NetApp founder: Creating a start-up is like castrating bulls

NetApp founder Dave Hitz shares his life with NetApp and bulls in his new book

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NetApp founder and executive vice president, Dave Hitz, recently published a book with an intriguing title -- How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business -- that screamed out "pick me up and read." I spoke to Hitz about the book, why he felt compelled to write it, his experiences of castrating bulls and founding NetApp.

What compelled you to write the book?
 
I've always enjoyed writing. I have a history of writing. I felt like it's very unusual for one person to see the broad scope of what I've seen as a result of starting NetApp. I'm not the only person to be at a company through start-up, to hyper-growth, to multibillion-dollar company. It's pretty rare -- it's not a whole lot of people who end up on that journey and I thought it gave me an interesting perspective on what those different stages are like. So, I wanted to capture that.

Listen to a podcast interview with Dave Hitz (9:55)
 
NetApp now has 8,000 employees and 10,000 customers and it's hard to talk to all of them. It just seems like something that would be interesting to a lot of people. The thing that was very rewarding to me as I started working on it and giving people early drafts, was I realized that it had broader potential appeal than I had been thinking. One person said 'My daughter is thinking of going to business school, but she doesn't understand what it's like being in business, can I give her your book?' A couple of people asked 'Can my Mom read it because she never understood what I did.' One Mom sent it back saying 'This is so exciting because I'm the president of the condo co-op where I live and I've been trying to apply your management techniques to the co-op.'
 
I started realizing that the experiences I'd had and the things I've learned from Tom Mendoza [NetApp vice chairman] and Dan Warmenhoven [NetApp chairman and CEO] resulted in a pretty cool education for an engineer who never got an MBA or any such formal education. I thought it would be fun for people to read.
 
Tell us a little bit about your experience castrating bulls and what that has to do with NetApp.
 
One of the funny things about doing startup work is when I was at NetApp there were aspects of it that reminded me of when I worked on a cattle ranch. I went to a strange school named Deep Springs College that has 26 students on a cattle ranch. The founder had this theory that smart kids can sometimes get a little full of themselves -- they are reading Plato and Nietzsche -- his idea was that if you send them off during the afternoon to go shovel cow manure, it kind of puts them down at notch or too. That was a very valuable experience for me.
 
In situations when you are with 20 other guys on a ranch in the middle of the desert for instance, you probably don't know how to do the task and the expert in it is nowhere near, so you just dive in, do your best, read a book, and/or talk to someone who has at least done it before. That seemed like the kind of approach needed to make a start-up successful. In start-ups especially, it’s a dive in attitude. The reason I chose 'How to Castrate a Bull' as the title, is because one of the book's themes is taking risks. You might screw up some of the things you dive into, which isn't a big deal. However, there are some things like going into a pen and cutting the balls off a bull calf, that need to be carefully planned out before you jump in. For instance, it's best to attempt this when they are young, but you still to be mindful that there is a risk of breaking an arm or something. It's one thing to take risk, but it's another to approach the how and the when. I thought the idea of castrating a bull captured that risk theme.

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NetApp founder and executive vice president, Dave Hitz, recently published a book with an intriguing title -- How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business -- that screamed out "pick me up and read." I spoke to Hitz about the book, why he felt compelled to write it, his experiences of castrating bulls and founding NetApp.

What compelled you to write the book?
 
I've always enjoyed writing. I have a history of writing. I felt like it's very unusual for one person to see the broad scope of what I've seen as a result of starting NetApp. I'm not the only person to be at a company through start-up, to hyper-growth, to multibillion-dollar company. It's pretty rare -- it's not a whole lot of people who end up on that journey and I thought it gave me an interesting perspective on what those different stages are like. So, I wanted to capture that.

Listen to a podcast interview with Dave Hitz (9:55)
 
NetApp now has 8,000 employees and 10,000 customers and it's hard to talk to all of them. It just seems like something that would be interesting to a lot of people. The thing that was very rewarding to me as I started working on it and giving people early drafts, was I realized that it had broader potential appeal than I had been thinking. One person said 'My daughter is thinking of going to business school, but she doesn't understand what it's like being in business, can I give her your book?' A couple of people asked 'Can my Mom read it because she never understood what I did.' One Mom sent it back saying 'This is so exciting because I'm the president of the condo co-op where I live and I've been trying to apply your management techniques to the co-op.'
 
I started realizing that the experiences I'd had and the things I've learned from Tom Mendoza [NetApp vice chairman] and Dan Warmenhoven [NetApp chairman and CEO] resulted in a pretty cool education for an engineer who never got an MBA or any such formal education. I thought it would be fun for people to read.
 
Tell us a little bit about your experience castrating bulls and what that has to do with NetApp.
 
One of the funny things about doing startup work is when I was at NetApp there were aspects of it that reminded me of when I worked on a cattle ranch. I went to a strange school named Deep Springs College that has 26 students on a cattle ranch. The founder had this theory that smart kids can sometimes get a little full of themselves -- they are reading Plato and Nietzsche -- his idea was that if you send them off during the afternoon to go shovel cow manure, it kind of puts them down at notch or too. That was a very valuable experience for me.
 
In situations when you are with 20 other guys on a ranch in the middle of the desert for instance, you probably don't know how to do the task and the expert in it is nowhere near, so you just dive in, do your best, read a book, and/or talk to someone who has at least done it before. That seemed like the kind of approach needed to make a start-up successful. In start-ups especially, it’s a dive in attitude. The reason I chose 'How to Castrate a Bull' as the title, is because one of the book's themes is taking risks. You might screw up some of the things you dive into, which isn't a big deal. However, there are some things like going into a pen and cutting the balls off a bull calf, that need to be carefully planned out before you jump in. For instance, it's best to attempt this when they are young, but you still to be mindful that there is a risk of breaking an arm or something. It's one thing to take risk, but it's another to approach the how and the when. I thought the idea of castrating a bull captured that risk theme.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.