Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia

I recently interviewed former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: My guest today has played a key role in building two of America's largest and leading technology companies. Bob Muglia was the CEO of Snowflake, valued today at more than $50 billion and previously led a 10,000 person team responsible for more than $17 billion in P&L at Microsoft. Bob is also the author of the new book, The Datapreneurs. Bob, thank you for joining us.

Bob: Thanks, Adam. It's great to be here.

Adam: Great to have you on. You grew up in Michigan and you did your undergrad at the University of Michigan, not far from where you grew up right outside of Ann Arbor. You ultimately joined Microsoft in your late 20s. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Bob: Thanks for asking, Adam. I would say that, early on, I focused an awful lot on data issues in my earliest parts of my career. My first real computer job was at a company called Condor Computer in Ann Arbor. It was actually a relational database that ran on a Z80 microcomputer. It had a join command, although it was not SQL. This was in the late 1970s really before SQL became the standard that it is today. But I had a first taste of building applications really for customers on microcomputers in the late 1970s, early 1980s in Ann Arbor. And although my background at Michigan was really more on communications focus, which is what led me to go to ROLM Corporation in the Bay Area, which built telecommunication systems for business that got me out to the West Coast after I graduated from Michigan. And interestingly enough, although I was in a communications company, I worked on data problems, building applications that work with data. And it's that work on PCs that led me ultimately to Microsoft.

Adam: What attracted you to the world of technology. This was a different time and place, the 1980s. Today, everyone wants to work in tech, this was a different era. What drew you in?

Bob: Well, I was thought it was really the most exciting thing to work on. I mean, some form of tech. I've always enjoyed aeronautics and focused on airplanes. I think there's a lot of interesting things that were happening in the 1960s and 1950s on airplanes. But that was the era of where the real innovation happened in aeronautics, a lot of the real innovations that the industry has been perfecting for decades. Whereas in computers, it was a brand new industry. And it was a greenfield. The systems were all very large. In general, only the largest companies really had computers and the government. They weren't ubiquitous the way they are. Now, I always saw that computers would have a much bigger role in society. This was the real advent of the microprocessor, the earliest days, and it was apparent to myself, and my wife was instrumental in helping make some of these decisions about moving to Microsoft as well, but it was very apparent that the PC was going to be the future and that computing was going to become much more ubiquitous. And of course, that's what we've seen happen.

Adam: Brand new industry. Microsoft, very different company than it is today. Can you share some of the key early lessons that you learn from those early days in your career? What did you learn that helped you become successful that helped you get to where you are today?

Bob: I feel like I learned an awful lot about how to run and manage a business and grow an organization by spending time at Microsoft in the early days. This was the Wild West of software development. Everything was new. Everything was being started for the first time. We didn't understand by any means the implications of how big an impact we were going to have on society. Certainly some of the mistakes made by Microsoft in the 1990s, which resulted in the trial that was held with the Department of Justice as an example of some of those early mistakes. I was in the middle of all that. I was certainly involved in the work that was done towards the Internet, and was involved in the trial, actually, and was one of the 12 witnesses that testified in the Microsoft DOJ trial. And so I learned a lot in that period about the importance of values. Microsoft always had a very strong hunger to solve problems for customers, to build products, to get things out, but to grow. And I think we had a perspective that was perhaps a little bit off base, because I don't think we fully recognized the responsibility that Microsoft had in the industry to be a leader and to to drive values across the industry. And so some lessons got learned in the early days. I'd say the lessons I learned from and back then were: you've got to push hard, but you have to do so in a values-based way. And that's something I've tried to foster throughout the rest of my career.

Adam: What were the skills you developed, as you were rising within your career, that were most integral to your success as a leader? And what are the most important skills that you've utilized in leading large teams and ultimately leading a large organization and Snowflake?

Bob: I guess what it really comes down to is the simplest of things: it's always all about people. It always comes down to people and relationships. One of my lessons is my parting lesson. When I left Microsoft I said this to everyone. I said, I tried to look back and say that one of the issues I learned over time is, whatever you're working on, no matter how important you think it is, it's not worth destroying relationships with people over and a lot of times people get into arguments in companies with peers about issues and, in the process of those things, they harm relationships with others. And the thing that I learned over time, and this is through many mistakes made, but the thing I learned over time is that long after that issue is gone and is long forgotten, the relationship with the person remains. And so in some sense, that should take priority. The other thing that I found really interesting is that, in a situation where my job at Microsoft, for a good part of the time, was Program Manager, which specifies what a product should do, the requirements of a product. And I can think back and so many times the things I was so passionate about needing to add to the product for the customers, when I look back over time, if I lost one of those battles and I didn't get something in, quite often, it never happened. Not like it just got delayed to the next release. But it just never happened, the world moved on. And so obviously, what I was fighting for couldn't have been that important. I must have been wrong about that. And so coming back to the importance of an issue that you see at the time, versus a relationship with people, I've learned to always preserve that relationship. You might want to fight like hell for that issue. And that might be the right thing to do. But the relationship with the person is always what matters. You know, leadership is really three things. And if you get these three things right, you'll be successful. They're not easy to get right. But if you get them right, it's having the right strategy, having the structure that is effective for execution, and then having the right people in place. You do those three things, you're going to be successful, but they're not easy.

