Snowflake CEO collects a $95 million payout every month
CEO Frank Slootman is one of the best-paid technology executives.
Snowflake Inc. is doing well by any stretch of the imagination.
On Wednesday, the cloud-computing company reported that third-quarter revenue more than doubled from a year earlier, and its stock has surged 183% to $339.89 since its Sept. 15 initial public offering.
That has helped make Chief Executive Officer Frank Slootman one of the best-paid technology executives. A compensation package he received upon joining Snowflake in April 2019 awards him a batch of options every month — for four years — that are now worth almost $95 million each, or about $1.1 billion annually.
Slootman’s pay includes more than 13.7 million options with a strike price of $8.88. The vast majority can already be exercised but the underlying shares vest monthly over four years, beginning with the month he started.
He also gets a $375,000 annual base salary, which can go higher depending on the firm’s performance.
Once the full options package is paid out in early 2023, it would be worth about $4.5 billion at the current stock price.
A spokeswoman for San Mateo, California-based Snowflake declined to comment on Slootman’s pay package or net worth.
He hasn’t exercised any of his options and his shares are subject to a lockup period that ends in March.
The monster pay package is partly a result of Snowflake’s surging valuation. In October 2018, about six months before Slootman joined and negotiated his compensation, the company raised funds at a valuation of about $3.5 billion. It’s now worth $96 billion.
Chief Financial Officer Michael Scarpelli, who joined a few months after Slootman, has a similar compensation structure. His options are worth about $25 million a month at the current share price. Snowflake co-founder Benoit Dageville, who’s also chief technology officer, owns a $2.73 billion stake.
Snowflake is the third CEO gig for the Dutch-born Slootman in less than 20 years. He led data-storage firm Data Domain from 2003 until its takeover by EMC Corp. in 2009, then ran cloud-service firm ServiceNow Inc. from 2011 to 2017.
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