Interlude - Index of

Starting NetApp | 29
sales; when you buy corn at the grocery store, that’s indirect
sales.) Charlie’s experience launching and running Sun’s indi-
rect sales program in Japan felt like a perfect fit. He was a big
boost to our business credibility, so we made him a retroactive
founder, even though we had already raised some money and
hired an additional programmer.
••
With angel money coming in, we needed a hiring plan. Fortunately,
we had the benefit of hindsight. At Auspex, James was
the twelfth employee and I was seventeenth; Mike had been
involved with several start-ups. We sat down and went through
Auspex’s hiring order, writing down job titles and reporting
lines up through about fifty employees. I also tried to remember
the size of different groups when I’d been at MIPS with
one hundred employees. Soon we had a respectable organization
chart to take us through our first growth period.
Even though we had done the normal seed-round tasks—
fleshed out our business plan, interviewed potential customers,
hired key people into our team, even built early prototypes—the
VCs still weren’t impressed enough to reach into
their pockets. Mike’s past CEO experience had been in Canada,
so he wasn’t a known quantity in Silicon Valley, and they
still couldn’t get their heads around our “we do less” strategy.
Later, a VC who rejected us told me it was one of the biggest
mistakes in his career. After our success, he funded several
other computing appliance companies.
One VC asked what had changed in the industry that
made our idea possible. It was like he thought, If this was such