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
Frank Slootman
Image: Christie Hemm Klok for Forbes
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 gruff Slootman 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.