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PART ONE
BEGINNINGS
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1
BEFORE NETAPP
On Computers, Colleges, Castration, and Risk
My good fortune to be involved in technology came from not listening to my mother. When I was young, a family friend taught me the rudiments of programming, and I loved it. I read early computer hobby magazines like BYTE and Dr. Dobbâs Journal. At fourteen, I bought a build-it-yourself mail-order computer called an IMSAI 8080. It had binary toggle switches on the front and little flashing lights. I programmed the lights to go back and forth. A television set was the display, and an audiocassette tape recorder was my first storage system ever. This was in 1977, right at the dawn of the personal computing era.
My mother seemed to feel that working with computers was not a serious profession. Perhaps she saw a matchbook cover that read, âYou, too, can learn computer repair!â with a picture of some guy fussing with vacuum tubes and his butt crack hanging out. She made her opinion clear: computers were fine as a hobby, like ham radio, but you would never make that your career.
Sordid Details Explained
The 42nd Street Fleabag
I was, in fact, conceived in a dodgy hotel outside Times Square. My parents had arrived in New York on their way to Europe. Bad planning and bad luck conspired to put them up in a low-cost hotel in Midtown. My father told me, âThe place wasnât so bad,â but my mother insisted, âOh, yes it was,â in that tone of voice that ends discussions. They went out for dinner, and by the time they got back, the drug store had closed.
That night in Times Square had to be my beginning. My father had been away on a business trip for a couple of weeks before, and their trip to Europe was romantically challenged due to a rough ocean crossing that left them both hopelessly seasick.
That was my first trip to Europe, and I donât remember a thing.
Opium
My mother was on a trip to India, and her tour group came to a little hut in the desert. Mom approached some wizened old men who were stirring a pot of liquid, and one of them cupped some of the fluid in his hand and offered it to her. She asked the guide if she should partake. He told her that it would be the polite thing to do, so she slurped the liquid from his hand. Only then did the guide tell her it was opium.
Computers challenged me, but high school did not. Some might feel that high school boredom is normal. My mother disagreed, and she worked to make education rewarding for her children. My younger sister had learning disabilities, but somehow, whenever we moved to a new location, or my sister graduated from one school to another, a perfect program for her needs was always just starting. Years later, I commented on this lucky streak to my father, who said, âDave, you do know the reason for that coincidence is because thatâs what your mom did with her life?â Many school systems were not aware of the laws about what schools must do for students with learning disabilities. My mother made them aware.
Much later, at a family gathering, Mom was sitting with a particularly staid relative, and I took it upon myself to suggest that she tell us all about the time she did heroin. âIt wasnât heroin. It was opium,â she blurted out. She then reconsidered and said, âI mean, I donât know what youâre talking about.â
The Cathouse College Fund
While living in Virginia, my parents owned some investment property in Northern California. One day, the local sheriff called my father and asked if a man named Kentucky Wooten was his property manager. Dad had never heard of the man. It turned out that this con artist searched property records for out-of-state owners, rented out their property illegally, and pocketed the cash. He rented the ramshackle house on my parentâs property to an enterprising woman and her two grown daughters, who established the property as the local whorehouse. Evicting anyone in California is tough, but tossing out pregnant women is especially hard. So, for the next couple years, at any one time, at least one of the women was pregnant, staving off any attempt to clear them out. My grandfather, who lived nearby, collected the rent for my parents until my grandmother found out and put a stop to it. Eventually, my parents did extricate themselves from being brothel owners, and later the property paid their kidsâ college tuition.
My problem required a different approach: the law protects students with disabilities, but not students with boredom. My mom came across an article in Smithsonian magazine about young teens taking college courses at George Washington University (GW) in Washington, D.C., not far from our home in Virginia. We followed up, and at age fourteen, halfway through my sophomore year of high school, I started college: high school classes in the morning and college classes in the afternoon. I had always planned to be an engineer, like my father, but my adviser at GW felt that a narrow focus was bad for kids so young. For every course in calculus or physics, he made me take one in literature, philosophy, or creative writing. Even for an engineer, writing is a powerful tool; being forced to take classes with term papers was lucky for my later career. Never underestimate the power of a clearly written proposal.
