Interlude - Index of

Starting NetApp | 33
very innovative features. The Engineer and the Frog
Patrick’s favorite feature was On a walk in the woods, an engi-
that our system rebooted neer sees a frog sitting on a rock.
in thirty seconds, instead The frog says, “Hey, I’m not really
of taking hours like our a frog. If you kiss me I’ll turn into a
competitors’ systems. He beautiful princess.” The engineer
also loved the simplicity. I
picks up the frog and looks at it.
had written the user’s manual,
and it was only a cou-
The frog says, “Aren’t you
going to kiss me?” The engineer
shakes his head and sticks the
ple dozen pages long. Sun’s frog in his pocket. The frog pokes
manuals filled ten inches of its head out and whispers, “Look,
shelf space.
if you kiss me, I will do anything
We built and shipped you want . . . anything.” The engi-
our first product with only
neer says, “Nah,” and stuffs the
eight full-time employees.
It’s true that we worked
many long nights and didn’t
frog deeper in his pocket.
The frog shouts, “I’ve got to get
out of this frog body. I’ll be your
girlfriend for a year.” The engi-
have much of a social life, neer says, “Who has time for a
but even so, it’d be impos- girlfriend? But a talking frog: that’s
sible today to develop a
net work storage system in
really cool.”
eighteen months with eight people and $1.5 million. Startups
have raised over $100 million dollars to compete against
NetApp and still failed. When a market is young, the rules are
different—the bar to entry is much lower. If we had decided to
attack Sun and Auspex’s high-end storage systems with a me-too
product, we would have been doomed, but instead we went after
a part of the market that they didn’t care about, at the very low
end, with a completely new approach.