Interlude - Index of

54 | Beginnings
so fast?” Dan replied, “In this case, I’m more afraid of the
reputation I’ll get if I don’t.” The rest were less urgent, but
within a year Dan had replaced everyone on his staff except
Tom Mendoza, James Lau, and me. At that point, James and
I focused on technology and strategy but didn’t manage any
other people.
Going public is a tricky transition: from private company,
whose shares are owned by a handful of employees, angels,
and VCs, to public company, whose shares are listed on a stock
exchange so that anyone with a Schwab account can buy them.
You start the process by hiring an investment bank. Helping
private companies go public is one of their businesses. They
find lots of institutional investors, like pension funds and
mutual funds, to buy the shares, and they help you file amazing
amounts of paperwork with the SEC and other government
agencies.
I was excited to go along on the road show, which is a trip
before the initial public offering—the IPO—to line up institutional
investors. The meetings we had were surprisingly similar
to sales calls I’d been on to sell storage systems, except the
product we were selling was shares in our company. A salesman
from the investment bank was in charge of each meeting.
Dan and I were there to answer detailed questions about
“the product,” which was NetApp itself. Most of the questions
went to Dan because he was the expert on NetApp’s business
details, but they had me along in case someone had a technical
question about our storage systems. Mostly I watched Dan
give the same presentation thirty times. In one week, we traveled
to Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Wilmington,
Baltimore, Boston, and then New York again, telling our story
five to seven times a day.