Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman on Covid and distant work adoption

Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, told CNBC Tuesday that he believes the coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed the role physical offices will play for businesses in the future.

“The whole idea that the office is your working day is nonsense,” Slootman said on Squawk Alley. “Offices … have to be there for a specific purpose – for events, for training, especially for meetings – but not a place to hang out between 9 and 5. That is definitely changing. It really becomes the real estate footprint of companies have to decrease. “

The emergence of the Covid-19 outbreak last spring ushered in widespread remote work for many employees that has been going on for months. It has proven to be “almost like a wake-up call that just opens our eyes to the opportunity,” said Slootman, a longtime tech manager who acquired Snowflake, a cloud database company, in 2019. It went public in September in a massive IPO.

Snowflake and other cloud companies are benefiting from the move to remote working. For example, Andy Jassy, ​​CEO of Amazon Web Services, told CNBC in December that “the pandemic will have accelerated enterprise cloud adoption by several years”.

Slootman said he understands that once long-standing public health restrictions are relaxed, people may seek to get out of their homes more freely and may want to return to pre-pandemic commuting routines. However, he said his San Mateo, California-based company “has no longing to go back to where we have been”. Slootman added, “From a business perspective, the shock to the system we have received has many positive effects.”

A positive aspect could be the ability to recruit potential employees from a wider geographic area. In fact, Okta co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon said “a talent war” that is waging beyond Silicon Valley has helped catalyze the company’s adoption of remote working. “And the broader we can reach people by making them work from anywhere and … making a high-level contribution from anywhere, that’s our plan,” McKinnon told CNBC last month.

Slootman also pointed to companies like Oracle moving their headquarters from California to Texas as evidence of how the coronavirus pandemic is recalibrating work approaches. In announcing its decision, Oracle referred to implementing a more flexible working policy.

“The whole idea of ​​headquarters is evaporating before our eyes,” said Slootman, who was previously President and CEO of ServiceNow from 2011-2017. “We’re no longer working with a physical center of the universe. We we’re completely virtual. We connect as needed, and we’ve been out of office for almost a full year, and it’s fine. … It’s just a concept, whose time has passed, and that is very profound. “

However, the long-term effects of the pandemic on the office are not yet known, and some companies have indicated that permanent remote working is not in their future. For example, while Google has postponed its employees’ return to work date to September 1, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a corporate email last month that they are expected to work in person at least three days a week.

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