Interlude - Index of

66 | Turbulent Adolescence
on board less than a year. The big challenge is quickly absorbing
them into your culture.
••
I was lucky to still have a job at NetApp. The title “jack­ofall­trades”
is greatly valued in start­ups, but unfortunately, the
entire phrase is “jack of all trades, master of none.” Start­ups
remind me of my time on a remote desert ranch: you need people
who can do pretty much anything. As a company grows,
job requirements get more specialized. Bigger companies have
more masters and fewer jacks. Founders often leave after the
IPO or after a new CEO, but James and I survived both.
Lots of people asked, “What’s next for the two of you?”
and VCs and headhunters called to lure us into another startup.
They assumed that we would be looking for something
new. But when James and I thought back to our initial vision,
we realized that we had much more to do at NetApp, and we
wanted to see it through. We wanted to change the industry.
We wanted NetApp to become a Fortune 500 company, like
Sun and Cisco. We had built a foundation, but in terms of
these big goals, we’d come less than halfway. Fortunately, we
found places to contribute—James became CTO and I became
“VP of doubling.” Having two founders stay so long was
unusual enough to make people curious. VCs sent the technical
founders of younger companies to ask: Why hadn’t Dan
fired James and me? The secret was simple: We valued our
customers and our company more than we valued the technology
we had developed.
In the beginning, a start­up is all about new technology, but
as it grows, other things become at least as important: customers,