You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Hypergrowth | 63<br />
“Great,” Tom said sarcastically, “the $300 million can be<br />
my safety margin.”<br />
Tom could have turned it back on me by saying, “Okay,<br />
Dave, we need the product to be thirty times faster.” Then it<br />
would have been my eyeballs rolling back.<br />
A few years before, we were concerned with hundreds <strong>of</strong><br />
thousands <strong>of</strong> dollars and then with millions. Now Dan was saying<br />
we should talk about billions. “Can we do it?” he asked.<br />
“Well, sure we can,” said Tom, “we just need people we<br />
haven’t hired yet to sell products we haven’t built yet to customers<br />
we haven’t met yet.”<br />
••<br />
We had many reasons to believe that NetApp had a big opportunity.<br />
We had a track record <strong>of</strong> high revenue growth. Over<br />
three years, sales went from $2 million to $14 million to<br />
$43 million. Our initial market, storage for lowend UNIX<br />
computers, was growing quickly, and we found new markets<br />
as well. We added support for Windows computers, which<br />
roughly doubled our potential, and our Ferrarifast speed let<br />
us sell to still more customers.<br />
The biggest growth driver <strong>of</strong> all was the Internet. Many<br />
dotcom companies became great customers because they had<br />
so much data. They stored email for millions <strong>of</strong> people, photos<br />
and movies to download, or pictures <strong>of</strong> products for people to<br />
buy. One analyst explained it like this: venture capitalists gave<br />
money to Web startups, and the startups gave it to NetApp.<br />
Early Internet customers included Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, Earth<br />
Link, MindSpring, and even Hustler.com—the list goes on<br />
and on. In the Gold Rush, it wasn’t the miners who made the
Change language