Surviving Economic Down-turns and Thriving June 18, 2009

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.

What You Will Learn and Take Away from this Session:
--How NetApp survived the last economic downturn when 70% of your customers were going out of business and how you could apply those lessons today
--Examples of how to frame critical decisions and make them - examples of how NetApp made some very difficult decisions that translated into new 'eras' for the company
--How the strat planning process changed over the evolution of NetApp

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. Hitz holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.

Dave's recent book, not to be missed: How To Castrate A Bull -

www.howtocastrateabull.com

$25 members, students, affiliates, $35 all others. At door $35 members, students, affiliates, $45 all others.

Official Website: http://www.strategyplus.org/chapters/NorthernCalifornia.php