Former Dutchman Frank Slootman is responsible for the largest IPO of a software company ever with Snowflake. Who is he?
For Frank Slootman, born in the Netherlands, the United States still seems to be the land of unlimited possibilities. Slootman is the CEO of the technology company Snowflake, which on Wednesday in New York experienced a spectacular IPO that makes the ex-Dutchman a passant billionaire.
Slootman (61) grew up in the Netherlands, studied at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and left the Netherlands after graduating in the mid-1980s. He got his first job at the time in the US at the ICT company Burroughs. Slootman continued to work in the technology sector and after the turn of the century became CEO of the California start-up Data Domain. He became an American citizen around 1995.
Data Domain grew from a company with twenty employees into a major player – in 2007 the company was successfully listed on the stock market. Slootman recorded the period in his book Tape Sucks: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story. He left Data Domain to lead the American software company ServiceNow. He also took that company to the stock exchange.
Cloud storage
Snowflake can now be added to the list of IPOs led by Slootman. The company was founded in 2012 in San Mateo, California, located on San Francisco Bay in Silicon Valley. Snowflake offers other companies the possibility to store data externally, in the cloud. Slootman became CEO in May 2019.
Snowflake has already raised a lot of money from investors in recent years. Last week it was announced that Berkshire of super investor Warren Buffett is also investing money in the company. On Wednesday, the IPO was warmly received by investors.
This IPO will go down in the books as the largest IPO ever of a software company. It is also the largest IPO in the United States in 2020. During its first trading day, Snowflake’s price doubled to nearly $ 254 per share. With that, at the end of the day on Wall Street, the market value of Snowflake was around 73 billion dollars. For Slootman, who reportedly has an equity stake of 5.9 percent, this means that he owns approximately $ 4 billion.
In interviews he says about his naturalization “he feels he was born in the wrong country.” He praises the energy and drive in the US, and calls himself a “hybrid Dutch American”. He has the time: technology companies are doing dizzyingly well on the stock exchange. With Snowflake, Slootman is now among the big boys of the technology sector. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are partners of the company, which stated at the IPO to have more than 3,000 customers.
