Interlude - Index of

2 | Chapter Zero
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
com panies, 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