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...