Adam: Let's dive in to each of them. Right strategy, right structure, right people?

Bob: Exactly. Very simple. How simpler can you get?

Adam: Well, we have time, how do you develop the right strategy?

Bob: You listen, you listen mostly. And then you work with people. I've never – Hard strategies, I always found, had to be developed with collaborative effort by people working together to put the pieces together. I very rarely –  I'm just not smart enough to come in and say, this is going to be the strategy. I am smart enough to come in and say I think that we may want to talk about X, we might talk about Y. And let's go through these. And what I found is that we were dealing with some of the hardest problems we would ever come up with in any business like, let me give you an example of one of the ones where I look back on it as actually being quite successful for the company in retrospect, which is the the transition from the server environment of having just physical servers to actually virtualizing those servers. And that happened, that transition happened in the early 2000s. And it was led by VMware, who was virtualizing Microsoft Windows Server as well as Linux. And we came up with our own strategy for virtualization, which is Microsoft Hyper V, and selling Windows Server as essentially guests on both VMware and our own systems. And we were putting that strategy together, understanding how to transform a business from the physical world to the virtual world, and doing so in a way that ultimately both companies want. Now we saw each other as big competitors back then. But when we look back, and I know all those people, their colleagues, in some cases, friends, personal friends of mine, while we fought like heck as competitors, in fact, both companies won, and good things happened and you know, there's partnerships and stuff still that have been built. And I think that those are examples of how you work together. How to build a strategy. And in order to come up with that strategy, I met with my team for months, talking about how we would evolve our Windows go-to-market and distribution. Remember, this was a $5+ billion business. It's a giant business that we needed to shift to a totally new distribution approach of running in these virtual machines. And in order to come up with a strategy that was ultimately successful, it required a series of discussions with many, many smart people, over a period of I’d say months. I don't have that many pages in my playbook. One of my pages that I use all the time is a regular meeting, a recurring weekly meeting tends to work well. It tends to be a good frequency. And so you need to drive a business change like that, like going from a physical world to a virtual world, and doing so successfully and not sinking a $5 billion business. To do that, it required literally dozens of these weekly meetings and bringing together 8, 10, 15 people to talk about the problem and work things through. And frankly, the answers we came up with were far better than the answers that any one of us individually could have possibly done.

Adam: Why do you think weekly meetings are magic? And what advice do you have for anyone listening on how to run a meeting: how to organize a meeting, how to ensure that whatever meeting you're involved in is as impactful as possible? 

Bob: Well, first of all, those are the easiest meetings to have with a very focused agenda, because they are very focused. You have a clear task you're trying to accomplish. That task may migrate a little bit over time. But in this case, it was ‘how do we transition this business from selling in one form to selling in a new form?’ And it included the engineering teams because they had a stake in the game, because they had to make changes. It included the marketing teams who had the salespeople. So the first thing I'd say is you pull together all stakeholders. You’ve got to have somebody in the room when these decisions are being made, where every stakeholder feels like they're represented, because if you leave somebody out, then they'll just feel excluded. So get the right group of people together. And the reason why it works is very simple. It's just a forcing function. It just forces action to happen on a regular basis. So in that meeting, you come into every one of those meetings with action items from the previous meeting, and you have a discussion about where we are on those action items, what's been accomplished, what are the key issues, and then you leave that meeting with a set of new action items that need to be accomplished typically before the next meeting. And so the regularity of it drives progress forward. And that's why weekly tends to work very well, because it's frequent enough that it causes action to happen. But it's not like daily. If it's daily, people don't have time. And the recurrence can vary. I mean, sometimes they’re monthly, frequently they’re weekly, I have done daily meetings before. But only typically when I've got a customer issue. I mean, if you've got a customer, outages are a major customer problem that deserve a daily meeting. Most other things do not have that level of criticality, unless you're on a deadline to ship something and you just start right at the wire.