This mix of college and high school worked well, but after a year and a half, my high school principal told me that I needed another year of high school math to graduate. Despite my three semesters of college calculus, he suggested pre-calculus, since that was the most advanced math class available. He also said that Iâd never be successful without a high school diploma. That was an early lesson in idiot bureaucrats. I dropped out of high school to go to college full time.
GW taught me to love liberal arts, so even though I planned to be an electrical engineer, I didnât want to attend an engineering school like MIT or Caltech. I chose Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania because it is a liberal arts school with a solid engineering program. That didnât work out so well, because engineering prerequisites dominated my coursework. I could share a dorm with nonengineers, but I couldnât take many classes with them. Always read the fine print.
Even though I was at Swarthmore, I was still supposed to be a senior in high school, so colleges continued to send me applications. One was from Deep Springs College, a two-year liberal arts school located on a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in Californiaâs high desert. The school had three hundred head of cattle and twenty-six students who worked the ranch when not studying. It looked crazy, but I mentioned it to my uncle, a Russian history professor at Cornell, and he said, âDeep Springs is a great school. If they invited you to apply, you must.â Instead of trying to take liberal arts courses at the same time as engineering, I decided to go to Deep Springs for a concentrated dose. If you keep your eyes open, solutions often present themselves.
Deep Springs College was founded in 1917 by L.L. Nunn, a high-tech entrepreneur of his time. His story is a lesson in business. He was a pioneer in alternating current (AC) electricity, which powered his mine in Telluride, Colorado. In the late 1800s, there was a battle between George Westinghouse, who thought AC was best, and Thomas Edison, who preferred direct current (DC). Westinghouse was rightâAC is what we use todayâbut Edison was a brilliant if unorthodox marketeer. AC was too dangerous, Edison argued, and to prove his point, he traveled from town to town, publicly electrocuting dogs and cats. Search the Web for âedison electrocute elephantâ for an unsettling video. Edison even funded an electric chair companyâAC powered of courseâto promote the link between AC and death. L.L. Nunn convinced Westinghouse that a remote mountain mine was the perfect proving ground for this dangerous technology. It worked, and Nunn converted his mining company into a power company, electrifying mines across the rugged West.
Finding skilled workers so far from civilization was a challenge, so Nunn started a school to train electrical engineers. That sparked a lifelong interest in education, and Nunn later bought a ranch in eastern California, two valleys over from Death Valley, and started Deep Springs College there. Deep Springs combines a liberal arts education with hard physical labor, desert isolation, and student self-governance. Students select the faculty as well as the next yearâs incoming class. The isolation and small sizeâjust twenty-six studentsâcreate an intense community life. Nunn believed that ranch work helped balance intellectual pursuits. Adolescents reading Aristotle and Nietzsche can get a little full of themselves, but it is hard to take yourself too seriously when shoveling cow manure.
Ranch work can be risky. If someone gave you a dull pocket knife, pointed out a five hundred pound bull calf, and said, âJump that fence and cut off his balls,â would you do it? If you were fool enough to try, youâd probably end up with a broken arm (best case). Most people intuitively avoid foolish risk. But what if the ranch manager demonstrated the procedure and explained its importance? Castrated bull calves are easier to manage and fetch a higher price at market. Before Deep Springs, I could never have imagined performing rudimentary surgery on a touchy region of an enormous, angry beast; now Iâve done hundreds. Risk can be managed.
People are sometimes shocked that Iâve slaughtered cows and pigs for food. They say, âThatâs awfulâI couldnât do it.â But how is paying someone else to kill your food for you more moral than doing it yourself? The reality is, they could do it if they needed to. Ranch life demands self-sufficiency: it includes many jobs that you may not want to do, that you may not even be qualified to do, but when no one else is available, you do them anyway.
Years later, these lessons were surprisingly relevant in Silicon Valley start-up companies. Not the details, but the attitudes and styles of thinking.
After George Washington, Swarthmore, and Deep Springs, I was ready for a break from college. I spent the next two summers as a paid cowboy for Deep Springs. Between the two summers, I rented a room by the week in a seedy part of San Francisco and looked for work.
