Interlude - Index of

76 | Turbulent Adolescence
the way you would want to be treated in this situation, and the
odds are that it is probably legal. I trust you.”
••
The dot­com era was like a giant wave. It lifted us, and carried
us, and when it set us down, NetApp was a completely different
company—a large company, a billion in revenue, and we
were helping even larger companies solve some of their most
important problems, a far cry from the small workgroups that
we started with.
The wave analogy encourages humility. Imagine you are
surfing, and you spot the biggest wave ever. You decide to
catch it, and you have the best ride of your life. You can be
proud of spotting the wave, and of deciding to catch it, but
don’t be proud of the wave itself. We didn’t invent the Web
or even predict the Web, but we saw it coming and decided to
catch it. I’m proud of how well we rode.
The key lesson is that change creates opportunity. With
change, customers encounter new problems, and although
they hate working with start­ups, they will if their problems
force them to. As a small company, I’d much rather target a
turbulent $1 billion market than a stable $10 billion one. If
the chaotic market is adjacent to a giant stable one, so much
the better; with luck, the chaos may spread. The Internet was
a rare opportunity, but such opportunities favor the prepared,
so I hope that describing our experience will help you spot the
wave of a lifetime in your own industry.
Perhaps it is the nature of hypergrowth to always end in a
thud. To optimize for growth, you assume it won’t stop. You