Interlude - Index of

36 | Beginnings
it in. The customer asked, “Aren’t you going to tune it?” I
replied, “It’s pretuned. We’re ready.” We were so fast that Sun
brought in a second team to tune for a second week, but they
still couldn’t beat us.
We won the contest, but we lost the order. For one thing,
they were used to buying expensive, refrigerator-sized systems
built with lots of custom hardware, and they couldn’t believe
that a small box running Intel chips could really be better.
They wouldn’t trust their high-end engineering data to the
same technology that their kids used to play video games at
home. At least, that’s what we told ourselves—and it was partly
true—but their biggest concern was that they didn’t like the
way we sold our products.
••
We had hoped that our indirect sales strategy, working with
independent resellers, would be cheaper and faster than hiring
our own salespeople to sell directly to customers. In fact,
it was killing us. Customers were reluctant to buy from a small
start-up that they had never heard of, and buying through a
small reseller made them even more nervous. People will consider
a start-up if they have a problem that they can’t solve
any other way, but they feel more comfortable having a closer
relationship. We had modeled the strategy on PC vendors like
Compaq and Dell, but their products were basically identical
to PCs from IBM. The network storage appliance was newly
invented, and people had never seen anything like it.
How do you know whether to change strategy or stick to your
guns? We had stuck to our appliance vision when VCs scoffed,