Dave Hitz Himself!!

Today I got the biggest thrill yet! Dave Hitz was speaking at a conference and I was able to get my copy of HTCAB that I love so much autographed by noone other than DAVE HITZ HIMSELF!

I knew that he had seen this blog because he posted a comment a long time ago. But I never thought he'd remember it and remember me. Can you imagine a better gift?

Dave Hitz, if you're still reading this I know that I didn't finish this blog reviewing every chapter of HTCAB, and I kind of lost focus, but now I know I really need to focus and get it done. It's the least I can do.

One last thing, I want to make sure everyone notices Dave Hitz's signature! It's just 4 vertical lines and a long Z all the way through. SO COOL!

HTCAB: Chapter 7

"This chapter is the story of how NetApp learned to satisfy the largest corporations in the world and matured into a grown-up company." That pretty much sums it up. I don't know if he saw the current situation coming, but Dave Hitz wrote:

Fortunately for us, the tech crash sent the economy south, and the recession was good for us. It created so much pain that conservative enterprise customers were forced to consider new solutions. The attitude changed from, I'll be promoted if I keep things working to I'll be fired if I don't cut costs. The tech crash also gave us extra incentive to go after the nterprise companies, because our Internet and technology customers -- 70 percent of our revenue -- pretty much stopped buying.

The implication is pretty clear that this current and worse recession is going to be even better for NetApp especially considering that they used to be fighting to get into all these deals, and now everyone knows about Dave Hitz's company!

Next up came more of Dave Hitz playing with ideas:

I love using thought experiments to test ideas. On a business trip, I noticed a coffee machine in my hotel room, and I started asking myself questions. What if I were Mr. Hilton, and I had hundreds of hotels, each with hundreds of rooms, and each room had a Mr. Coffee? What would my problems be -- aside from my granddaughter Paris -- and how would I solve them?

The idea is that coffee makers probably break all the time, and there's no way to know so people staying in the hotel rooms would have no coffee, no way to make it, and no way to get a new coffee maker. Dave Hitz came up with the idea to have the coffee makers phone in to mission control in case they were broken. Brilliant! And take that Paris Hilton!

HTCAB: Grown-Up Company

Before starting the chapters about NetApp as a grown-up company, Dave Hitz writes about a couple of his favorite books: The Innovators Dilemma and Inside the Tornado. They're totally next on my list after I finish HTCAB.

Dave Hitz writes that an important lesson he learned was that "low-end technologies tend to move upmarket and outperform high-end technologies." This is exactly what Dave Hitz has done at NetApp to rise from a small company to the #1 company to work at.

Christensen's theories helped me understand how NetApp and NAS could win against larger and more entrenched competitors, first against Auspex, and later against major IT vendors like IBM, HP, and EMC. NetApp's NAS started as a low-end technology that was only good enough for small workgroups. Our competitors sold a different type of storage called SAN, whicih was -- at first -- faster and more reliable, but also much more expensive and harder to manage. As NAS improved over time, we found ourselves competing against SAN and winning.

This is exactly now Dave Hitz got to the top and how he'll stay there.

HTCAB: Truthful Interlude

To be honest, the interlude after Chapter 6 kind of lost me. I kind of knew that I was in trouble when Dave Hitz started it with "Sometimes I like to play with ideas." When Dave Hitz starts like that, what chance to I have to keep up!

The basic idea, I think, is that there are some things that you can prove to be true, but there are other things that you just trust to be true because they make things easier. But I'm not really, and here's where Dave Hitz really lost me:

Maybe we should keep looking for scientific-truths that are just as convincing as important useful-truths. Perhaps we could even discover a scientific-religion. If you believe that religions offer useful-truths that are not scientific-truths, then the trick would be to find the corresponding scientific-truths. You might supplement God says be nice to your neighbors with Axelrod's computer simulations proce that you should be nice to your neighbors."

Man, deep stuff! Next Dave Hitz writes "I have wandered far into the clouds." Whew! Glad it's not just me. I'm not sure how this stuff ties into the rest of the book, but I'm glad for the interludes so that Dave Hitz doesn't have to just follow the conventional structure for what management books are like (including starting from Chapter 0)!