Short on cash, I spotted a place where you could sell your blood. What the hell, I thought, and got eight bucks twice a week for my plasma. Mom was appalled. My parents were not rich, but they were comfortable. Both came from families that had little money during the Depression, and like many from that era, they were savers. They would have taken care of me, but I wanted to make it on my own.
The state employment agency wasnât much help for landing a computer job. San Francisco wasnât as close to Silicon Valley as it appeared on the map, and the job agent knew nothing about computers except that they involved typing. She gave me a test, and I could bang out seventy words a minute, so she sent me to an insurance company where I spent the winter typing peopleâs names and diseases on index cards. Iâd rather have been shoveling shit. A winter of typing at Blue Shield gave me a very clear visionâbetter than most students haveâof why I should return to college.
I applied to Princeton and was accepted as a physics major. Even though physics had been my favorite part of electrical engineering at Swarthmore, I struggled immediately. Princeton had multiple class tracks: physics for nonmajors, for majors, and for honors. I was in the middle track and getting middling grades. Meanwhile, I was taking computer classes just for fun. I talked my way into the âcutter course,â designed to weed out students who didnât belong in computer science. The professor told me that I didnât have the right background and would not do well. Eventually he relented, and he later gave me one of only three A+ grades that he had ever handed out. When I got a programming assignment, I would rush home to start work. The problems were like fun puzzles. Physics homework was a painful grind.
Aristotle said that the secret to happiness is to find what you do well and do it. Getting a C- on a required physics course finally convinced me I was in the wrong place. I changed my major to computer science. Thank goodness for that bad grade. Had I been a tiny bit better at physics, I might be a second-rate physics teacher at a second-rate school today. My brain was not wired well for physics, but it worked great for computer science. This was before people saw computers as the path to riches. I didnât switch to computer science for the money; I switched because I loved the work.
The Secret to Success
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon .com, was my roommate for a year at Princeton. He also started as a physics major and switched to computer science. The president of Princeton told me that they were examining the room we shared for the secret to entrepreneurial success. In our senior year, we discovered a mummified mouse in an old couch that we scavenged off the street, and we hung it by a string over the entrance to the room. Perhaps that was it.
After Princeton, in 1986, I moved to Silicon Valley. RĂ©sumĂ©s are generally boring, so I decided to include âherded, branded, and castrated cattleâ on mine, if only to see whether anyone actually read the whole thing. During one interview, I watched the hiring manager read my rĂ©sumĂ©. She scanned down the page and her eyes went wide. She cracked a little smile and said, âManagement experience, I see.â
My first real job was computer programming at a two-year-old start-up called MIPS Computer Systems, which designed computer processor chips. It had about a hundred employees and was growing fast. Too fast. This was my first experience with rapid growth, and it taught me how growth can cause pain and confusion. There were always new bosses, and communication was spotty and vague. Being a programmer at a chip company put me outside the companyâs core mission. I wanted to be part of a company where my work was the focus; I wanted to be on the cutting edge. After two years, I decided to leave.
In 1988, I joined Auspex Systems as employee number seventeen. It was my first small start-up, and product development had barely begun. Our goal was to build a network storage system that was bigger, faster, and more reliable than anything on the marketâbetter, in particular, than anything from Sun Microsystems, which was the market leader.
Start-ups have a sort of pulse. You work work work: no customers and a limited supply of money. Itâs very creative and exciting because you are inventing from scratch. Eventually, hopefully, it all comes to a crescendo where you ship version 1.0. Then the creative work goes into a lull. You want to ship the exciting new features of 2.0, but first you have to do the bug fixes of 1.0.1 and the minor features of 1.1 and 1.2. But the features that matter most to customers often arenât the most exciting to design and develop. I had a knack for finding small projects that made the customerâs life better. At a trade show after the 1.3 release, we had a poster listing four new features, and three of them were things that I had thought up and developed. If you focus on customers instead of technology, that lull becomes more interesting.
I went through several bosses at AuspexâI might have been a problem employeeâbut James Lau was the boss that stuck....
