The Outsider

FRANK SLOOTMAN DOESN’T START COMPANIES. BUT NO ONE IN BUSINESS HISTORY HAS A BETTER TRACK RECORD OF TURNING THE IDEAS OF OTHERS INTO JACKPOTS. WITH $80 BILLION SNOWFLAKE, THE BIGGEST SOFTWARE IPO EVER, HE’S REWRITTEN THE PLAYBOOK

- ALEX KONRAD

By Labor day, it had become clear that Frank Slootman’s third initial public offering (IPO) would not be like the other two. After a slight summer lull, Covid-19 was resurgent, which meant that rather than a global tour of get-to-know-you lunches and PowerPoints in hotel meeting rooms, his roadshow for data warehousing company Snowflake was going virtual.

Slootman, 62, took over a nondescript conference room on the second floor of Snowflake’s Dublin, California, office, embarking on a series of meetings that now rank with Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm coding sessions in terms of value per hour. For seven days in mid-September, packing in everything from a series of one-on-one meetings to large presentations, the naturally gruffSlootman met over Zoom with more than 1,000 people, including fund managers and investment bankers, who were on hand to win a piece of his IPO.

Rather than the usual grilling, 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.”