Interlude - Index of

38 | Beginnings
We hired Tom for American sales and largely abandoned
our indirect model, except in international markets, which
Charlie would oversee. Tom joined in April 1994, and Charlie
left two months later. After that, Tom handled sales.
Tom had been at Auspex when we won the bake-off at
Synopsys, so he went back to them and said, “Now that I’m on
the other side, tell me why you went with the Auspex system
when it was so much slower?” The chief information officer
(CIO) told Tom that his problem was NetApp’s indirect sales
strategy. If NetApp had been selling direct, he said he would
have bought. Tom stood up, shook the CIO’s hand, and said,
“Congratulations, you’re our first direct customer.”
Tom had similar conversations at Cisco, Western Digital,
and Cirrus Logic. Together those four accounts did $3.5 million
over the next 120 days. Years later, Tom restarted the indirect
strategy and it worked wonderfully, but at the time our
appliance idea was too new and our company too small.
This would not be the last time that we completely reversed
our strategy. You must be willing to admit when you’ve made
a mistake. Spotting mistakes and then changing course can
be more important than getting everything exactly right the
first time. This is just as true in strategy as it is in product
development.
••
Mike Malcolm was a genius. He spotted the market opportunity,
invented the idea of a storage appliance, and it was Mike
who called James and me, not the other way around. His years
as a professor left him with a gift for guiding small groups of