“For entrepreneurs and founders and CEOs, one of the hard parts about dealing with VCs is the VCs have a perspective on the world that’s based on seeing different companies and different management teams and board-meeting dynamics. You’ve been a VC, you have powerful relationships in that community, but you also state emphatically in the book that VCs see the world very differently than CEOs do. And so it’s really for them, it’s for founders, it’s for CEOs, people that are fighting the good fight, and that are suffering the anxiety and terror of these kinds of roles that are very difficult to relate to for people who have never been in that combat seat.” 2. Over the last 10 years or so since we published our first book, which became like a combat manual for entrepreneurs, how much they valued this unvarnished version from a fellow traveler. It’s for people who are in the arena that are doing this kind of work. “The book is really intended for that ‘man in the arena.’ It’s not for pundits. What was behind your choice of Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” quotation to open the book? I hope you’ll enjoy Slootman’s advice, and that you’ll want to watch the video interview as well. You can view the entire interview here starting at 11:00am ET today, and it will also be available afterward on-demand.īecause Slootman’s proven that he knows what he’s doing to an exceptional degree, and because his counsel is not only so refreshingly unique and blunt but also easy to grasp and deploy-he says you can start “amping it up” tomorrow-I’m going to run big chunks of his comments from our interview below. Corporate turf battles? “Hysterical conversations.”.Customer-success teams in tech companies? “Mindless!”.So it was a real pleasure to sit down with Slootman via Zoom last week and talk about his experiences and Amp It Up for 40 minutes. And in Amp It Up, Slootman cuts through the crap that has hamstrung so many companies today and offers blunt and brutally honest examples of how he’s been able to be so wildly successful across 3 companies and 2 decades. Now, clearly, those types of highly differentiated outcomes don’t arise from following the pack. And in his new book, Amp It Up, Slootman vividly underscores his reputation as that rarest of leaders: a big-vision CEO who also delivers world-class execution and creates powerful cultures centered on mission, customers, excellence, speed, and growth.

Frank slootman amp it up