HTCAB: Chapter 6

In Chapter 6, Dave Hitz takes a new job at NetApp as VP of engineering. Keep in mind that this was from a guy who had basically never managed anything before. But Dave Hitz was totally up to it. Dave Hitz described what made him a great manager:

Steve Kleiman, our CTO at the time, had a theory about engineers and managers. He divided the world into people who have technical orgasms and people who have management orgasms, or TOs and MOs for short. A TO is when an engineer says, "What if we start the data in NV-RAM and not do the file allocation until later? By delaying that processing we'll speed up the packet response time to the network and get better block layout optimization on the disk drive... Whee!" ... A management orgasm is when a manager says, "I set up this team and coached the leader on how to hire good people and manage them effectively, and now he's matured to the point that he can start other teams and coach their managers, so I have more time to focus on the annual budget and planning process... Whee!"

I didn't get it at first, but "Whee!" is supposed to be the sound of the orgasm! ::slaps forehead:: I thought this was going to be a really important idea that Dave Hitz talked more about, but it wasn't.

In a lot of ways, I think this next quote speaks directly to me:

Thety say with dogs that you cannot punish them three days later for crapping on the floor. You have to drag them over and rub their noses in it right away. Bill applied the same principle, except he rubbed our noses in success.

Exactly! HTCAB is so good that I can't believe that this is the only blog out there dedicated to it. I know that I've been dragging a bit getting to my chapter reviews, but this last chapter inspired me to power through!

Dave Hitz: Beyond Bull Castration

Dave Hitz just wrote two awesome articles for NBC and the Financial Times! From the Financial Times piece, here's my favorite part:

I remember a sales call with the CIO of a large Wall Street firm. She started the meeting by saying: ”I think I know your story. You’re half the price and have amazing new features besides, right?”

It seemed like an auspicious start, but she went on to say: ”Sorry, but my current vendor meets my needs, and cost isn’t an issue because we’ve got plenty of money.”

Our vice chairman Tom Mendoza has a saying: ”Customers only open their wallets when they are in pain.” The good news for some is that economic downturns create lots of pain.

It seems simple, right? But this is exactly why Dave Hitz is going to kick ass especially in this economy. People won't just go with the market leader, they're going to go with NetApp, the little guy who's "good enough considering" (as Dave Hitz says).

In the NBC article, Dave Hitz really got me thinking about HTCAB:

If you’ve ever hoped to start your own multi-billion dollar company, or even just wanted to know what it feels like, I wrote this book for you.

Well, I don't think I'm going to start a multi-billion dollar company, but learning what it feels like from the master himself was well worth the price of the book!

In the intro, the person from NBC writes:

Dave Hitz is a major-league tech-wonk but he’s also the type of guy you want to meet, and share a laugh with over a beer or two. I mean how many tech wonks can you actually say that about?

Man, can you imagine? And I bet that guy from NBC doesn't even really appreciate it. Maybe some day...

Dave Hitz On YouTube!

After the recent NetApp rap, I decided to look around on YouTube for more videos from Dave Hitz. I found an awesome playlist!



The first video is about HTCAB, but my favorite is the second video where Dave Hitz speaks off the cuff a bit more, including right after an interview with Business Week.

Customers only open their wallet when they're in pain, and it's true that there's less in their wallet, but boy is there a lot of pain to go around. So if you can figure out the stuff that's hurting them and figure out a different way to solve it there really is a big opportunity.

I was kinda surprised to hear Dave Hitz say that he didn't do all the writing in HTCAB, but it sounds like Pat Walsh did manage to make the book even better! I sure hope there are more episodes of On the Road With Dave Hitz.

HTCAB: Legal Interlude

The interlude at the end of Chapter 5 reminded me of some recent conversations I had around the design of this blog. But as Dave Hitz writes:

My new slogan: Success breeds litigation.

While it's frustrating, it's just lawyers executing in the system.

To put it in computer terms, Congress is the programmer, laws are the program, and the courtroom - lawyers, judge, and jury - are the computer that runs the program.

I love that example. Also it helps me understand the changes I was asked to make. Dave Hitz, while I could never be mad at you I certainly forgive you now!

HTCAB: Chapter 5

Sorry for the long delay in getting back to HTCAB. I've been busy with other stuff, but fortunately, there's been the awesome NetApp rap and interview with Dave Hitz to keep everyone reading!

