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
Technology
SK Hynix shares extend gains to over 2-decade highs as parent group reportedly plans AI data center
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.
Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
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