Company-building memoir 2009

How to Castrate a Bull

Dave Hitz and Pat Walsh

A candid, unusually useful founder memoir whose hard-won heuristics deserve application, not worship.

Durable idea

Separate risks that reward improvisation from risks that demand preparation, then keep revising the distinction as the company grows.

01 / Orientation

The book in one sitting

How to Castrate a Bull is Dave Hitz’s account of learning to build NetApp, framed by the ranch work he did at Deep Springs College and written with Pat Walsh. Its route runs from improvised beginnings through funding, product definition, an IPO, hypergrowth, the dot-com collapse, and the problems of becoming a mature enterprise supplier. That range is the book’s chief asset. Hitz is not reconstructing a clean founding myth from the finish line; he keeps returning to moments when the founders lacked money, people, managerial experience, or even confidence that they understood the market.

The title supplies the governing distinction. Some unfamiliar jobs can be learned by trying, observing, and correcting. Others have consequences severe enough that bravado is a bad substitute for instruction. Hitz turns that distinction into a practical theory of entrepreneurial risk: preserve room for experiments, know which mistakes are survivable, and prepare carefully where the downside is irreversible. His Computer History Museum oral histories reinforce the point. NetApp began with consulting income still running, a deadline for proving the file-server idea, and a deliberately smaller, simpler product assembled from commodity hardware.

The method is memoir rather than management science. Short stories carry lessons about founders yielding authority, making decisions, hiring for the next scale, clarifying a product’s value, and changing strategy. The strongest example is NetApp’s debate over adding storage-area-network capability. Hitz opposed it; customers wanted it; the company broadened its market and was less exposed when internet customers collapsed. This is good founder material precisely because the founder admits that conviction and correctness are different things.

The book is most valuable for operators crossing stages. A decision process that works among three founders can fail at forty people, and a manager who can lead ten people may not be ready for the organization those ten will soon hire. Hitz makes those transitions concrete without pretending that polish created the company.

The limitation is equally clear: one successful company cannot establish a universal law. Anecdotes selected after survival carry hindsight and survivorship bias, while NetApp’s storage market, financing environment, and timing were unusually favorable. Readers should therefore treat the lessons as prompts for diagnosis, not recipes. Even so, the conversational voice, willingness to show confusion, and full-company lifecycle make this a better operating companion than a triumphalist startup story. Its durable contribution is a temperament: improvise without romanticizing ignorance, listen when the market disproves you, and keep changing the way you manage before growth changes it for you.

02 / Argument map

What it is really arguing

Risk has different categories

Entrepreneurship requires action under uncertainty, but not every uncertainty should be handled with the same appetite for improvisation.

In the book: Hitz contrasts ranch jobs learned by making do with handling a bull calf, where preparation and experienced guidance materially change the downside.
Why it matters: Classify decisions by reversibility and cost of failure before deciding whether to experiment quickly or prepare deeply.

Resource scarcity can sharpen the first product

A startup’s constraints can force a simpler value proposition and a narrower technical design.

In the book: Hitz told the Computer History Museum that NetApp aimed to make file servers smaller, cheaper, and easier to use than refrigerator-sized systems, using commodity-era PC hardware and mostly proprietary software.
Why it matters: Ask which complexity customers are paying to escape, then spend scarce resources only on the differentiator.

The management job changes before the title does

Rapid growth repeatedly makes yesterday’s adequate organization too small for tomorrow’s work.

In the book: In the NetApp oral-history panel, the leaders describe forcing managers to project a doubling team and identify who could lead the next layer rather than merely today’s group.
Why it matters: Plan roles against the next organizational scale and make capability gaps explicit while there is still time to develop or hire.

Customer evidence can overrule founder identity

A founder’s attachment to the original niche is not a sufficient reason to reject an adjacent market.

In the book: Hitz opposed NetApp’s move into SAN products, but customer demand and broader enterprise exposure won the argument; the resulting diversification helped during the dot-com crash.
Why it matters: When a strategic debate becomes ideological, return to customer willingness to pay and portfolio concentration.

03 / Critical ledger

The case for it / The case against it

The case for it

A rare full-lifecycle view

The same narrator covers formation, financing, scaling, a public-company crash, and maturity, letting readers see how useful practices expire as context changes.

Candor makes the lessons portable

Hitz names errors, confusion, and lost arguments. That lowers the hero worship and makes the decision conditions easier to compare with another company.

The case against it

A sample size of one

NetApp’s survival cannot show which practices caused success rather than merely accompanying a strong product, market timing, capital access, and luck.

Anecdote outruns mechanism

The ranch parallels are memorable, but they do not provide a repeatable test for deciding when improvisation is wise, when expertise is mandatory, or when a strategy has truly failed.

04 / Lines to keep

Memorable lines

“A lot of the choices you make are just real compromises based on you don’t have enough money, you don’t have enough people, you don’t really know what you’re doing so you make a lot of guesses.”
— Dave Hitz, Computer History Museum oral history (opens in a new tab)

“In this economy, if a customer would like to give you money, I recommend you take it.”
— Don Valentine, recalled by Dave Hitz in the NetApp oral-history panel (opens in a new tab)

“I strongly believed in our technology. I felt we had really good solid technology. In terms of how it could be a business was a lot more confusing to me.”
— Dave Hitz, NetApp oral-history panel (opens in a new tab)

05 / Outside reading

What other readers noticed

Brown reads the ranch story as a startup lesson in learning unfamiliar work while distinguishing ordinary, recoverable mistakes from risks that require deliberate planning.

Michael Brown, Bowery Capital

Crump expected another storage-industry book but found a conversational account whose unusual value comes from Hitz remaining on the executive team through startup, explosive growth, the 2001 crash, and maturity.

George Crump, Network Computing

06 / Application

Put it to work

Sort the risks

List one current decision that is cheap to reverse and one that is not. What different preparation does each deserve?

Manage the next doubling

If your team doubled twice, which current role would break first and who could lead the new layer?

Let the customer arbitrate

Which strategic belief would you reconsider if three important customers offered to pay for the alternative?

07 / Continue

If this stayed with you

The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz

It extends the candid operator-memoir form into layoffs, executive hiring, and the decisions that resist tidy frameworks.

08 / Method

Sources and editorial note

This is an interpretive reading aid, not a substitute for the original work. Review takeaways are attributed interpretations; short quotations are linked to public sources where available.