There is an ancient
battle about whether it’s better, when you are counting, to start with “one” or
to start with “zero”. English majors think the answer is obviously “one”, but
many technical folks believe that it's better to start counting with “zero”.
This was the issue behind the argument about whether the new millennium began
in 2000 or 2001.
I won't get into
the nerdy details, but “off-by-one
errors” are one of the most common mistakes that programmers make, and
often the root cause is counting from one instead of zero.
Given that books
are full of words, it is probably a good thing that English majors dominate the
publishing industry, but as a result, books always start with Chapter One.
Until now.
I decided to strike
a decisive blow for technical people by starting my book with Chapter Zero.
Many of my early
readers were engineers, and they loved the idea of chapter zero. My copy-editor
(not an engineer) was simply confused. She “fixed” it without even talking to
me, because she couldn't imagine why I'd want to do such a thing. I explained
about the ancient battle and the year 2000 and how it wasn’t fair that
engineers have never had a book numbered their way. She was stunned by my anguish.
“I had no idea this was so important to you.” She was a good sport and changed
it back.
So without further
ado, here is your chance to read chapter zero. (To read more, I'm afraid you'll have to visit Amazon. :-)
How To Castrate a Bull
Chapter Zero
I am the product of a tryst in a squalid Times Square
flophouse and was raised by a brothel owner and his opium-using wife. I am a
high school dropout who started college at fourteen. My youth was spent
hitchhiking and cutting the testicles off bulls. I sold my blood for money. I
am an ordained minister and an atheist. I once ate dog meat and the
still-beating heart of a snake. I made a billion dollars and I lost a billion
dollars. I am presently employed as a shaman.
Or . . . I can say that I am the son of comfortable and
educated middle-class parents. My father was an aerospace engineer while my
mother took care of the three children. I went to college and studied to become
an engineer like my father. I earned a computer science degree from Princeton
in 1986 and headed off to Silicon Valley to write software. In 1992 I joined two
colleagues to start a data storage firm called NetApp, where I still work
today.
Both accounts are true. My story, like everyone’s, depends
on the circumstance in which it is told.
This book is a memoir of a company and of a man, because
both stories are intertwined. NetApp started as an idea scribbled on a
placemat, became a real business, and quickly grew to a Fortune 1000 company.
Our sales are about four billion dollars a year. I began as a software
engineer, became a manager, and eventually developed into a businessman. In a
sense, NetApp and I grew up together. Being there from the very beginning has
given me an amazing tour through business. I’ve seen—and participated
in—venture capital financing, management shake-ups, hypergrowth, going public,
economic disaster, strategic reversal, and recovery. It’s rare for one person
to survive such a volatile trip, seeing the whole thing as an insider, so I’ve
tried to capture my experiences and distill lessons that may be useful to other
businesspeople. I also want to tell a story that non–business readers can
enjoy.
NetApp sells mostly to large corporations, so it isn’t a
household name—even though the company has thousands of employees, billions in
revenue, and offices in over a hundred countries. Let me briefly describe what
NetApp does. We sell giant boxes of disk drives to big companies that store
large amounts of data—Internet e-mail, X-rays and CAT scans for hospitals,
design data for new cars and computers—and we help customers manage all that data.
If you’ve flown Southwest Airlines, seen Lord of the Rings, or driven a
Mercedes, then you are an indirect NetApp customer. Major banks, telephone
companies, and retailers around the world use our equipment to track customer
records, which covers still more people. (I try to avoid getting too technical
in this book, but there are more details in “Interlude: What NetApp Does” after
Chapter One. There’s also a glossary for when I do use jargon.)
I care more about themes and lessons than about chronology, but
stories lose their meaning without a sense of time, so I divided the book into
three parts: NetApp’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Childhood is about
getting started, raising money, venture capitalists, and so on—plus one chapter
on my own beginnings. Adolescence, in NetApp’s case, was a time of rapid growth
in the dot-com boom, and then a sudden, painful end to rapid growth. Adulthood
is about becoming a grown-up company, selling largely to other grown-up
companies. The bull of the title is a metaphor for risk. In some ways, the
first part is about risk, the second about growth, and the third about success,
but in fact, all three themes run through all three parts, especially risk.
This is my personal journey as well. In Part One, I am a
programmer, spokesman, and company gadfly. In Part Two, I am a vice president
with a $100 million budget and a staff of hundreds. In Part Three, I have no
direct reports but influence NetApp’s strategic direction by trying to predict
the future.
There is more than one way to tell a story; however, this
book is the best way I know to relate not just what I’ve learned but—more
important—how I learned it. Let’s start with my first business lesson ever:
Don’t listen to my mother.
