TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story

In hindsight, it helped explain how some of our breakthroughs came about: they ended up betting on Moore's law, the microprocessor subsystem, and avoiding the entrenched bottlenecks in the storage subsystem

Fslootman@me.com

Ratcheting up customer focus assumes you are tuned in to a specific application or process.

software development actually suffers from diseconomies of scale: the more engineers, the slower it goes.

The channel is a powerful, entrenched fixture in the industry, and one that demands respect. If you don't bring the channel in, they will bring in your competition.

You simply cannot invest intelligently in revenue generation if you do not understand how to ramp effectiveness and make the underlying economics work. It should be obvious that a sales force that loses money will only accelerate cash burn—in the absence of deep pockets, not a game to be played for very long.

Trust your team—nothing else scales.

A challenged product sector is obviously a much better starting point than attacking a category that is favorably regarded. When picking a fight, don't seek out the most formidable opponent.

Startup CEOs are more like plow horses than racehorses. A racehorse gets pampered all week, to be taken out of the barn for a few minutes to race on Saturday afternoon; startup CEOs live 12+ hours a day behind the plow. It doesn't feel so glamorous when you get home at 11 at night and you need to get up at 5 am to catch a flight out of town.