055: Navigating Equity in Tech Companies with Fred Deworken

00:00 - 00:29 | Christopher: We have to know and be able to articulate our own value, right? And that's why you then chose to invest in yourself. You chose to then go to the seminar by the gentleman who helped you see, okay, it's not about your resume. It's about how you tell your story, how you actually create relationships, and then how you articulate your value in a way that they're going to understand. And they're going to look beyond the fact that you have no experience, but the fact that you have the desire to go win in South America. You just need a little bit of training.
00:29 - 00:46 | Fred: That's basically it. And to start molding myself into the activities that led to being a good salesperson. The course that I took with ProLango and Paul Anderson, it was like the foundation of my tech career, because those things that I learned about building rapport, those things that I learned about telling stories, those were extremely valuable for the sales career.

00:47 - 01:47 | Christopher: Welcome to the podcast for financially focused technology employees. Are you working for equity? Do you have questions on how your career and money work together? Then welcome. Every week we discuss strategies and tactics for how to grow your career, build wealth and reach your financial and lifestyle goals. Welcome to TechCruise and Money Talk. I'm Christopher Nelson. I'm your host, and I'm excited to introduce everybody today to Fred DeWorkin. Fred is the founder and CEO of Blue Yeti. But before that, he actually had the opportunity to work for Tableau and Snowflake and go through IPOs with those companies. But what I think is more interesting is he started off his career in the Peace Corps and as a claims adjuster. Today, I really want to dig in with Fred and understand what was his transition like going from a non-tech role to a tech role? And then how did he figure out how to trade his time and talent for equity and get through some IPOs?

01:47 - 02:11 | Fred: Fred, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Christopher. You've been an inspiration listening to your show. I've passed it along to so many of the people that I mentor and also just friends who are interested in tech and interested in getting in. And I think, you know, people can get your framework and apply it to what they're doing. It's going to help them advance a lot faster. I wish I would have had your framework whenever I was starting out in tech.

02:12 - 02:53 | Christopher: Thanks so much, man. I really appreciate that. And this is why I think stories like yours are so important because of stories like yours that help add to this framework. And then I think also bring to light for everybody else that this is possible. It's possible to go from the Peace Corps and claims adjusting to working in tech and then also figuring out how to work for companies that are going to go through IPO. Absolutely. So, let's talk a little bit about that. Let's talk and I remember first and foremost, I think it's important for people to understand that you did spend some time in the Silicon Valley and you sort of saw, you know, how tech was working and how it was helping people accelerate their wealth and you started having the idea at that point.

02:53 - 04:03 | Fred: Yeah, absolutely. I had the idea, but I don't think I had the belief in myself or the vision of myself in a tech position. I was several times in as a claims adjuster, I would wind up at somebody's house, very wealthy people, and ask them what they do. They were in tech. And I thought it was interesting and it was attractive because these wealthy people have really beautiful houses, beautiful cars in the driveway. And I remember one person I still keep in touch with to this day, Steven Dinnerman. He was employee number six at Seagate Technology. Wow. Richer than you could imagine, and did nothing but watch Bloomberg. And I think he might have had a little bit of a drug problem. But he was a really just fascinating person. And that kind of planted the very beginning of the seed of like, oh, wow, there's a lot of money to be made by being an early employee in some of these companies. And I didn't really revisit that till after I went to the Peace Corps, because then it kind of really sank in. I was still focused more so on traditional careers. You know, my parents were really big on, you should be a lawyer or a doctor or something like that. And I was actually pursuing a law degree at one point, and it wasn't fulfilling. It just didn't really spark my passion.

04:03 - 04:25 | Christopher: So, when I know it was, you were in Washington in the Seattle area, and there was a point that you said, I really want to start, and I'm trying to understand, was it just the desire to start working for tech because you knew that there were good salaries, or was there the thought and desire to work for equity that made you start pursuing a role in tech?

