I am the product of a tryst in a squalid Times Square flophouse and was raised by a brothel owner and his opium-using wife. I am a high school dropout who started college at fourteen. My youth was spent hitchhiking and cutting the testicles off bulls. I sold my blood for money. I am an ordained minister and an atheist. I once ate dog meat and the still-beating heart of a snake. I made a billion dollars and I lost a billion dollars. I am presently employed as a shaman.
Or . . . I can say that I am the son of comfortable and educated middle-class parents. My father was an aerospace engineer while my mother took care of the three children. I went to college and studied to become an engineer like my father. I earned a computer science degree from Princeton in 1986 and headed off to Silicon Valley to write software. In 1992 I joined two colleagues to start a data storage firm called NetApp, where I still work today.
Both accounts are true. My story, like everyone’s, depends on the circumstance in which it is told.
This book is a memoir of a company and of a man, because both stories are intertwined. NetApp started as an idea scribbled on a placemat, became a real business, and quickly grew to a Fortune 1000 company. Our sales are about four billion dollars a year. I began as a software engineer, became a manager, and eventually developed into a businessman. In a sense, NetApp and I grew up together. Being there from the very beginning has given me an amazing tour through business. I’ve seen—and participated in—venture capital financing, management shake-ups, hypergrowth, going public, economic disaster, strategic reversal, and recovery. It’s rare for one person to survive such a volatile trip, seeing the whole thing as an insider, so I’ve tried to capture my experiences and distill lessons that may be useful to other businesspeople. I also want to tell a story that non–business readers can enjoy.
NetApp sells mostly to large corporations, so it isn’t a household name—even though the company has thousands of employees, billions in revenue, and offices in over a hundred countries. Let me briefly describe what NetApp does. We sell giant boxes of disk drives to big companies that store large amounts of data—Internet e-mail, X-rays and CAT scans for hospitals, design data for new cars and computers—and we help customers manage all that data. If you’ve flown Southwest Airlines, seen Lord of the Rings, or driven a Mercedes, then you are an indirect NetApp customer. Major banks, telephone companies, and retailers around the world use our equipment to track customer records, which covers still more people. (I try to avoid getting too technical in this book, but there are more details in “Interlude: What NetApp Does” after Chapter One. There’s also a glossary for when I do use jargon.)
I care more about themes and lessons than about chronology, but stories lose their meaning without a sense of time, so I divided the book into three parts: NetApp’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Childhood is about getting started, raising money, venture capitalists, and so on—plus one chapter on my own beginnings. Adolescence, in NetApp’s case, was a time of rapid growth in the dot-com boom, and then a sudden, painful end to rapid growth. Adulthood is about becoming a grown-up company, selling largely to other grown-up companies. The bull of the title is a metaphor for risk. In some ways, the first part is about risk, the second about growth, and the third about success, but in fact, all three themes run through all three parts, especially risk.
This is my personal journey as well. In Part One, I am a programmer, spokesman, and company gadfly. In Part Two, I am a vice president with a $100 million budget and a staff of hundreds. In Part Three, I have no direct reports but influence NetApp’s strategic direction by trying to predict the future.
There is more than one way to tell a story; however, this book is the best way I know to relate not just what I’ve learned but—more important—how I learned it. Let’s start with my first business lesson ever: Don’t listen to my mother.