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Amp It Up

Editorial pick

Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

By Frank Slootman · Wiley · 2022

The closest thing to a 'how I run a public company' textbook published in the last decade.

Memoir 200–350 pages(224p) Intermediate Published 2022
Amazon Publisher Goodreads

Editorial take

Slootman took three companies through hypergrowth IPOs — Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake — and Amp It Up is the operating playbook from those runs. The book is unfashionable: it argues for higher expectations, more urgency, narrower focus, and the willingness to make people uncomfortable as the central CEO craft. It will rub you wrong in places. It is also unusually honest about what running a large software business actually demands at the top. Read it as a corrective to the warmer, more permission-giving leadership canon — not as a replacement for it.

Last hand-checked 2026-05-18.

Read if you …

  • are a public-company-bound CEO or COO and need an operating intensity baseline
  • lead a sales / GTM organization that needs more urgency without losing the team
  • have read too many warm leadership books and feel underequipped for hard calls

Skip if you …

  • you reflexively distrust 'wartime CEO' framings — Slootman is unrepentantly in that camp
  • you're early stage (<50 employees) — most of the playbook applies at later scale

If you only read one chapter

Raise the Bar on Performance

Slootman's clearest argument that calibrated performance management is the highest-leverage CEO activity. Pair with Horowitz for balance.

Key ideas

  • Most companies are running at half their potential intensity. The CEO sets the ceiling.
  • Raise standards. Most performance gaps close when expectations rise.
  • Narrow the focus. The number of priorities a company can execute is one to three.
  • Tell people the truth. Politeness becomes a tax over time.

About the book

Frank Slootman's distillation of the operating model that took Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake to multibillion-dollar exits. The book is structured as a set of operating principles followed by chapter-length applications — sales, product, talent, board management — each grounded in a specific decision Slootman made at one of those companies.

The writing is direct and occasionally abrasive. That's the point. The book makes a case that polite leadership culture has produced a generation of underperforming software companies, and offers a sharper alternative.

Pairs with

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