04:25 - 06:56 | Fred: So, there was an interesting moment that happened when I was in Panama working at CB Richard Ellis. I worked at C.B. Richard Ellis, the commercial realtor, because my Peace Corps service had ended and I'd met this beautiful woman who is now my wife. And we had to figure out if we were going to make it work. So I extended for a year by finding a job with C.B.R.E. as their international marketing and their business development consultant. And the first task on the business development side was how are we following these leads? What can we do to ensure our sales efficiency and effectiveness? And I said, OK, what kind of CRM do you guys have? So the managing director takes me to this closet and he shows me this this rack. And next to the rack is, you know, the desktop computers. Right. And he's like, it's in there. Is it connected to the rack? No. Who sold it to you? The Spanish guys. Oh, my God. OK, well, that's a sunk cost, Mr. Ramon. How much you pay for it? Fifteen grand. All right. That's a sunk cost. We got to figure out how we can get you a real CRM. And I went through a sales cycle with Microsoft. with Salesforce and with Sugar. And it was a quite excruciating sales cycle because as part of what I was doing at CBR, I was prepping myself for sales. And they had a great portal with lots of great information in this portal. And I was just sponging it up. And I'd just come off of almost three years in the Peace Corps, 30 months. And I'd read 72 books on all kinds of business excellence and good to great, Jim Collins and all these different things. And all this stuff was going in my head. And I kind of understood what a good sales approach and the commercial approach felt like. And this was Anthem. This was like the complete polar opposite. And that was the moment where I was like, oh God, I could do this. Like these guys, and look at that guy's watch. That's like a thousand dollar watch. And those shoes, I saw those shoes at the mall the other day, like 400 bucks. He's probably wearing a tailored suit. He looks like a million bucks. Like these guys are obviously getting paid. I need to go get paid. Because there was no way for me in commercial real estate in Panama making roughly $50,000 a year to build the bridge that I needed the two years to be an actual commercial real estate person. You need two years to fund yourself. That's what everybody that I talked to in my informational interviews told me. So I sat Maria down and I said, Hey, let's, let's go to Seattle. You know, these guys with the Microsoft, they've completely lost the deal. They had no control of it. They didn't make any kind of business. If we go there and I can get on, maybe I could help them. So Microsoft's dynamic CRM in Latin America. So that was the,

06:57 - 08:20 | Christopher: The goal is so that, yeah. And so there's a few things that I think it's important for people to unpack there, you know, because people who are in non-technical roles, right? So you're focused on sales. There's obviously the technical aspect you need to understand the value proposition and how the actual software works. So I think that's important to understand. But it's obvious to me from just getting to know you over the last few weeks is that you're somebody who is able to look and understand where there's opportunity and where you can leverage your skill set to move the ball forward and provide value to somebody. It's in that value exchange that then you can ask for salary, you can ask for equity, et cetera. You started seeing with your skill set of actually being in Central America for, what was it, three years? Yeah, three and a half, almost four. Three and a half years. So you, I can go lead into the market. I know how to now sell into here. I know where, you know, people have CRM sitting in closets that we could go get deals done. Let me go up to Seattle and try and figure out how do I start working for a software company. so that I can go open up these markets. I think that's fascinating and I think that's, you know, the takeaways I think for people are when you know your skill set and you know what value you can provide, this is what I try to tell everyone, when you know your own value and you're confident in it, then you can go and sit across the table from a recruiter and look to trade that talent for equity.

08:20 - 09:44 | Fred: Yeah, absolutely. That's 100%. Now, I kind of ran into a heavy dose of reality. Because when I arrived back to Seattle, it was December of 2009, which was the nadir of the financial crisis. That's right. Microsoft that month laid off 15,000 people, 15,000. So my whole idea of going to give my cardstock resume to the recruiter at Microsoft and getting on to selling them software in Latin America just wasn't happening. Right. And the first thing people started asking me is, well, do you have any quota carrying experience? What have you done before? And, you know, I sold chocolates for my elementary and middle school, Catholic high school. I helped them build a marketing plan. Well, that's not a quota. Where's your quota carrying experience? So it was tough for me. And I had to build a little bridge, which was a job claims adjusting, and I had to build some more skills. And I did that through this class called Pro Lengo. Pro Lengo is this guy named Paul Anderson, amazing person. He's one of those world citizens that's lived in Dubai, lived in Singapore, lived all around. And he just happened to be in Seattle at that moment. I think he's in Houston now. And he put on this three-day seminar and it cost me 900 bucks. And I had $5,000 to my name. I had spent 600 of that on a car already. And I'd put down about 2,500 on the first and last of the apartment. So it was kind of a big chunk of money for me. Oh, yeah.

09:44 - 09:46 | Christopher: That's one fifth of your net worth, if you will.

