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

Becoming a value-led organization doesn't happen automatically. We imported somebody else's culture with every person we hired, and therefore had to undo a bunch of stuff. We called it "re-programming." People learn culture based on what behavior they observe around them, good, bad, or somewhere in between.

People can instantly finger a phony. Let them know who you really are, warts and all—show your humanity, your passions, your likes and dislikes. What do you feel strongly about? Can they still remember what you said a week later? Are you leaving a room with more energy than when you entered it? Not sure? Then you didn't. For most of us, it is work

I found this advice priceless. You might as well spend all your time on winning—nothing else matters. Of course, a good board wants you to do exactly that. It obviously doesn't mean you should blindly bat away all opinions coming at you, but just try them on for size and merit, and go from there. Keeping good council is strength; caving in on perce

no strategy is better than its execution. When you get better at execution, the strategic issues will crystallize more as well.

Yet, there comes a time when the venture must pivot from conserving resources to applying them rapidly, as fast as you know how to do effectively—when that cross-over time comes is not always obvious. The irony is that most ventures seem to spend too much early on, and not enough later on when they could grow faster and pay for it. The question bec

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.

So, creative destruction is an axiom of business: you are not going to grow much without exacting a proportional decrease in business somewhere else. You better know whose livelihood you're going to mess with.

I staked out the Greater Boston Area and made more sales calls in the Northeast than anywhere else. Why? It was the home of our principal competitor at the time, EMC. We wanted to show our people we could beat them in their own backyard.

Start with the application or use case, not the technology. Don't make it an after-thought. Ass-backwards, it is awfully hard to successfully recover from a technology-led venture that cannot locate its target.