Interlude - Index of

74 | Turbulent Adolescence
organization. In other words, put the people with pencils and
eyeshades in charge.
••
When the stock market crashed in 2000, NetApp’s stock fell
from $150 a share to $6 in less than a year. Fortune published
an article called “The Forty Biggest Losers,” which listed the
individuals who lost the most money in the crash. I lost over
a billion dollars and was number thirty­two on the list. When
my assistant Kathy Bittner saw that, she marched into my
office, held up the article, and said, “This makes me ashamed
to work for you. Here are all the biggest losers, and you can’t
even make the top twenty.” One of Kathy’s jobs is to keep my
ego in check. Another friend helped out too. He came up to
me and said, “Hey Dave, did I ever tell you that I used to know
a billionaire?”
The dot­com boom of the 1990s was a classic market bubble.
Everyone sensed that the Internet was going to change
everything, and in some ways it has, but there was no justification
for the crazy stock prices. The crash hit Internet companies
first, but then spread quickly to anyone that sold to them.
Seventy percent of our revenue came from Internet and technology
companies, so their pain became ours.
Now the analysts wanted our CFO, Jeff Allen, to tell them
how quickly the stock market would bounce back. Would it
be a V­shaped graph or a U­shaped graph? Jeff said, “I know
what you want to hear, but I’m not going to blow sunshine up
your ass. I think the market looks flattish. L­shaped.” Nobody
wanted that news, but I was proud of Jeff. He wouldn’t make