One of my favorite lines in Chapter 6 had to do with selling during the dot com boom. A standard practice was to give customers loans in exchange for stock. Here's what my new favorite NetApp blogger Kostadis Roussos calls his "all time NetApp moment":

Your job is to find people who have money and sell them something

That was something said by Tom Mendoza who Dave Hitz calls "one of the best public speakers I've ever seen." Dave Hitz saw him as a role model for speaking saying "I'm more of a writer myself." No kidding! The writing in HTCAB is great!

Put your hands up for N-E-T if you wanna De-Dupe say A-P-P

NetApp made a sweet video. In case you didn't figure it out, "E Squared" is supposed to be EMC and "Double D" is Data Domain. The crowd comes to the obvious conclusion: NetApp is the best!



Here's my favorite line:

Your whole process is sloppy
We save Zeta-bytes he save floppy’s
Lack reliability when you copy
This guy bought himself into the technology

Dave Hitz Webcast

Last week, Dave Hitz gave a webcast about management and he gave a lot of great advice. I recognized a lot of stuff from his book, but it was amazing to hear his words of wisdom from the voice of Dave Hitz himself.

First, How to Castrate a Bull is a metaphor for risk taking and, better, appropriate risk taking. As the interviewer says in the opening it's a "fun book to read with fascinating insights."

Dave Hitz: Is this your typical business book?
Interviewer: no... not at all... very entertaining. The book is full of excellent advice.

Here are some other great quotes from Dave Hitz that I typed out because I think they will really help some people:

After the crash, we went back with exactly the same story, interesting solution, different technology, can save you a lot of money, they were all over it. And I would say in general an economic downturn creates a whole new set of problems for people. And people when they have problems that's what they spend money on. There's a phrase that I think should guide people's strategy both when they're being a customer making decisions in this environment but also when they're trying to sell to customers and that phrase is "good enough considering." And here's what I mean by that. Just in your personal life, if you're thinking of buying a car right now and you're looking at the economy and you're thinking "that BMW's looking pretty nice, but maybe a Ford Fiesta would be good enough considering." I think certainly anybody in management needs to be asking that questions about the decisions they're making, but if you're trying to sell to other people, that should be your leading value proposition. You know, is there a way to do things that are maybe different than the way people are thinking about. Maybe it's not. Like in the computer world, I think server virtualization VMware as an example of what's going on with that or possibly cloud computing. These solutions may make you uncomfortable or nervous but you have to ask "are they good enough considering." But I'm repeating myself: both as a customer and a sales person, that's where you need to start.

I still think of myself as a programmer, but the computers I program now are people's brains. My programming language is powerpoint.

Dave Hitz spent a bunch of time talking about The Innovators Dilemma (totally my next read after HTCAB). I thought this was a particularly interesting:

Interviewer: What are the big companies that are already up market supposed to do?
Dave Hitz: You read this whole book and you kind of conclude, those guys are up a creek. At minimum, being aware of that situation is a good starting point.
Interviewer: absolutely.

I wouldn't want to be NetApp's competition, LOL!

The interview ended with, I think, the best advice from Dave Hitz: "have fun with life and don't be too serious." And Dave Hitz has a message for bigshots: "Get over yourself!"

HTCAB: Chapter 4

I'm going to start this chapter review with some advice from Dave Hitz in the interlude after the chapter:

Here is my advice: Always start with the conclusion. Somewhere in your presentation you have a conclusion slide that summarizes the proposal you hope to get approved. Put that slide first.

Well: Dave Hitz is awesome.

The next part of NetApp's development that Dave Hitz talks about is hypergrowth, doubling and doubling and doubling the size of the company without end. I can see why he said at the end of the last chapter that everything was broken (and that that was good news!) because if you're growing that fast I bet it's hard to keep everything running perfectly even for Dave Hitz!

Dave Hitz also provides a good tip for founders of a company or, I think, anyone working for a company:

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.

It must be hard to always put the needs of your company and customers in front of the dedication to the technologies you develop, but I guess that's what a great engineer does. But a great engineer also has foresight as Dave Hitz writes:

We didn't invent the Web or even predict the Web, but we saw it coming and decided to catch it.

You don't have to invent everything or even predict it as long as you can see it coming and take advantage. What no one saw coming was the end of the dot-com bubble, but NetApp was able to come out of it in good shape because Dave Hitz had had the forethought to start selling to other strong industries like banks and phone companies.