Adam: And so much of it comes down to managing your time, managing your focus and prioritization. Nothing higher priority than your customers. If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. But at the same time, you need to ensure that you're marshaling your time wisely. And if you spend all day in meetings, you don't have any time to do anything else.

Bob: When I was running Snowflake, or when I was running the divisions at Microsoft, or some of the other roles I've had as an executive, you are spending a lot of your time in meetings because you're providing direction to people. And a lot of those meetings were just one-to-one meetings. And one of the hardest issues as an executive, and one that I didn't do very well to be honest with you, was how do you find enough time for yourself and time to think and also personal time and things like that? I did try to keep that balance as much as I could. But I admit it was often challenging.

Adam: So you outlined your three most important elements to excelling as a leader. Right strategy, right structure, right people. Can you talk a little bit more about how to get the right structure in place and how to get the right people in place?

Bob: Honestly, the structures are ones where you need experience. You have to find people that understand the domains that you're in. A real interesting example of this is demand gen to me. Demand gen is science these days. When I was starting in this business, marketing was a lot of art. Now, it's a data science basically. And understanding how to drive demand into your product is very much a science. And in order to build that process, you need somebody who understands it. So a large part about process is finding what state of the art processes are. And then bringing those into your organization by hiring people that have that expertise. This is an area where hiring can be very helpful if people have done something similar. Because generally speaking, if you set up a process for the first time, you’ll generally get it wrong. Generally speaking, you'll get it wrong. You may learn a lot through the process of doing it, and maybe you'll get it right the next time. But it's very hard to set up a complicated process if you've never done it before. Classic example of this is the structure of Salesforce for an organization. Salesforce is very flexible, you can do it a lot of different ways. And most companies, if you ask them about their Salesforce implementation, they will tell you it's messy. Maybe they’ll say it's even a disaster. The reason for that is because it's hard to do it correctly. And generally speaking, to do it, you need somebody who's done it before and understands the pitfalls of how you set up your CRM system. And again, the expertise really helps. So that goes back to the third thing, which is people and finding the right people. And generally speaking, I find that you need a balance of people with experience and who have an understanding of what they're doing together with people who are earlier in their career, who bring lots of energy and enthusiasm to the game, and sometimes brilliance as well on top of it. But the combination, that brilliance is usually best directed if it's coupled with experience. And that experience can provide the people earlier in their career with that direction.

Adam: And you worked with an extremely wide range of types of people. Over the course of your career, you worked with highly technical people, you worked with people who had very strong business skills, but weren't engineers. How, as a leader, do you most effectively manage and motivate different kinds of people? What advice do you have?

Bob: The most important advice I have for anyone who's an entrepreneur, starting a business or trying to build a company and recruit and manage a variety of different talents, is to have a very strong set of values in place. And to leverage the values as guidelines for how the company works. That's how it should work. I have watched over time how companies are built. And essentially there are two competing sorts of demands on an organization. One is the ‘What you do,’ what you're actually accomplishing. And the other is the ‘How you're accomplishing it.’ And the What is all based on performance and is often quite measurable, directly measurable. Certainly salespeople have performance goals that are very measurable. You can see what their quota is. Did they attain their quota or not? Engineers, it's a little less clear, because they're writing code and doing things. Measuring their What may not be quite as easy, but it's often quite doable. The How is where the interesting part comes in. And it's the approach that an organization takes to solving these complicated problems and interacting together as well as working with partners and customers. And that's where I find values to be invaluable in helping to direct an organization because as an executive, and particularly if you're a CEO and a leader of a company, you really want your organization to be operating in a consistent way that reflects what you need in the business that hopefully reflects the values of the organization. And if you properly establish your values, they can be leveraged as guidelines for people on how to behave. And one of the key things with Snowflake was that when we established our values, we did it a couple years into it. I think the values came out in 2015 and Snowflake was formed in 2012. I joined in 2014 and those values reflected the values of people across the organization. It was very much a collaborative process that involved quite a few people. It was top-down but it was also middle-up if that makes sense. I would say there's a lot of input that came from leaders within the organization that may not necessarily be managers, or have VP titles, but you know, are leaders inside the organization. They are the thought leaders that exist within any company and some of them are sometimes quiet. But by pulling out their sort of values and incorporating it into what you're doing as a whole, it can really build cohesiveness across the company. And you always know a values –  there's a couple of things to tell you about a values-based company. The first question is, is it on their website? Is it easy to find on their website, because if it's not, they're not a values-based company. Now, even if it is, that doesn't mean they're a values based company. A lot of companies put values up that are not values-based. The way you can tell if a company is values-based is when you interact with the people in that company. Do they reflect on the values of the company? Did they talk about the values? And the best example of this at scale is Amazon. I don't agree with all of Amazon's leadership, every value that Amazon has just as an individual, I might disagree in some cases. But that is a company that has leadership principles that people use for leadership and listen to. The 15 leadership principles that Jeff Bezos created are truly outstanding. And if you talk to Amazonians, they talk about the values. And hopefully if you talk to Snowflakes, they will also talk about the values. The reason that's true is because it's emphasized constantly from the top down. Once we put our values in place, I never gave a company talk and I did it almost every week, every week or every other week, I did an All Hands meeting. Every single one of those All Hands meetings, I talked about our values without exception. When I would meet with customers, I talked about our values. And by reinforcing this again and again, it causes people to believe in them, and to live them as much as possible. People make mistakes with values. Values are something you want to aspire to achieve on a daily basis, and we don't always succeed at that. But they are directionally what you want to have happen. And they're probably one of the most effective tools for leadership.

