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

Accounting is the bastardization of economics. It can be puzzling to see early stage ventures focusing on P&L profitability, as that mentality can choke off growth in a hurry. You should not care much about profits early on. Instead, you care about maximizing growth while maintaining sufficient cash balances to sustain it.

This fear-based behavior can scarcely be overstated. Large enterprises consistently prioritize their buying decisions to minimize the risk of embarrassment backlash. Huge premiums are paid in the misguided name of "playing it safe." Dominant suppliers carefully cultivate and nurture this incumbent bias.

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

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

The famed Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter is usually associated with this term, but the basic idea goes back all the way to the works of Karl Marx. The notion (which has experienced a recent resurgence via Clayton Christensen's writings on disruptive innovation) is that in order to create something, you have to destroy something else in the pr

If you have aspirations to go public, you cannot do so without a predictable model that you control. It is also a way to weaken competitors. At Data Domain we hired away the best of the best from our competitors—not only did we gather strength, we weakened them at the same time. Ulysses S. Grant once said that victory is breaking the enemy's will t

Early on, when employee candidates asked us what our culture was like, we invariably said "blue collar." Not a lot of flash—if it doesn't directly aid our cause, we don't spend money on it. Extravagance was frowned upon, and becoming self-congratulatory was avoided; these things weaken the focus and muscle of the company. Setting the tone

if you don't naturally swarm to the action, you need to learn that attitude.

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