On my list for today is the highly acclaimed cloud game Snowflake (SNOW).
So I was driving home last night and heard Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman – a mega-gazillionaire who loves sailing yachts but is also a master at building tech companies – conducting an interview with a YF competitor. With him is someone I've never heard of before, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who has been described as the new CEO of Snowflake.
My first reaction was, “Wait – how did I miss this tonight and why was I paying so much attention to Salesforce’s earnings?”
I slammed on the brakes of my new car and pulled off the busy highway to watch the interview (yes, really), where I found two smiling executives chatting with the host. The moderator suggested that Slootman had clearly signaled to him in a recent conversation that he was resigning.
Memo to Frank and the entire Snowflake board: They did a terrible job signaling that this was coming in some form. And now the average investor (who doesn't have access to Frank Slootman) is stuck with a highly touted tech stock – shares are plunging more than 23% as of this writing.
The street here was generally shocked.
“Snowflake surprised investors on several fronts last night: Its highly successful CEO is retiring effective immediately after declaring just seven months ago that he was going nowhere,” Guggenheim analyst John Difuci wrote in a note to clients.
Stifel analyst Brad Reback also called Slootman's exit a “surprise.”
End effect: CEOs have a responsibility to signal when they may no longer want the top job, whether because they are burned out, want to play golf or want to buy another yacht. And it is the board's job to ensure that this process is handled first-class, from external to internal communication.
If not handled properly, you could, excuse me, become slootmanned and experience a major stock sell-off due to a surprise shift in the C-suite.
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