Adam: Bob, you shared a lot of great stuff there. And I want to unpack some of it. The importance as a leader of listening, asking questions, encouraging a collaborative approach to leadership in gendering, fostering, collaboration in everything you do, starting with how you define your values as an organization, living your values, breathing your values. Something that you didn't say directly, but was implied in what you shared. By emphasizing your values so strongly, not only does it attract people who want to be a part of an organization, that love your values, and want to live your values, but it detracts people who don't buy into what you're selling, who see what you're talking about and say, ‘This isn't me,’ it helps you repel those people from being a part of your organization. And by doing that, it saves you a lot of headache and trouble and helps you avoid a lot of problems.

Bob: It lets you fail fast, too. That's the other thing. When you hire somebody and you've made a mistake in hiring, the failure can come faster. And that's generally good for everybody. Yeah, it's a very strong thing. And what we would find in general is when we had somebody not work out at Snowflake, that there were really only two reasons that they didn't work out. One is they didn't really have the skills we thought they had when we hired them, and we misjudged their skills. And the other was they operated on a set of values that were inconsistent from ours. Now, nobody's values have to be perfectly aligned with a company. I mean, a company's values are a company's values. I have individual values as a human being that are not the same as any company I've ever worked for. But you need to be in alignment with your values. And, you know, one of the other things I would say, and one of my other great learnings, sometimes through mistakes I've made, to be honest, is that when you are out of alignment with the values of your management, you should leave. If the management changes or something happens, it's probably good for you to leave. And that's the mistake I probably made in my career is staying in situations where that wasn't true.

Adam: Can you elaborate on that?

Bob: At Microsoft, my biggest challenge was, as Microsoft matured, and particularly when I was working with Steve Ballmer. Steve was my boss. Steve's values and my values are not in alignment and it probably should have been recognized by me sooner than it did. Satya’s values and mine are very aligned, highly aligned, and I enjoy working with Satya today. But Steve I had somewhat different values. He's a person I learned a tremendous amount from. I view Steve as being somebody that I say I learned a lot from. And it was many good things working with him but values wise, we were not fully in alignment.

Adam: What did you learn from Steve Ballmer?

Bob: Oh my God, he's the best business manager. I mean, his business management skills are unbelievable. He could drive an organization. His approach was a little harsh sometimes. But he had the ability to understand a business and understand pricing and understand markets and the dynamics of markets that were incredible. I mean, a large part of the Microsoft success was the combination of Bill's technical brilliance and Steve's business acumen. He's one of the best businessmen I've ever dealt with. Pricing, I mean, he's one of the best pricing people ever. And the way he thought about the Microsoft business, very complicated business, my God, and just unbelievably complicated. And Steve had the ability to look at the business in multiple dimensions. He could look at it from the perspective of geography. He could look at it from the perspective of a product. And he forced us to have all those views. I mean, he forced all of us into the discipline of that. And the discipline, a large part of – you know, remember the second thing I said in success is execution. And what that instilled was a focus on execution in Microsoft. You gotta give them credit. They've done a heck of a job. And a lot of that came from the DNA of Steve Ballmer, and I give him a ton of credit for it.

Adam: What did you learn from your time spent with Bill Gates?

