Why Skills-First Leadership Is Replacing the Ivy League Playbook in the C-Suite
05/23/2025
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The old prestige pyramid—where Ivy League degrees and blue-chip consulting backgrounds paved the way to the CEO seat—is cracking.
May 28, 2021: -Snowflake, the cloud data analytics vendor that held the most potent U.S. software IPO ever, has become the recent tech company to jettison California.
On Wednesday, Snowflake’s SEC filing showed an address in Bozeman for its executive office. The company laid the reasons why in a footnote,
“We are a Delaware corporation with a distributed workforce and no corporate headquarters globally. While the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules, we require to designate a ‘principal executive office.’ For purposes of this report, we have designated our office in Bozeman, Montana, the principal executive office, as that is based on where our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer.”
Snowflake will have a big operation in Silicon Valley and even went through a current massive redesign of its San Mateo office to prepare for the eventual employees.
“While San Mateo keeps remaining an important location for us, we do not have a single office that is at the center of Snowflake’s operations,” a spokesperson said.
The move to withdraw its corporate headquarters from the company California follows a trend that started amid the pandemic.
Snowflake, which has nearly 2,500 employees, has been moving in the direction of remote and distributed work for months. CEO Frank Slootman told CNBC that after the Covid-19 outbreak forced people to work from home, it was clear that the old way of working wasn’t going to return.
The pandemic has proven to be “almost like a wake-up call that is just opening our eyes to the opportunity,” Slootman said at the time. “It’s going to reduce the real estate footprint that companies have.”
According to Google Maps, the address Snowflake lists as its office in Bozeman, a city with fewer than 50,000 residents, is downtown, near a post office branch, a bowling alley, and a cafe.
Slootman has spent a lot of time and money in Montana in the years.
While CEO of ServiceNow before joining Snowflake, Slootman contributed the maximum sum allowed to Republican Greg Gianforte, Montana’s representative to the U.S. House until this year, the Federal Election Commission records show. Gianforte is now the state’s governor.
In late 2020, Slootman applied for an aviation ground lease for a 20-year term at Montana’s Twin Bridges Airport starting last October, according to meeting minutes for the Madison County Airport Board.
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