09:46 - 10:32 | Fred: Totally. Right. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to take a winger on this guy because I went, I was doing all this networking and there was so many people trying to get into jobs. You had these big things at CenturyLink Field, where thousands of people and resumes, and it was just a meat market. And a lot of desperation, you know, in Spanish you'd say that, a lot of people that were in desperate kind of. And Paul had this approach where he invited people to a free seminar about hacking the system. And there were three things he focused on. The first thing was hacking the ATS, understanding how ATSs work. Keywords and the fact that your little resume that you spent all that time on is absolutely 100% worthless. The second thing that he focused on was how to then build rapport when you do get the interview, right?

10:32 - 10:44 | Christopher: I know. So many people are so over-reliant even nowadays on LinkedIn and they spend so much time on the resume when no, it's actually the person-to-person contact and how you tell your story, how you demonstrate your value is critical.

10:44 - 12:40 | Fred: And I was missing all of that. And I was just so like gung-ho on selling software to Latin America and running into this constant wall of not having experience. I didn't have a way to articulate the experience that I did have in the terms that they could understand. And that's one thing that he taught us. And the third thing that he taught us was how to structure our search and to use social engineering to get the interview. So that we could basically go and use things like the book of lists to find out who's actually hiring. Every single major metro has a book of lists from the business journals. They're released once a year. And there's typically three that have growth companies. The smallest growth companies, which are most likely IPOs, the medium growth companies, and the large growth companies. And what I did after Pro Lango was I focused like a laser on the small growth companies, the pre IPO growth companies. And within that list, there was three. He always said, narrow it down to three. Go five if you want to give yourself a whole bunch of work. But the more focused, the better. So go with three. And my three were Vertifor. because I had insurance experience and credit for like an ERP for insurance brokerages. Cobalt Group, because they had dealership software that was making dealership operations more efficient. OK, that might be a nice bet for the time. Sure. At that moment in time, you know, Ford and Chevy were selling two for one cars, man. Wow. Yeah. All the dealerships were in bad, bad like place. They needed to modernize quick. And the third one was Tableau Software. Now, the other two were relevant until I actually went to a Tableau Software event and I saw Christian Chabot in person give a demo of Tableau Software to like 200 people. I was sold right then. I'm like, I got to work for that guy. And I, you know, approached him. Of course, I didn't get the job till like six months later. Right. But I said, hey, I love this. This is amazing what you're doing. And I told him about my experience. So, okay, that's great. Go apply.

12:40 - 13:29 | Christopher: I met some other people and I took some swag. I want to break that down for a minute because I think there's two factors and I'm curious how much more research you did, but I think leadership at hyper growth companies is essential. Great leadership where they understand how to balance business and engineering. They understand how important sales is in a business. It's the true engine of the business. And then also creating a very healthy culture because hyper growth is hard. It's really hard. And then the other thing that you said, as you mentioned, you saw the product, you saw Christian. What did you think about the product and how much more due diligence did you do on the product? You know, as you were, you know, you obviously had that emotional moment. Did you go and do some fact checking on both of those things, the leadership and the software?

13:30 - 13:46 | Fred: Well, this is where I wish I would have had your framework earlier, right? Because no, I didn't. Okay. I was just caught up with the charisma of Chabot. And if you talk to early Tableau people, and you know, Kelly, right? Oh, yeah. Chabot was somebody that you'd run through a brick wall for, just because.

13:46 - 14:28 | Christopher: It's true. I will say, from my experience, I was interviewing right around the same time that you were. So, I found my opportunity in 2010, but I wasn't interviewing in 2009. I was getting out of my first failed startup. But I had the opportunity to sit down with Godfrey Sullivan as part of my interview process, who was the CEO of Splunk. And it's the same thing. When you sit down with these guys that, Godfrey was a guy who'd been there, done that with Hyperion, and he had the resume. He was somebody like a Frank Slootman who had repeated successes, but he also had the charisma. He had the vision. You get sold pretty quickly.

