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7<br />
Customers<br />
On Love, Enterprise,<br />
Simplicity, and Partners<br />
Tom Mendoza shredded our initial sales strategy as soon as<br />
we hired him. To grow a business, you must find either more<br />
customers or bigger customers. Our original plan was to sell<br />
to start-ups, or to small engineering workgroups within large<br />
companies, and find lots <strong>of</strong> them. Instead <strong>of</strong> selling to ten<br />
small companies, Tom asked, why not sell ten times as much—<br />
or a hundred times—to one large company? Once we got in<br />
the door, we would be able to count on a regular and significant<br />
stream <strong>of</strong> orders rolling in automatically as the customer<br />
grew. “We’ll make millions,” Tom said, “as long as the fax<br />
machine doesn’t break.”<br />
This chapter is the story <strong>of</strong> how NetApp learned to satisfy<br />
the largest corporations in the world and matured into a<br />
grown-up company.<br />
In retrospect, it’s not surprising that our first customers<br />
were engineering workgroups. James and I had spent our entire<br />
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