to go help someone to go compete against them because culturally he's creating a toxic culture towards salespeople. And there are famous CEOs right now. famous, very famous CEO's right now who are toxic. And they just expect because people are, they're gonna make people lots of money that they'll be, they'll work hard.

1:01:27I'm not gonna go work for someone just because I'm gonna make money. Life is too short. You gotta go and enjoy what you do. And I think working with someone like Denise, working with Benoit and Terry, our founders at Snowflake, working with guys like Bob Muglia, Frank Slootman, Shradar Ramoswami, like these are all things that, You got to pick the people because putting up with someone who's disrespectful to you is just not worth it, in my opinion. I don't care how much money you're making. And it's easy for me to say that now, but I'm no chance am I ever working for a disrespectful CEO ever again.

1:02:01Agree 100%. Yeah. And also right to that point, who knows which product that is going to succeed? And also when I joined Snowflake again, very small company again. And when you read about the technology, met with the founders, okay, I knew, okay, if this product is going to make it, it will change, you know, the world, right? But we didn't know that then. Bob Muglia told me, Denise, this is the best product I've seen in my entire career. And he was a part of building, you know, Microsoft. So at that point, it's like, okay, you know, Bob Muglia is telling me this is the best product he's ever seen.

1:02:39you know, I get a, you know, he believes, you know, I get to believe in him. Right. And that thing is in early days, right. It's the believers that has to get the other people to believe essentially. Right. And Bob Muglia, our founders, they were incredible, you know, at that. So if you don't believe, you know, in the, in the founders, if you don't believe in the CEO, I mean, I think, I think the thing that like, it's interesting to, to, to, to think about what Denise just said around Bob is, you know, we had this incredible product, but we borrowed Bob's credibility. Bob was the most credible person to be selling that product at the time.

1:03:16Founders were great. Denise and I were great, but we could not have done it without Bob, no chance. And I think like now both Denise and I, because of the experience we have with stuff, like can add some credibility to younger founders and, and helping, you know, whether it's, we're a real company. Oh, we know who, who Chris is. We know who Denise is. I think that's what the founders, you know, get when they, they, you know, either ask us to be board members, advisors, work there, whatever. So, so I think to the, the, you know, the future founders or the founders that are building companies now is find someone that can, can bring you credibility.

1:03:55Cause these kids are 23, 25, 30 years old. They're building these world-class companies, hopefully, hopefully. But they need someone, I don't want to say grown up, who's a grown up, but adds credibility to them. And I think that's super helpful. Yeah. I think the other thing, my observation, both lived and observed, is they need credibility to go do other things, but also there is something about the belief that somebody else who has done it before can inspire in you. Like, um, you see this in venture capital all the time. Like if, you know, let's just say like if Mamoon leads your A, right, you, that belief that he's imparting in you is very like motivating.

1:04:44Like it kind of like, it levitates you, you know, like it's a, as Parker from Rippling would say, it's like, it sprinkles some fairy dust of credibility on you that really empowers and energizes you. Similar to like, if you join their board, you're like, wow, this really accomplished person sees something in me that I'm saying. I think I'm like talking the talk, but like they can help me walk the walk. You know, I think it's like really motivating and energizing. And, um, I think when you're 23, 24, 25, when you're a founder in general, the voices in your head of fear and doubt become very loud.

1:05:18And you have no idea what you're doing because it's never been done before with this specific company. And I think people like you or others that can inspire something in them to just say like, hey, I want to be on this journey with you. That gives you a lot of self-belief. That can go a long way. Just like Bob did for you both, right? Just like Frank did when he kept you. Yeah. I mean, incredibly important in the beginning. And it's the same thing when Dan When I joined, there were people who worked with me before and thought, okay, Denise believe, I got to believe too. Right? So in the early days, again, like credibility is what you lack and what you need to create.

1:05:56I think what I want from a founder is I want passion and conviction in what they're building. And that's what the founders, you know, at Stuff Like Had. So I want to see that passion and conviction. But I also need to see that they're humble enough to take feedback. Because some of these kids, because they are so smart, think that they know how to build. Like I was talking to a founder who they think they're special. So they can build this whole weird, literally weird sales organization. And I'm like, dude, you're special until you're not. And you're not, you're going to get sideswiped. because you didn't build the sales engine that you needed to build.

1:06:40You built this thing that's a hippy-dippy, feel-good organization with no accountability. And you need that eventually. And I think that's important for founders to be self-aware enough to actually say, I need to build these things because these things work. And maybe you're going to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but probably not. and you need to do it this way. I don't know if you share this in the book, but like if you think back, what was like the biggest point of contention where you're like, our relationship is not in a very good place right now. Do you remember periods of time where things were meaningfully rocky?

1:07:25I don't think we ever let it go to that point really. There was, where there was friction, it was because of people that either she had hired or I had hired. That the other doesn't think is pulling their weight. Correct. And this is where we would give each other feedback on those people. That's where I think there was friction. Yeah. And also, I think, again, I come back to that trust. When I gave feedback to Chris or vice versa, it was the truth, right? It wasn't trying to, you know, throw me under a bus or anything like that. if he came to me and tell me, you have a problem here, Denise, I dealt with it.