14:28 - 16:15 | Fred: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I was sold. I was sold by the vibe. I was sold by the product. I just knew there was something special about that company and the people, everybody that I interacted with that night was just amazing. So I was like, okay, how do I get into that? And this is where Providence intervenes. And I wound up several months later, I think that event was in March. In September, I wound up handling a claim for a gentleman named Lynn Smith, who was the director of sales for Tableau Software. And he saw me with the swag book that I was keeping notes in because I wanted to keep it present and I didn't want to slide into mediocrity. and just continue to do what I was doing. I was going to get into that company by any means necessary. And when he saw me with that book, he says, Hey, I work for that company. And I said, you do? Wow. Amazing. What do you do? I'm a sales director. Oh man, let me tell you, you guys have the most amazing product and I could really sell this in Latin America for you guys. It's something that's revolutionary, this and that. And he's like, Hey, we got a claim to him to here guy. I got a flood. So we got his flood taken care of. But Long story short that started off my interview process and I did get in I got in on the first rung of the ladder and It was a rocket ship And you know things don't always Work out the way you planned them and and God intervenes in so many different ways And luck if you want to call it sure, but you know, I wish I'd I could say that I'd planned for it and everything But I just believed in it I believe that I was on a mission to go and make a lot of money in tech sales and somehow some way it happened. So, you know, I think there's a cornerstone that every person who's out there that's thinking, you know, tech might be something for them. The cornerstone is belief. Yes. And you build on top of that.

16:15 - 17:22 | Christopher: Well, belief, and so I think peeling that back even more, it's belief in yourself and your skill set. What I think to me is obvious in your story is the fact that you had this vision and knew that you could bring this to life. Like you knew you could do the work if you had the opportunity and you had a little ounce of training. you were confident you could go and lead sales into Latin America. Absolutely. That's been a theme throughout your story as I've gotten to know you. And that's one thing I think is important for people to understand is that we have to know and be able to articulate our own value, right? And that's why you then chose to invest in yourself. You chose to then go to the seminar by the gentleman who helped you see, okay, It's not about your resume. It's about how you tell your story, how you actually create relationships, and then how you articulate your value in a way that they're going to understand. And they're going to look beyond the fact that you have no experience, but the fact that you have the will, you have the desire to go win in South America. You just need a little bit of training.

17:22 - 17:50 | Fred: That's basically it. And to start molding myself into the activities that led to being a good salesperson, That course that I took with ProLango and Paul Anderson, it was like the foundation of my tech career in terms of sales, because those things that I learned about building rapport, those things that I learned about telling stories, those were extremely valuable. Those were foundational kind of skills in my toolbox for the sales career.

17:51 - 18:16 | Christopher: So, you go to work for Tableau and tell me, I always think everybody's experience is always different, but what was that experience like when you sat down and they give you an offer letter and then they give you a stock agreement? What was that like? Here you are at the moment, everybody works to get to that moment. What was that like for you when all of a sudden you see both of those things in front of you?

18:17 - 19:58 | Fred: Well, so the second, I really wish I'd had your framework when I was younger, because I could have negotiated myself much better terms had I understood what was coming. Now, call it naivety, but I figured, okay, all the details are worked out. my hardest part was getting in the door. And it was hard to get in the door. I had to do seven interviews ending with Kelly Wright. And when I ended with Kelly Wright, Kelly Wright basically said, hey, great. Everybody likes you. It seems like you got the job. Here's the offer. The offer was, in my mind, I think it was like $65,000 OTE. It was really low. And And I was like, I had in my mind at least a hundred grand, like I was making 65 as a claims adjuster. And of course the explanation was uncapped earnings and all that kind of stuff. And we didn't really talk about equity. And I said, well, Kelly, I need to talk to my wife about this. And she says, no, you don't. And I said, what do you mean? No, I don't. She says, do you want the job or not? Is this your dream or is it not? And I said, it's my dream. And she said, well, take the offer. The rest will work itself out. Now, had I had your framework, I would have said, hey, Kelly, this 65 seems low. Let's talk about the other side. Let's talk about some increased equity. I'm willing to put some sweat into this thing to make it big. Let's look at the whole package. Yeah, let's look at the whole package. And I didn't do that. At that moment in time, Tableau was still under the radar, 180 employees. I probably could have doubled my equity package. That would have been a seven-figure payout just on that. I really wish I would have had the framework, but God is good and he gives you lessons.

19:58 - 20:33 | Christopher: No, he does. And I think too, I mean, sometimes, I mean, and this is the whole thing is that what you got, the value that you got out of that, you know, and this, I think is the important takeaway is you did get your foot in the door, right? Sure. If you would have had a little bit of training, you could have turned the dials and turned it into, you know, a plus two, but the plus one was, you got the ability to now get the training and now that's helped launch your entire career and you're now owning a business and driving in a direction based on the moment that you said, okay, I'm going to get in the door here.

