"Boom and Bust: Thriving Through Major Business Cycles"

Dave Hitz, NetApp Founder and Executive Vice President
Wednesday, November 4, 2009, 4:00 pm, Engineering 2 Building, Room 180, Simularium
Hosted by Stephen Bourdow, Director Engineering Development

Abstract

Having been ranked #1 on FORTUNE magazine 2009 "Best Companies to Work For"
List, NetApp makes for a great case study for Silicon Valley tech companies.
Join us when Dave Hitz, co-founder and executive vice president at NetApp,
shares his insights on growing a company from 3 to over 8,000 people and the
major business cycle NetApp had to go through to get there - from the
jack-of-all-trades mentality of a start-up, to the tumultuous period of the
dot-com boom and bust, and finally to a mature enterprise company. He'll
also share stories and anecdotes from his new book: "How to Castrate a Bull:
Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business".

This talk will be webcast via UCSC CITRIS at: mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/ucsc

Biography

Dave Hitz and James Lau founded NetApp in 1992, with a desire to simplify
storage the way Cisco simplified networking. Hitz and Lau believed that
general-purpose computing systems were too complex, so they built dedicated
devices called appliances. These appliances were designed to handle one
thing well: data storage.

Prior to 1992, Hitz worked as a senior engineer at Auspex Corporation, an
enterprise storage solutions provider, where he was responsible for file
systems and microkernel design. He also held engineering positions at MIPS
Computer, focusing on file system and I/O subsystem design for the System V
kernel development effort. Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz
worked as a cowboy, gaining valuable management experience by herding,
branding, and castrating cattle. Hitz holds a bachelor's degree in computer
science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.

As executive vice president, Dave Hitz is responsible for the future strategy and direction of NetApp.

This event is sponsored by the Storage Systems Research Center