Snowflake’s Slootman says he’s not worried about employee exodus: ‘This is not a personal cult’
Snowflake Chairman Frank Slootman attends the Snowflake Summit 2022 in Las Vegas on June 14, 2022.
Snowflake | Via Reuters
News of Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman’s retirement sparked an 18% plunge in the company’s stock price on Thursday, its steepest selloff since the data analytics software vendor debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.
Slootman’s departure was announced late Wednesday as part of Snowflake’s quarterly earnings report, which included disappointing guidance. Analysts at Mizuho Securities wrote in a note that the stock is getting hammered “as investors digest the resignation” of Slootman, who joined in 2019 and led the company through its blockbuster IPO the following year.
While the announcement caused consternation on Wall Street, Slootman told CNBC that he’s not worried about a wave of Snowflake employees following him out the door.
“This is not a personal cult, OK?” Slootman said.
Slootman, 65, is being succeeded by former Google ad chief Sridhar Ramaswamy, who joined Snowflake in June via the company’s $185 million purchase of Neeva, a startup Ramaswamy co-founded in 2019.
Snowflake was the third enterprise technology company that Slootman shepherded through the IPO process, following Data Domain in 2007 and ServiceNow in 2012. Snowflake marked his biggest financial windfall. He controlled roughly 6% of the company’s stock at the time of the IPO, and owned 10.6 million shares as of Feb. 9, a stake that’s currently worth about $2 billion.
Additionally, Slootman’s total compensation in 2023 amounted to $23.7 million, almost entirely from stock and option awards.
Before joining Snowflake, Slootman spent about six years as CEO of ServiceNow. He told CNBC that ServiceNow has continued to flourish since his departure. Annualized revenue has grown from $1.5 billion to almost $10 billion.
“Some people are still there that I hired — quite a few of them, actually,” Slootman said. “There’s also new ones, obviously.”
ServiceNow’s workforce stood at 23,668 by the end of 2023, compared with 603 in December 2011, months after Slootman had joined, according to regulatory filings.
“We put ServiceNow on the rails. We’ve done that with Snowflake as well,” said Slootman, who’s sticking around as chairman.
Taking three companies through big and successful exits is a rare feat in technology, and has gained Slootman plenty of acclaim. But he’s also attracted attention for stepping into controversy on issues like the tech industry’s focus on diversity. In 2021, as corporate America was wading through the fallout of the George Floyd murder, Slootman noted that diversity shouldn’t trump merit. He later apologized.
In his 2022 book “Amp It Up,” Slootman offered advice leaders on how to raise standards inside companies, citing Steve Jobs’ insistence on greatness at Apple. “Don’t let malaise set in,” he wrote.
Founded in 2012, Snowflake built a cloud-based data warehouse for storing and analyzing corporate information. Now the company wants to help clients build artificial intelligence models and applications on top of the data.
Ramaswamy said Snowflake has a clear vision, with the data cloud at the center and apps around it.
“Just delivering on that at scale with speed is what I’m going to do,” he said.
The challenge will be to maintain the company’s momentum.
Snowflake generates about $3 billion in annualized revenue, growing at about 32% a year, compared with under $200 million before Slootman replaced former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO in 2019. As it tries to continue its rapid expansion, Snowflake faces competition from Databricks, valued at $43 billion last year in an investment round that included Capital One, which previously backed Snowflake.
After Snowflake bought Neeva, Slootman said he made an effort to get to know Ramaswamy. The company put Ramaswamy in the most critical role at the time, leading its AI efforts. Slootman had a realization.
“Holy s—, this is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for,” he said.
Ramaswamy said he’s been spending a lot of time with Slootman. They’ve traveled together to London and Berlin, along with domestic trips to Arizona and Las Vegas. Ramaswamy said he’s held conversations with over 100 clients, including many with Slootman.
Now that he’s at the helm, Ramaswamy has to deal with the naysayers.
“It is no doubt concerning to see Mr. Slootman, who has a strong track record and is well regarded by investors, step down after five years in the role,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note on Thursday, though they maintained their buy recommendation on the stock.
But nobody has more at stake in Ramaswamy’s success than Slootman, who remains one of the company’s biggest investors.
“Snowflake is in an extremely good place, having Sridhar at the helm,” he said.
WATCH: Part of Snowflake’s downfall is related to CEO Slootman’s retirement
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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