1:08:05And if I hadn't, and if I said to Chris, I don't agree with you, everyone else maybe saw the problem. I didn't, right. Then he would never come and tell me again. Right. So I think we also know that, Hey, Chris, here's some feedback for you. You actually did something with it. Right. You did, you, you, you did dig into it. Right. And, uh, I wouldn't just take it for face value. Yeah. You would ask a few more people as well. If she said something about somebody on your team, let me go dig into it. But often again, often, right? You don't know everything that is going in on your organization, right?

1:08:37Some people are very good at managing up to you and you don't see the issue, right? Other people around you see it, but they don't want to tell you. So that's why it's so incredibly important to have people that you trust around you that are going to tell you the truth. And I think that's like so hard is like when you get that feedback, it's super easy, especially if you like someone that's working for you, you get some negative feedback on that person to go back and give that person that feedback and saying, well, this is not good. When it turns out you end up ratting out the person who gave you that feedback.

1:09:15And that's bad because you lose trust and you then don't get that feedback loop that you need. So it's super important that when Denise would give me feedback on someone or Slootman or anybody is like, go out and, and do your own investigation, find the untruth. I mean, there are some wacky stories that I have on someone telling me something totally, you know, slandering someone's character. Turns out it was a lie. Um, and, but I had to go do my own investigation. There was, it was one of the more wild experiences I've had, um, in managing people. And I think it's just important for you always to, to, to hear things, listen to them, But know that someone might be feeding you information too, which is kind of wild.

1:10:01But yeah. Random question. When everyone started to get rich that used to work for you, was it hard to manage them? Like did motivations change as the company became more successful? Maybe it was secondaries before the IPO. Maybe it was after the IPO. Like as external influences started, people's lives changed. Like there's no doubt about it. Like people's lives changed. did motivations feel like they changed to you can you feel that yeah i never really saw that happen at snowflake i think people were most passionate about the mission that we were on maybe on the south side you might be more uh money money motivated this is okay we don't agree here maybe maybe it's different i i didn't see that um on the marketing side i think people really really really were motivated by by the mission you know we had every day and those people um ended up leaving snowflake anyway yeah there's two things that that happen is number one is like there are people that get lazy um and stop doing the things that you expect them to do things like I don't like I found out like an example I'll give you is that I assumed that because since the beginning of dawn at snowflake every single week I did a forecast call every single week I did one-on-ones that was just part of my job so to when you work for me I would expect you're doing the same thing because you're You're gathering information about what's happening in your organization.

1:11:47Turns out that doesn't happen. And when you have 3 ,000 people in your organization, you have, I don't know, 500 managers. Turns out not every manager's doing that. They were. And they got lazy. And they stopped doing that. They stopped caring. And how do you know this is where the operational side of the business is important to dig into to make sure that those checks and balances are, you can no longer just trust that things are happening. So, yeah, I saw that around, like, you know, I went to Europe and there were some problems in Europe that I didn't realize because the person had stopped traveling in Europe.

1:12:32And, well, Jews, your job is to travel around Europe. And so it's like, you just, you kind of have to figure that out. And it's, it's just, it's unfortunate, but that happens and it's happened. And I think it happened a little bit to me, to be honest with you, towards the end. Where what? Where I got lazy. I didn't want to do the hard things. And I think sometimes doing the hard things are what the company needs. And, and that's, you know, that's a real problem. In the book, well, I guess actually just generally speaking, feel free to give me whatever opinion you want. Chris, you were hired early at Snowflake, meaning pre-revenue, pre-products, pre-website.

1:13:18My conventional wisdom tells me that's too early. My pattern recognition would say that's a really early time to bring somebody on when we don't even know what we're selling. And then for you, Denise, the company was 3 million and they brought in a pretty fancy CMO who has done it before. Did the, maybe as you look at other companies now that are asking you for advice, would you give them the same advice of when you both respectively joined Snowflake in their own organization? I think the fact that Chris joined so early is kind of the key to Snowflake success, right? And that was something Mike Spancher did intentionally to be able to get feedback, right, from prospects every single week, right?

1:14:03That was the whole point. I mean, Chris, I mean, you were essentially a product manager, right, at Snowflake? Yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, so I think it's super important that you have a deep, if you're building a company, you have a deep competitive moat. because right now, like if you're building an AI company, the chances are that, you know, Facebook or Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, X, are going to eventually develop a product that you developed. If they can do it, they will. And so you have to assume that you have to build a better product than them, that they can and faster. This is not dissimilar to what we ran into with Amazon.

1:14:51So for me, what Spizer had really the foresight in doing was saying, Chris, go and put the product. I don't want you to collect any revenue. I just want you to put the product in as many customers' hands as possible and have them break it and make sure that we actually have a product. And there were material things that broke in Snowflake prior to us collecting any revenue. Like they had to do open heart transplant basically on the product, replacing a core engine in the product because we had some of these early ad tech companies that were beating the crap out of it, breaking it. and our founders realizing, well, geez, like this, they were using MySQL for one portion.

