Interlude - Index of

Values and Culture | 85
vendor. In the short term, it looked like a win-win deal for
everyone. The big company got immediate revenue and the
dot-com got valuable equipment for what was often worthless
stock. But the whole thing smelled fishy to Dan and Tom. If
NetApp had to give the customer money before the customer
could afford to buy our product, it was not a real deal.
Tom sent voice mail to all of our salespeople saying, “Your job
is to find people who have money and sell them something.”
Some people felt that we were too squeaky-clean, and
that we missed opportunities to cash in on the boom, but
really, we dodged a bullet. Companies that bought the worthless
stock got into big trouble when they had to write off all
those “investments” that vaporized in the crash. Values are
often that way. In the short term, they can be frustrating, but
in the long term, they keep you out of trouble.
In the mid-1990s, we were competing against our old
nemesis, Auspex, for business at the National Security Agency
(NSA), the folks who monitor electronic communications
around the world. The NSA wanted a feature that neither of
us had, but they said they’d buy right away if we would commit
to deliver within a year. We knew it would take us at least
eighteen months, but Auspex promised that they could meet
the target.
Auspex was lying. We had worked there and knew their
engineering process well. We believed it would take Auspex
even longer than us. At a meeting to decide what to do, we
started wondering, should we also lie to the customer? That
would actually help them, we reasoned, because then they
could choose us and get the feature sooner. We went on in that
vein for a while, until one employee said, “I can’t believe we’re