Bob: Well, Bill. I learned an understanding of the potential for business from Bill. Bill has the ability to look at technology and see its potential, and then affect that and then essentially make that happen in the industry. I think with Bill, I learned that anything is possible in technology. And if you're focused enough on it and do the right things, you can have a huge impact and make that happen. I watched Bill transition the company with the Internet wave. And while we got ourselves into a little bit of trouble with that, I talked about that weekly meeting process. That was Bill Gates that was doing that. And we were in regular meetings in his conference room during 1995 and 1996. Going through how the Internet would affect every single Microsoft business. And he just moved the company. He just shifted that entire company to be focused on the Internet. Now, there were some things that they didn't do, like they still held on to Windows too hard, they didn't understand the long term role of the client would be diminished. And they didn't want to give that up. I could go on for hours about that, but Bill's insightfulness about how business can be created from technology, how technology can foster the creation of business is world class.

Adam: You've spent a lot of time with some of the most successful leaders. You yourself have lead at and have led some of the most successful technology companies, What do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader? And what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Bob: One of them is passion, for sure. For sure, if you're not passionate about what you're doing, it shows to others. So believing in what you're doing and being very passionate about it. I think that one of the great things about great leaders is the realization that everything happens through people and their ability to influence people. If you look back, I mean, think about the leaders of the time, they're almost mystical in it. Like Steve Jobs is almost mystical in his ability to influence people. And people talked about the distortion zone around Steve Jobs, that reality distortion zone. But when you're with him, you believed him. And these leaders have the ability to inspire ideas and people and get people to do more than they thought they could ever do. And that's always one of the great things that I look back on then. And look at some of those people, my techniques are very different than like a Bill Gates technique. Bill inspired people by telling them they could do better. This classic line, which those of us at Microsoft heard so many times, we used to laugh at it was: ‘That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.’ He’d say. And he would force people by if he didn't think something was good enough, he would push it really hard. And certainly Steve Jobs and others have been known for that. Elon Musk is really known for that. I'm probably a little more subtle than that, in that I don't say everything is crummy, and I need better. My approach tends to be to encourage people on what they've done, but then suggest how they could continue to improve that. And I found that it gets some of the best results to be positive, and to have a positive interaction with people, and then leverage their thinking to encourage them to take the next step. 

Adam: How can anyone take that next step? What can anyone do to become a better leader?

Bob: Listen. I think one of the biggest things is people don't listen enough. And really focus. The biggest thing is really knowing what you want to achieve. I would say it's these three things, it really comes down to those three things and making all of them as good as you can. The best strategy (or the right strategy is sometimes the way to put it), an effective structure. So many things fail at structure. I'm dealing with small companies right now. I'm on boards, and I'm helping small companies develop. Sometimes they have incredible strategies, and they have great people, but their structures are a disaster and the infrastructure they have is a disaster. That's the way people fail. And that's the way companies fail, too. So it always comes down to those three things. And if you actually put all of your energy into making sure you're on the right strategy, if you're on the wrong strategy, you're doomed. You're absolutely doomed. You can't be successful. Now, it could be that you go down the wrong strategy and you can pivot and go to the right strategy. You still have time, but you have to be on the right strategy. And then you have to build the infrastructure in the team to make it happen.

Adam: Bob, your new book, The Datapreneurs, dives into a lot of the topics that we've been talking about: ethics and leadership and how they intersect and how leaders should understand how to lead within this ever changing world where we have new technology that seems to be changing at a pace faster than any of us can understand. What should anyone listening to this conversation understand about AI, understand about this ever changing landscape? What should we take away?

Bob: Well, this is the future really. I think that a future where data becomes an asset, a core business asset for every organization. That's something I've been saying for some time that, and certainly when I was at Snowflake it was one of our key objectives, to enable every company to be data driven, and to work with data, but then to be able to apply that data to now the intelligence that's coming with these artificial intelligence models. That is remarkable, because what it means now for the first time is we have this combination of data, which is really knowledge, together with intelligence that we can put inside a computer to perform an action. Until we had these AI models, we had the knowledge, but we didn't have the intelligence and all that had to be hand-coded. Now what's becoming possible is really every domain will be impacted by AI. So every different industry, every different area where there is expertise, is an opportunity for entrepreneurship to build new applications and solutions that effectively bottle the knowledge and intelligence associated with the business and put it inside the computer and inside the product. And so it's a great time for entrepreneurship. And in fact, of course, we see 1000s of companies springing up right now.

Adam: Bob, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Bob: Understand what your objectives are, and listen to those around you. And make sure that the way you realize, you accomplish that is by working with people and building relationships. In the end, it's always about the people.

Adam: Bob, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Bob: It was good talking, Adam. Thanks.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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