I recently had the pleasure of reading a draft of Dave Hitz’ new book (title intentionally withheld, so as not to play the spoiler).  Dave is one of the co-founders of NetApp (nee’ Network Appliance), and he wrote the book, at least in part, to give current NetApp employees a view into the early days of the company.  At recent growth rates, I suspect that substantially more than half of the employees have been with the company fewer than five years and missed not only the startup days, but the turnaround days, post-2001.

Like potential customers, I get “pitched” a lot.  And one of the things I’ve noticed is that many startups try to cast a very broad net.  A good friend recently pitched me on his new company, and he went through a long litany of all of the things their product could do better than NetApp or EMC or any of the other major storage contenders.  As Dave explains, in the early days of NetApp, they could have tried to cast a broad net, too.  But instead, they did something more akin to spear fishing.  They focused on solving one particular problem for one narrow set of individuals (notice, I said individuals, not companies), who had a very particular job to do.  From there, they sought out other customers who had similar problems.  Only several years later, after they had generated significant sales, did they start layering on the features and begin making the “we can do it all for you” pitch to a broader audience.  EMC used a similar approach, when they first took on IBM in the mainframe computer storage business.  They solved a particular problem for a particular set of customers.  And today, both companies are leaders and fierce competitors in the storage and information management industry, doing much better than other companies that tried to do it all from day one. 

Watch for Dave’s book later this year.  I recommend it for any founder of a company in the early stages of growth.