I loved the story about Dave Hitz taking a friend's daughter to a piercing studio and recruiting the tattooed piercer with an interest in IT (information technology). I guess you really can find talent anywhere and you can't judge a book by its cover. But if you judged this book by its cover you'd be exactly right!

Dave Hitz on the RADIO!

Not that it's any surprise, but it looks the media is finally waking up to how awesome Dave Hitz is: according to his latest blog post, a radio station even called him in the early hours of the morning just to interview him! I can't imagine that they do that for just anyone, and as a big Dave Hitz fan, I'm psyched to see (and hear!) him hit the big time. He may be a celebrity now, but Dave Hitz is still an engineer, and even with the media attention on him he had a really interesting observation on how broadcast news is made that really stopped and made me think. But that's Dave Hitz for you, some people get rich and famous and never give anything back, but Dave Hitz always seems to find the time to share his insights with the rest of us. Which reminds me I need to get to the insights that await in Chapter 4!

Non-Stop Lawyers

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I think Dave Hitz is awesome. When I saw that he wrote a book, I was really psyched to read it and finally start a blog dedicated to him. But now I'm thinking that it might have been more trouble than it's worth because NetApp won't leave me alone! They're all like "change this" and "don't use that color" and "use this photo but not that one." I keep trying to do what they want but they keep coming back wanting some other stupid change. If I wanted all this crap, I'd just call up my mom! So while I still think Dave Hitz is a genius, I also think that he has some seriously bored lawyers working for him. He needs to take some of his own advice and bounce these guys like they were Mike Malcom! If his lawyers ever had any magic dust, I think they smoked it LOL!

I need some of that magic pixie dust

The change I made to the layout the other day wasn't quite enough for the people at NetApp, so I remade it from scratch in homage to Dave Hitz's blog. I guess I didn't follow the directions I got from Dave Hitz (!), but I hope that I won't have to change it again.

It does make me wish that someone with magic pixie dust could sprinkle some on this problem to make it go away (Dave Hitz, are you still reading this?). I know I sure don't have any LOL!

HTCAB: Chapter 3

Chapter 2 ends with Dave Hitz about to fire NetApp's first CEO Mike Malcolm. In Chapter 3, he explains that the reason Mike needed to go was because "good CEOs have magic pixie dust that they can sprinkle on problems to make them go away. You don't have any pixie dust." I totally know what Dave Hitz is saying. There are some people who really can work magic like that, and apparently Mike wasn't one of them. It might sound like a crazy reason to fire someone or kind of whimsical, but Dave Hitz writes:

I was a tense time at the office, especially since it took the board almost a year to act. Fourteen years later, with much more management experience under my belt, I still think I was right.

It sounds like it was a really hard decision. Dave Hitz wrote he "woke up in the middle of the night shaking." But after all, NetApp was his baby, and Dave Hitz knew what was best.

As an aside, I learned something new about English. It turns out the word for politics comes from the word for city:

Some people think that politics is a dirty word, but not me. Politics is simply the art of making decisions in groups. It comes from the Greek word polis, meaning city. Any group working together - whether it has ten people or ten thousand - needs some mechanism to keep everyone aligned: that's politics.

That kind of changes the way I think about politics.

So NetApp hired a new CEO, Dan Warmenhoven, and a new sales guy, Tom Mendoza. The chapter ends like this:

Both Tom and Dan brought us great stills in those areas, which was fortunate, because for the next few years at NetApp, the good news was that everything was broken.

Now, I don't know how everything could possibly have been broken much less how that could have been good news, but I can't wait to find out!

Yes, THAT Dave Hitz

Regular readers of this space may notice a slight difference today in the layout. I'm not going to say exactly what the change is, but I will tell you that it was a change requested by none other than Dave Hitz himself! Yes, that Dave Hitz, and I just about crapped my pants when I saw his e-mail to me in my inbox! In one of my earlier posts I saw a comment from someone named "Dave", but I just it was assumed that it was one of my friends messing with me. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that Dave Hitz himself would read this blog!

So let's just say that I was more than happy to make the change he requested. I thought it was awesome that he took time from his busy schedule to mail me, and the fact that he was so decisive in his mail is exactly why he's the one out castrating bulls! As a bonus, he gave me an inside track on the book: according to him, I'm going to have to make up with my mom after reading Chapter 9. While I think Dave Hitz is a genius, even I don't think he can pull that one off! Can't wait to keep reading!

