Boom and Bust: Thriving Through Major Business Cycles

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.

About the Speaker

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.