Boom and Bust: Thriving Through Major Business Cycles April 21, 2009

NetApp is a great case study for Silicon Valley tech companies and was just ranked #1 on the "Best Companies to Work For" List by FORTUNE magazine for 2009. Join us when Dave Hitz shares his insights on growing a company from 3 people to over 8,000 - going through every major cycle in business-from the Jack-of-All-Trades mentality of a start-up, through the tumultuous period of the dot-com boom and bust, and finally to a mature enterprise company.

He'll also share stories from his new book: How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business.

Speaker Bio:
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: 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.

$45 members - $65 non-members (pre-registration).

Official Website: http://nawbo-sv.org