Pulled a "Dave Hitz" on my mom

Didn't get a chance to read a chapter today, but I had my first opportunity to use some of what I learned from HTCAB! I was talking to my mom today, and she started in on me (again!) for not having made it home for the holidays (which trust me was impossible based on work). Well, I took Dave Hitz's advice from Chapter 0: I finally told her that I wasn't going to listen to her anymore. When she said I sounded crazy, I responded, "yeah crazy like a billionaire!" Boy did that shut her up! She is super pissed at me right now, but I feel great. Thank you Dave Hitz, and can't wait to read more great advice!

HTCAB: Chapter 2

In my post about Chapter 1, I was maybe a bit overexcited about the idea of Dave Hitz founding a pen-based startup. In the next chapter, he admits that he didn't really understand that market and those customers. But what he did know was NAS from his time working at Auspex.

The idea Mike Malcolm had for starting NetApp was to make a NAS box that was as simple as a toaster: one button that says Make Toast, and one knob that says How Dark. The amazing thing was that the machine Dave Hitz designed was built to do less than what his competitors (Sun and Auspex) could do.

If there's a disappointing bit in this chapter, I think it's this:

Eventually we named our new company Network Appliance, which we later shortened to NetApp. We chose a generic name because we believed that the appliance concept could apply to many market areas beside storage, and we didn't want to constrain ourselves. We may have been planning a bit too far ahead: sixteen years later, NetApp still focuses on storage and data management.

I guess it's good to do one thing and do it well, but you have to admit that it raises an intriguing possibility of what could be. That said, when NetApp's stock peaked in 2000 "a $50,000 angel investment was worth $107 milion." No wonder Dave Hitz doesn't feel too sorry for those early angels despite asking them to re-up a few times!

I love how each chapter pulls me into the next (but I've decided to show some self-restraint or else I'd be blogging the whole thing in a day)! Chapter 2 ends with Dave Hitz recognizing Mike Malcolm, the founder of NetApp, as "a genius" as well as his adviser, mentor, and friend, but concluding that he needs to be fired because "Mike had no magic pixie dust."

HTCAB: Chatper 1, continued

In my initial post, I mentioned how in chapter 0, Dave Hitz said the he was the "product of a tryst in a squalid Times Square flophouse and was raised by a brothel owner and his opium-using wife" and "the son of comfortable and educated middle-class parents." Well, I don't want to give away the surprise, but let's just say that after that I can certainly understand his advice:

Don't listen to my mother.

HTCAB: Chapter 1

I started in on Dave Hitz's book, How to Castrate a Bull (henceforth HTCAB), last night with high expectations, and I was certainly not disappointed. I was hoping to find a mixture of memoir, advice, and management, and I think I'm in for a generous helping of all three.

There's a bunch of stuff early on that I know I would have already helped in my life:

Never underestimate the power of a clearly written proposal.
Always read the fine print. [about college prereqs *slaps forehead*]
If you keep your eyes open, solutions often present themselves.

Dave Hitz initially quit his job to start a pen-based start up company. I remember when I was a kid thinking that the Newton and later the palm were really cool. It sucks that the technology was ahead of its time -- I would have loved to see what innovations he would have come up with. The chapter ends with Dave Hitz about to meet with Mike Malcolm (never heard of him, but he sounds amazing) to talk about the idea of NetApp (I assume).

Here's my favorite chunk from the first chapter:

Castrating a bull is a metaphor for learning to take risk... Was it really sensible to leave high school, quit a great job, or jump that fence into the bull's pen with a dull pocket knife? Those choices worked out pretty well for me.

It makes me wonder how much of life is luck and taking chances and how much is orchestrated.

Non-Stop Hitz

I've been a big Dave Hitz follower for a little while now, and I thought the release of his book would be a good occasion to start a blog following the various goings-on of him and his company, NetApp.

My copy of How To Castrate a Bull arrived today and I can't wait to get started. Stay tuned for a chapter-by-chapter review. I'll try not to include too many spoilers! For now, check out the book's website: www.howtocastrateabull.com. My favorite part of the site is the Q&A with none other than the man himself.

If you haven't seen it already, check out Chapter 0. As a hacker myself, I love that he went with zero rather than one; take that English majors! I can't wait to find out how he's both the "product of a tryst in a squalid Times Square flophouse and was raised by a brothel owner and his opium-using wife" and "the son of comfortable and educated middle-class parents..."