- Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman denies that his predecessor, Bob Muglia was removed over his reluctance to take the company public, and that he was hired specifically to rush out an IPO.
- In fact, Slootman says an IPO is possible within a three-year timeframe, but far less likely in the near term.
- He said the Snowflake board wanted another executive to lead the company through its next stage of growth telling him: "We want you."
- Snowflake, last valued at $2.5 billion, has raised some $928 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ Capital, and Madrona Venture Group.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman strongly denied Tuesday that his predecessor Bob Muglia's departure from the company had anything to do with his seeming neutrality on the idea of bringing the company public this year.
"I can patently deny that," Slootman told Business Insider. "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard."
Slootman also denied that he was hired specifically to take Snowflake public, even as he laid out the odds for Snowflake hitting the public markets any time soon: "An IPO in the next year is extremely unlikely. It's possible in the next two years. It's probably likely in the next 3 years."
Still, there are likely some who are eagerly waiting for that IPO: Snowflake, a data warehousing startup last valued at $2.5 billion, has raised some $928 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ Capital, and Madrona Venture Group.
'CEO transitions are difficult'
Slootman, who gave a keynote at Snowflake's San Francisco event where the company announced a partnership with Google Cloud, took over in late April after the sudden departure of Muglia, in a management shakeup that stunned the tech world.
Muglia's exit happened shortly after an interview with The Information in which he said he didn't plan to pursue an IPO for another year or two. But Slootman said any speculation that Muglia left because Snowflake's board of directors was reacting to the interview didn't make sense.
"That is now how boards operate or how they think," he said. "CEO transitions are extremely difficult. They're risky. They're absolutely the last resort. You don't do this because somebody had a bad interview. It's absurd."
He said changing CEOs "happen for profound strategic reasons." Muglia, he said, was respected by the board who thought he had done a good job. Prior to taking over at Snowflake, too, Muglia had a long and distinguished career at Microsoft.
"He took the company from next to nothing to full-breakout velocity," Slootman said. "But as so often the case what got you there is not what's going to get you to the next milestones. … The board felt that we needed a different operator for this stage of the company's evolution. … Now you need to build organizations that can scale."
Asked if that meant the board felt that Muglia was not the right person for that task but Slootman was, Slootman answered: "I think that's what the board thought."
'We want you'
Asked if Muglia was asked to leave, Slootman said, "Not in those explicit terms. This is not how these conversations happen. You don't sit somebody down and say, 'I want you to leave.'"
He also noted that he was not part of that conversation. "I know what they told me which was: 'We want you.'"
Slootman said he did recruit former colleagues from ServiceNow to join him at Snowflake. Rob Specker is now general counsel at the company, while Shelly Begun is as vice president of HR.
"Those changes are made," he said. "When you take over a fast-growing company like this, there's a lot of moving parts. I wanted to make sure that I had known trusted entities in key roles. I can't sit around and try to find out if somebody is a fit for a role when I have people I can plug in there. When you run companies the way I have, I no longer waste time on this sort of thing. It's all about the elimination of the unknown and uncertainty. That's the game I play."
Slootman is known in the tech industry for leading fast-growing startups, such as Data Domain and ServiceNow, to IPO or acquisition. That also led to speculation that he was brought in to preside over similar processes at Snowflake, whose pioneering cloud data warehousing platform has turned it into one of the hottest startups in tech.
"That's also incorrect," he said. "I'm saying that emphatically."
The Snowflake board is in no hurry to go public, Slootman says, though the three-year timeframe is a long time and things could change.
"There is zero pressure on taking the company public," he said.
Besides, he added, "I've taken two companies public and I'm not itching to do it either." He was referring to the pressures of running a public company which are typically subjected to more public scrutiny.
"More complications," Slootman said.
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