20:33 - 21:26 | Fred: Absolutely. And I spent six and a half years with some of the best operators in tech. I don't have a lot of innings, but the one thing that I did notice between Tableau and Snowflake was Tableau, for those six and a half years I was there, none of the executive team turned over. Tom Walker, Kelly Wright, Christian Chabot, Lisa Fink, Brian from Ops, Meeve Ellsworth, that whole team was rock solid. And if you talked to one of them, it was like you talked to all of them. Every single one of them had the same message. And there's something beautiful about that. When you see operational excellence at its best, and these guys bootstrapped, Yeah. They took 5 million from NEA, I think it was, and they just put it in the bank. They didn't need it. Wow. It was just so that they could have somebody on the logo to make them seem serious. Interesting. So being able to do that for six and a half years and operate with them, that to me was invaluable.

21:27 - 21:51 | Christopher: It really is. Well, and this is where I try to tell people is that growing your career capital, which is the combination of your education experience and results in education, I mean, like on the job education, being able to grow that, that's when you get the opportunity then to go trade up, right? And so, you spent six years and I'm sure that as you were, because you eventually then started running South America or Latin America.

21:52 - 23:52 | Fred: Yeah. Well, I didn't run it. They brought in a VP and I learned a lot from him. Oh, great. Miguel Nusch and how to operate within Latin America at an executive level. I was the tip of the spear. Right. More like the operational guy, kind of keeping it all together. And in the very beginning, I had the direct sales hat on with the partnerships hat. And I didn't even realize how much responsibility that I had. At that time, yeah, you were doing both. But I was just doing what needed to be done. Because in my time at CBRE in Panama, at the decision moment when we're trying to figure out between these three technologies. And I coached the chosen guys, the guys that should have won was Microsoft because everybody was on Outlook. And we were going to be more productive and no sales guys were each pulling down a million dollars a year for the firm. So productivity It pays for itself. Yeah. And I tried to get the Microsoft guys to say that and to bring somebody from from a lookalike in the United States to say that to our managing director. So he would believe it. And they never did. And it was just too much of a bridge to overcome that cost. Right. And the very end of it, he picks up the phone and he calls the guy that maintains the networks. And he says, what do you think about these CRM packages I got in front of me, this Microsoft one and the sugar one? And the guy responds, because he had him on the speaker phone. Well, which one? How much are they? Well, the Microsoft one's 30,000. And then, you know, 65 a user. And this one's 1500 and then 15 a user. Well, you got to go with the 1500 one, Senor Ramon. So I realized how important these these X factors, these partners were. Right. Because the Microsoft guy should have won. The thing that kills CRM is adoption. That company never really adopted to sugar. Not to the extent that they would have. Sure, of course. on the Microsoft one. So, you know, I realized, OK, I got to I got to build a partner network at the same time. And Tableau was such a lean, mean machine that we just kind of all did it. We did whatever we had to do.

23:52 - 24:10 | Christopher: Yeah, exactly. So so then you do six years there. And and so help me understand at that point, did you as you got some refreshes, as you got promotions, did you start understanding more of what the equity was and how it could really accelerate your earnings?

24:10 - 24:50 | Fred: I did. And there's a point, I still wasn't educated enough to deal with the tax ramifications. Right. That's one bit of knowledge I wish I would have had, because I would have even taken out a credit card loan to pay for some of my options. Right. To exercise some of the options. In order to reduce some of the EMT that I had to pay. Sure. Some of those checks that I had to pay to the Uncle Sam, the first time I ever sent a six-figure check to Uncle Sam was at Tableau. Yeah. That was more than my salary was. Yeah. And thank goodness, you know, but you know, whenever you have an event like that and you can finally cash out and you got to send the majority of it for something like that, it's kind of demoralizing. Yeah, it is. No, it is. Well, it is.

24:50 - 25:18 | Christopher: And this is why I think education around this stuff is so important. And it sounds like most people, I mean, people figure it out as they go. They see the equity growing. They get excited about the fact that now I'm getting more and more equity. But then as they start digging in to start utilizing it, then they realize, oh, this is a more sophisticated asset class than I thought it was. I did this. Now I have to pay that. Wait, I get this. Wait, how does this all work?

25:18 - 25:29 | Fred: Absolutely. And I had a CPA that wasn't necessarily attuned. Right. To how to deal with ISOs. And I did learn that lesson before Snowflake. That's great. And I approached it very differently.

25:29 - 25:37 | Christopher: So let's start taking the conversation there. So you leave after six years. What were some of the things that brought you to Snowflake?