1:15:46It just wasn't going to work. And so they had to replace MySQL with another database called FoundationDB. And when they did that, it was heartbreaking for me because I was ready to go, let's go sell faster. That was six months. And thank God they did that because then that allowed us to scale beyond. So it just depends from, you know, you're on the VC side. It depends on how much belief and willingness the venture team has in the founder and what architecturally they're building and are they building a competitive moat. Because once you have that competitive moat, then you throw gasoline on it and go with the sales team and the marketing team.

1:16:27Yeah, and when I joined at 3 million, I mean, there was early market fit, right? Mostly in that ad tech and gaming space. but there was of course huge you know ambition and at that point it was go go go and and i mean you joined bob was a huge exactly exactly and bob had already joined interviewer oh i did yep what'd you think well i i the funny the funny story for for for everyone i i ask this question pretty much not every time but a lot of times i i ask i ask everyone what's the biggest misperception of you? Because I want to see if you're self-aware. So I said, what's the biggest misperception of you?

1:17:12And Denise, and you know, she's Swedish. She may be part of the Swedish mafia, but just kidding. And she, she looks at me in a, in a very Swedish way, very just stoic. And she says, ice queen. And I'm like, what? She's like, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm the ice queen, but I'm actually really funny and she laughed. I'm like, dude, I like this lady. Yeah. So it was like, cause she was like, I was like, Oh shit. She's going to be this like mean, like, you know, European. And all of a sudden she like had a sense of humor and I was like, okay, this is, this will be fun. That's awesome. What did you think when you, when you first met Chris?

1:17:56There was no way you thought he was going to. No, no, everyone told me that. I know, again, I mean, Chris is the person, he's so authentic person, right? I mean, Chris is known for wearing his heart on the sleeve, right? So just very straightforward. And I think I looked forward to be working with like a no-nonsense person, right? Very, very straightforward. I mean, he was very clear on kind of what his expectations were and what he needed, what the priorities were. And I liked that, it was very clear. Hey, these are the top three priorities. I can do that. I could see myself, I can go in and be successful here.

1:18:39Okay, but like how often were you cleaning up after Chris? How often would he say something where you're like, you didn't say that? And he's like, yeah, I said it. And you're like, come on, no way. And then you're like, you can't say that. At least once a year, right? How often was that happening? There are times, to Denise's credit, There are times where I have put my foot in my mouth. Yes. But there are times when I've done that. And I'm like, oh, I got to go send this apology out. And she's like, because HR comes to me and says, you got to send out this apology and blah, blah, blah, blah. She goes, no, you're not doing that.

1:19:18Here's why. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You didn't, you're not meaning what you said and all this other stuff. And you go deal with the people that, you know, talk to the people that you think you may have offended. And sure enough, I hadn't. So she's got my back. I mean, I felt like, you know, where I, yeah, I'm a little bit of a hot mess sometimes and I'll say some stupid things, but, you know, for the most part, she keeps me in check and she made sure I was in check today. So do you, do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask? No, no, I don't. I mean, I just try to really, you know, figure out this person.

1:19:52I mean, there, there are a lot of different, I mean, questions. I just try to get to know the person. There are a lot of different questions. I don't have that one question that Chris has. Yeah. I appreciate you both doing this. When is the book out? August 7th. No. October 7th. Yes. When is that? Like three weeks? Three weeks. Three weeks. Okay. Are you nervous? Like, what if it's a flop? Again, I mean, it's been written for founders. in a marketing sales leader. It's not a book for everyone. And I don't think it's going to be a flop for what it's worth. My daughter's tried to read it and they didn't like it.

1:20:39I think it's, I think it's actually quite good. I really do. And I'm, I'm, I'm glad that there are examples that this works because there is very, very few in the Valley. And I hope that's I hope it inspires people that this is doable. I really do. And I'm happy that you're democratizing some of this knowledge for others. And I think that was your goal, was to let others know this is doable. Is that fair? I think it's, yeah, I think there's many reasons. I think it's doable. I think the partnership between sales and marketing is uber important. When you're building an enterprise organization, I cannot overemphasize how important the relationship between the marketing and sales team has to be.

1:21:35And then I think there's just a bunch of lessons that we learned along the way where we did screw up that it's helpful to share that with other founders. because I think if they take the time to read the book, if they take the time to, you know, they can always reach out and ask me questions. But I think it's important for them to be self-aware of some of the mistakes they're making because we made them and they're in there. Some of those are in the book. Yeah. I appreciate you playing ball, Denise. Your team, you know, asked me for the questions and I, you know, didn't, I don't have, like I don't have prepared questions.

1:22:15and so I appreciate you doing this. I know that was maybe uncomfortable with Chris and I sitting on the other side of the table from you. I've asked Chris this question at least twice now, probably a million times. So I'll just ask you, when you hear the word grit, what do you think of? Persistence, purpose, never giving up. Make it snow, October 22nd? October 7th. October 7th. 7th, yep. Amazon? Amazon. Everywhere. All right. Yeah. Cool. Jubin, thank you for having us. Thank you both. Thank you for having us, Jubin. I appreciate it. That's it for now. If you liked the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks.

1:23:00This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production and I'm Jubin. Thanks for listening.