Interlude - Index of

64 | Turbulent Adolescence
most money; it was the people who sold them shovels and blue
jeans. We weren’t a Web company, but we supplied them.
As the dot­com boom progressed, this style of thinking
drove NetApp’s stock sky­high. Our price­to­earnings ratio
hit 800 at one point, which was absolutely crazy. (I became,
for a while, a billionaire.) Jeff Allen was our chief financial officer
(CFO), and the stock market analysts wanted him to justify
our stock price. “That’s your job,” he said. “I can tell you
about our business and our growth, but as to what the market’s
doing, I really can’t help you there.”
The Internet helped us in a second, more subtle way: it
legitimized networking for mission­critical applications—apps
that absolutely must be available 100 percent of the time. In
the early nineties, Ethernet, the technology that networks are
built from, wasn’t very reliable: good enough for e­mail or
sharing files, but only a crazy company would trust it for applications
that provide services to customers or collect money
from them. Internet companies, however, had to depend on
their networks. If the net was down, Amazon couldn’t sell
books. Yahoo couldn’t provide e­mail.
This situation drove Cisco and other networking companies
to make Ethernet faster and more reliable, and that
helped NetApp. Remember, the “N” in NAS stands for network:
Network­Attached Storage. Our products provided
storage over the network, so improving the network improved
our solution. At first, only Internet companies used NAS for
mission­critical applications, but when the trend spread to traditional
companies, it created a truly enormous opportunity
for us.
Even with so much opportunity, it was fair to ask: How
fast can a company grow? Despite Tom’s skepticism, I felt that