25:37 - 27:36 | Fred: So leaving Tableau was a little bit traumatic. I got caught up in the riff of April, 2016 and I didn't leave my own volition. And the first couple of places that I landed after Tableau were kind of just called licking your wounds, not really. And in the middle of that, my grandmother died and she was kind of my rock. So I was in this haze and I was doing things. I was operational, but I wasn't all plugged in. So I wound up getting a couple of positions. One was through a recruiter and that lasted about six months. It was a company called Galvanize. a great LMS company that has a data science platform. They didn't have it quite all together when I was there. So I was like, okay, this is not the same energy as Tableau. This is not the same kind of like velocity. I got to go do something else. So I reached out to my network and one of the gentlemen in my network, Phil Andrews, recruited me to come work for Telium to do what I did at Tableau to help them take their Latin American efforts to the next level, which I did over 18 months. But even yet, Latin America is kind of a hairball to a lot of executives. And, um, you know, I was making the case for, uh, investing kind of going in deeper, um, with a sales engineer, you know, something basic like that. And they had other priorities, right. Which were, let's, uh, you know, beef up the East coast and things like that. And why don't you take some Florida accounts and Texas accounts and, I love Latin America. I have a specific skillset. I didn't feel like I would be effective being diluted because I'm always, I understand where the bodies are buried in Latin America. I know how to approach a global, which are on par with Bank of America and Disney. The opportunities there are the same. And I don't know how to approach national cruise lines or whatever. So I just had a heart to heart with myself and said, okay, well, If this is the road, I need to go find another road. And I actually tendered my resignation. And then I went back to basics because now I was a little bit more clear-minded. I'd gone through this kind of hazy period.

27:36 - 27:58 | Christopher: Yeah, the emotions. Yeah. And I know, especially going through being on the other side of a riff is emotionally just really, really shocking. So you need some time, you gather yourself and then you say, okay. I also think it's hard too when you're, when you, you finally start figuring things out. And for you, like you literally walked into your rookie season was with a Superbowl team. Totally.

27:58 - 27:58 | Fred: Right.

27:58 - 28:08 | Christopher: So it's very difficult because then you walk out of that scenario and then you walk around and it's wait, who, what, when, where? Yeah.

28:08 - 28:57 | Fred: Exactly. It was all of that. But I'd gotten my sea legs under me. It was like Goldilocks kind of. And it's like, okay, this one's a little too cold. This one's a little too this. I didn't like selling to Martech people either. Nothing against Martech people. There's just so many logos on that board. And there's so much turnover in the Martech positions. And it was hard to get traction. So it was just like, okay, well, I kind of have a really good idea of what I'm good at. What I'm good at is data. What I'm good at is Latin America. So let me go back to basics. Let me go into the book of lists. Let me go to the Deloitte 500 and let me look for the companies that are in data, the interesting companies out there that are in that sweet spot that Tableau was in whenever I joined at 180. Let me not go to my network and spin up a whole bunch of feel good conversations, catching up with people and saying, oh, have you heard about anything?

28:57 - 29:18 | Christopher: Really focused on that. Well, and that's the thing is like your first time out. And I mean, and that's one of the things that I learned too is, is keep that list short and then be doing due diligence on those to try and even get the list shorter. So that you, you just have very, very clear targets. So you went back to basic, you now have, so what were the targets that you came up with?

29:18 - 29:33 | Fred: So my targets were, it was Snowflake, it was Starburst, and it was Dreameo. And very quickly, I zeroed in on Snowflake, because there were several people who were operating, there were X Tableau within Snowflake. Right.

29:33 - 29:42 | Christopher: So now your network's connected. So now you see that. And then was it the fact, did you look at the network first, or did you see the differentiation in the product first?

