ServiceNow ft. Frank Slootman and Fred Luddy - From Starting Over at 50 to Dodging a $150B Mistake
Listen now
Description
In 2004, bankrupt after the company where he’d previously worked had imploded, Fred Luddy decided to start over as a first-time founder at age 50. His vision was to reinvent the nascent IT software field for the cloud era. What started as simple help desk replacement software would eventually become a ~$150B market cap company powering digital workflows across the enterprise—but success didn’t come easy. Initially bootstrapped and ultra-lean, the company’s infrastructure began buckling under its own success as customer demand spiked. When the legendary Frank Slootman joined as CEO to help scale the company, he describes being terrified to check his email every morning. Hear how Frank, Fred and the team stabilized the business, expanded their product offerings, and nearly made a $150B+ mistake by selling too early.   Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Fred Luddy, Frank Slootman, Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Carl Eschenbach Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-servicenow/ 00:00 - Cold open 00:22 - Introduction 02:09 - Fred Luddy’s journey to coding 03:33 - Founding ServiceNow after financial ruin 07:11 - Finding product-market fit 15:16 - Finding a new CEO in Frank Slootman  22:19 - Overcoming scaling challenges  29:54 - Contemplating an acquisition offer 32:07 - Blocking the sale 38:17 - Lessons learned
More Episodes
Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi share insights from building two of the world's most successful delivery platforms—DoorDash and Wolt—which merged in 2022 to create an $80B GOV business operating in 32 countries. In this candid conversation with Sequoia's Alfred Lin live at a Sequoia event in Europe, they...
Published 11/14/24
DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and his co-founders started in 2013. But after talking to hundreds of local small businesses, they realized there was still an unmet need: None of the...
Published 10/24/24
Published 10/24/24