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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dave Hitz
Read between
March 30 - April 13, 2022
If you focus on customers instead of technology, that lull becomes more interesting.
You shouldn’t take risks so dangerous that they might kill you. Or if you must, get lessons first. But even when not deadly, risk should feel uncomfortable, should push you beyond the familiar and safe.
It’s hard to be at the right place at the right time, so perhaps the best alternative is to go to the right place and wait there.
I now believe that when exploring new product ideas, it’s best to ship early, listen carefully, and react quickly.
the founding CEO of a start-up has the shortest employment life expectancy in Silicon Valley, and he said that the job came with two rules: Rule Number One: Never keep more in your office than you can fit in a gym bag. Rule Number Two: Always keep a gym bag in your office.
Seared into my mind, whenever I’m going to give someone an award, is this simple lesson: First check that their job is secure.
Recently I was a guest lecturer at Stanford with Jeff Chambers, who is a VC. I took the opportunity to ask him, “When is the right time to fire a CEO?” He said, “You should fire the CEO the first time it occurs to you. If a founder or vice president comes to the board and says to fire the CEO, you have to take into account that they probably went through a lot before that point. They are there every day and not acting on a whim. Whatever is going on is a serious issue and will likely get worse.”
“This is a not a vote,” he said. “I’m going to decide this one myself, but before I make my decision I want your advice.” Dan announced his decision the next day. Not everyone agreed, but they felt good that it was a fair process and that they got the chance to make their case. Hearing different points of view is critical for good decision making, but if you want people to speak their minds, you must consider their advice seriously even when you don’t follow it.
Dan held an all-day staff meeting shortly after he arrived, and at the end he said, “I want everyone to rank our candor. You know each other better than I do. Did people say what they really believe? Did you? I won’t ask you to explain your score, but I’m going to go around the room, and I want everyone to give a grade from one to five—five is good—on how candid you think we were with each other during this meeting.” Dan felt that there was lots of bad politics at NetApp, and he wanted to quash it. He didn’t mind if people disagreed with each other—that is a healthy part of finding the best
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Two weeks after joining, Dan fired the first person from his staff. Valentine asked him, “Aren’t you afraid of getting a reputation as a hatchet man if you move so fast?” Dan replied, “In this case, I’m more afraid of the reputation I’ll get if I don’t.” The rest were less urgent, but within a year Dan had replaced everyone on his staff except Tom Mendoza, James Lau, and me.
Our first CEO, Mike, had a saying: “Profitability is habit forming.” Our second CEO, Dan, had another saying: “Profit is like oxygen. It shouldn’t be the reason you exist, but you need it in order to accomplish anything else.” In this case, both were right.
Presentations are much better when you start with feelings and actions. Good content is important, but it’s only a tool. Feelings and actions are the goal.
As VP of doubling, I would walk into a manager’s office and say, “Right now you have ten employees. Next year it’ll be twenty, in two years forty, and in three years eighty. Have you thought about how to hire seventy more people? Have you thought about how to organize a group of eighty people? Can any of your people manage a group of ten? In three years you’ll need eight who can.” My goal was to get people thinking big. If they couldn’t, then we’d have to hire a boss over them who could.
The first lesson of hypergrowth is Everything is always broken. Relax, because it’s a good thing. Of course, there are good problems and bad problems. We need more office space. Our demand exceeds our production capacity. We have too many orders to process. I love to hear problems like this. On the other hand: Everyone is quitting. Sales are down. Our investors are dissatisfied. Not good.
Companies in hypergrowth are rare, so application vendors don’t optimize for their needs. The result is lots of problems.
Don’t fix a problem because it’s painful; fix it because it impedes growth.
Instead of focusing on process and control, you focus on trust and enablement.
The dot-com 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
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The key lesson is that change creates opportunity. With change, customers encounter new problems, and although they hate working with start-ups, they will if their problems force them to.
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.
employees who don’t agree with the kind of work environment we are trying to create may find that they don’t fit into NetApp’s culture. If the disagreement is too strong, they might be better off leaving. This may seem like a subtle distinction, but even though I’m uncomfortable telling people what their beliefs should be, I’m completely comfortable letting them know what ours are, so they can decide whether or not they want to join in.
Brian’s test for leaders is simple: “Look behind you. If nobody is following, then you aren’t one.”
The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer says, “This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”
“Customers don’t open their wallets unless they are feeling pain.”
They 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.
Two books deeply influenced my strategic thinking about how companies mature: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen, and Inside the Tornado, by Geoffrey Moore.
that it is appropriate for early stage start-ups to invent technologies that can solve many different problems for many different people, because such broad solutions have enormous potential. And yet, when it comes time to establish a sales footprint and get profitable, Moore argues that it’s critical to solve a particular problem for a particular type of customer: Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket closely.
Don Valentine,
I don’t know whether the public debate actually changed anybody’s mind, but many people told me that it made them much more comfortable with the decision. Allowing the anti-SAN people to make their strongest case in public made it clear that we had made the decision with our eyes wide open. It is tempting, after a decision like this, to whitewash the debate and pretend that everyone agreed all along. Our approach worked better in the long run.
It is hard to get people to think more than a year in the future, but looking back many years prepares you to look forward many years. Don’t just extrapolate today’s concerns; try to spot emerging trends that could trigger a new era. By definition, an era is marked by such radical change that success requires new strategies: if the issues aren’t radically different, then it isn’t a new era.