29:42 - 32:08 | Fred: I looked at the optics, and I wish I'd have written them down to know in that moment of time what the growth was. It was explosive. Yeah. Even at that moment. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They came out firing. Yeah. And then I started looking at the way that they they announced themselves. And I made the click that democratization of data was going to get accelerated with Snowflake. Because the limiting factor in selling Tableau was always infrastructure. Right. How many concurrent users can you put? Well, now let's throw cores at them. Well, great. Well, where do we install these cores? OK, that's that's more cost and more weight and this and that and the other. And now you had Snowflake, which is basically like, how many cores do you want? Right. What's a core? Like just turn the thing, just turn the dial. So once that clicked in my brain, I'm like, oh, it was like that Chabot moment. Like this is a special technology in a special place in time. And then the other two didn't exist. Starburst and Vremio, you know, a federated query engine. And I was like, it sounds great and stuff like that. But when you compare that to a snowflake, it's like, oh my God, this is going to be a very massive opportunity. I immediately recognized it was going to be 10x Tableau. So after talking to Ross Perez, Ross was like, yeah, I love this place. It's amazing. It's a rocket ship. He put me in touch with a couple other people. I know Ryan Janoff, who was up in the Pacific Northwest. I talked to him about it. He was like, yeah, this is a great place. They put me in touch with another gentleman. Named Danny and in Portland. We had a great informational interview and then they put me directly with the person who Latin America rolled up to Paul Moriarty and Paul flew me out to Cleveland, Ohio and this was all that was my first kind of official interview was with Paul after having these internal interviews and it was kind of a one interview thing and You know, they made me take a personality test and I had the interview with Paul, which went great. But I still didn't know if I had the job and I'm flying home. And when I landed, Paul had left a message and he said, hey, you know, we we would love to offer the job to you, but give me a call because I have a proposal. And when I called him, he said, hey, the proposal is we already paid for this Gartner event in Mexico City. It's going to be next week. Can you go? Can that be your first day? I was like, yeah, man, no problem. Yeah, let's go, baby. Let's go, dude. So they shipped me my laptop. It arrived the day before I left, and I activated it in the Mexico City Amex lounge, and then I hit the Gartner floor and started slamming snowflake.

32:08 - 32:19 | Christopher: That's amazing. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. So now here we are, round two. Round two, you get the offer letter, you get the stock agreement. Where are you at at this point in time?

32:19 - 32:53 | Fred: So I just had this underlying belief that this thing was going to get big. And maybe I could have asked for more, but it seemed pretty generous to me. I mean, they gave me 9,000 shares at my level. And they were about to accept, their word was already out on the street that they were about to accept more funds. So, for me, it was just sign this thing as fast as possible. I didn't want to fool around. Because I also knew from some of the people, Ross and from Ryan, that, hey, these guys really don't do a whole lot of negotiating on the equity and stuff like that, but they're very generous in the ups. So, just get in the door and keep going.

32:53 - 33:32 | Christopher: okay so i guess so you know well but that's i think that's important for people to understand right sometimes you do have to uh you get intel and you sort of read the room because you know companies that are hyper growth want to move fast and if you I hear people say, get in the door, sign this. You do have to make decisions. I think it also depends on role, depends on where you may or may not have leverage, where you are in your own career, if you have a position already. Hey, if you're looking for your next big opportunity, but it sounds like they have a history. And I knew that the first, I think the first regime there did have a history of some very generous refreshes as you went.

33:32 - 34:39 | Fred: Yeah, they do. Well, they did. Unfortunately, I didn't. Bob Muglia did make it to my first refresh. So I had to sit pat on what I had as Frank and team took over. But that was another master class in watching operation. And I also knew from inside Intel that that team, as far as the salespeople went, they had basically a directive to not hire X Tableau people. So I actually had to proactively manage that as an objection in my first kind of official uh, in screening interview with Chad Pete's from, um, um, from Sutter Hill. He was at Sutter Hill at that point as their in-house recruiter. Um, I forget where he's at now, but you know, I told Chad basically, Hey, I know that you guys may, uh, have a opinion on next Tableau people, but let me tell you about Tableau. When I joined it, it was 180 people and I had to go sell to Latin America who knew nothing about Tableau. I wasn't surfing any easy wave or just sitting there receiving a whole bunch of orders. I had to go trim that stuff off.

34:39 - 34:59 | Christopher: Right. That can happen in rocket ships, right? As these waves of employees come on, sometimes the people that are doing a lot of the work, other people will receive the benefit. I know, especially when it is a software that becomes really liked in the marketplace. Absolutely. Huge demand. So you managed that scenario and then stayed on with the company.

34:59 - 36:18 | Fred: Yeah, I managed that and I locked in with Snowflake. It was much more tumultuous than Tableau because of the leadership change. Frank Slootman and team are operators, but it was Bob Muglia is a very charismatic CEO and he had these town halls and people loved to hear Bob talk and opine about the state of what we were doing. And he's visionary. Everything that you see now in terms of the data cloud and being able to do cross-cloud sharing and the hyperscalers, that was something that he envisioned and set into place. you know, people adored him for that from a product perspective and just from an organizational perspective. Now, was Frank Slootman the right person to thread the needle and take us public? Hindsight's 20-20. You know, Bob didn't necessarily have the sense of urgency to go public. There were a few interviews that he gave internally and externally where it's like, hey, if we do it, we do it. If we don't, great. When Frank came in, that talk track switched. It was this word, everything's getting battened down because this rocket ship's going to take off. And they understood and they knew that there was a little window that was closing and they threaded it perfectly. Watching them prep for that IPO and take an IPO was absolutely a masterclass.

36:18 - 36:57 | Christopher: That's so important for people to understand that there are teams of people, right? Frank Slootman, I think, is one of the iconic CEOs that he's brought in to help take companies public. And there's a saying that if there's a rocket ship of a tech company taking off, you just want to get on it, right? And you are already on it. But that is one of the indicators that for private companies, when you have key leaders that have that reputation, that have that experience, that is a tell. That's a tell saying, okay, this company, you know, who knows what the success, the market will treat it as such, but they're going to actually get it to that event.

36:57 - 38:33 | Fred: Absolutely. And Mike Spicer was one of the indicators too, whenever I was determining whether to come on to Snowflake. That's why I didn't make a whole lot of fuss about the package. And I guess I could have, I guess I could have, you know. But I just felt like, man, I got a seat on a rocket ship and we're going to do this thing. Let's go. Now, the good things that I did do was I prepped myself a lot better. I had the ability to buy my shares as they were coming off. At first year, started exercising them, low basis for tax. I started doing tax projections with my CPA. So good. Yep. So I would understand how much money I needed to put away and the ways that I could invest that in order to build a return while I'm waiting to pay my tax. Right. So just that kind of knowledge gave me a different level of ease. Now, the one thing that was more difficult was I did all my projections of like 60, 70, 80, 90. I think 120 was my wildest dream projection early. And the first day Snowflake went out, it got to 311. Right. Yeah. It's just like, Oh my God. So when, when you talked about in the prep notes of the, the moment where you see all those zeros and what do you do? You know, I took the fidelity thing and I showed it to my wife and I just watched her face get pale. Is this real? What is this? Yeah, that's, that's our fidelity account, honey. And then you start thinking, okay, well, how do I defend this? Right. And what do we do? It's a, it's almost a moment of, of, of incredulous shock. So, I want to pause you right there.

38:33 - 39:00 | Christopher: No, I want to pause you right there because we're going to, we're going to actually take that into the next episode. So, I want to really, I want to really talk about that. But I want to just, I want to put a bow on this because, you know, what we wanted to communicate here in just, it's a case study. It's a case study, I think, of, you know, Fred Dworkin, you know, who Peace Corps employee, but has this vision and understanding. Volunteer. Oh, sorry. Thank you.

39:01 - 39:04 | Fred: Volunteer. Peace Corps volunteer.

39:04 - 40:57 | Christopher: No, but you had this vision and you saw people who were working for equity and you thought, this could work for me. You had belief that it could work for you. You had belief in your skill set and you realized with your Peace Corps experience, your experience in Latin America, that you could turn that into something. You also got very, very focused on, I'm going to look at three companies. I'm not looking at 10 or 20, I'm looking at three. You're really focused on the pre-IPO. I think like everybody else, we get into these things and we figure it out, right? I think, I mean, and this is why the podcast is here, the book is coming and everything else to try and educate people so that we can pass back our lessons, right? Then you figure out how to do it again. And the thing that's evident to me is that you see patterns. And the thing that I can't explain to people, but I think you know because you've had that experience is when you see success, when you saw that team at Tableau, how they work together, how the executive team had a single voice, how customers consume the product and were such fans and fanatics, you knew I had to be a part of that. You knew that was going somewhere. The same way as then you got settled into your second round and you said, let me do the same thing again. Let me get three targets. Let me understand this one's the clear leader. Let me look at all of the data points that I have, whether it was deep due diligence or just a framework, you had a framework. you executed on that. And then the second time, because of the natural mistakes you made, you did better. And the exciting thing is, you work for two companies that had tremendous exits. And when you get the zeros, it scares the crap out of you.

40:57 - 40:57 | Fred: Oh, yeah.

40:57 - 41:18 | Christopher: Yeah, it's a scary moment. It is. And so that wraps up this first episode with Fred DeWorkin. Decided to change it up. We're doing two episodes this time. So stick around for next week. And we're going to be talking about what does it feel like and what do you do to protect and manage the money that you make going through IPOs. We'll see you next week.