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

TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story
Author: Frank Slootman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2011-05-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9780615484068

Silicon Valley has been birthing renegade technology companies for the better part of a century, a storied lineage that traces from Stanford's Fred Terman to the Varian brothers' Klystron amplifier, from the hallowed garage of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard to the bold "traitorous eight" who fled Shockley Labs to form Fairchild Semiconductor. These companies, to be sure, broke new science and engineering ground-yet their most lasting legacy may well be their pioneering approach to business itself. They blazed a path that led to Intel, Apple, Oracle, Genentech, Gilead, Sun, Adobe, Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, and many, many others.What causes a fledgling company to break through and prosper? At the highest level, the blueprint is always the same: An upstart team with outsized ambition somehow possesses an uncanny ability to surpass customer expectations, upend whole industries, and topple incumbents. But how do they do it? If only we could observe the behaviors of such a company from the inside. If only we were granted a first-person perspective at a present-day Silicon Valley startup-cum-blockbuster. What might we learn? This document-the story of Data Domain's rise from zero to one billion dollars in revenue-is your invitation to find out. For anyone curious about the process of new business formation, Tape Sucks offers a provocative, ripped-from-the-headlines case study. How does a new company bootstrap itself? What role does venture capital play? Why do customers and new recruits take a chance on a risky new player? Frank Slootman, who lived and breathed the Data Domain story for six years, offers up his clear-eyed, "first-person shooter" version of events. You're with him on the inside as he and his team navigate the tricky waters of launching a high-technology business. You'll feel-deep in your gut-the looming threat of outside combatants and the array of challenges that make mere survival an accomplishment. You'll catch a glimpse of an adrenalin-fueled place where victories are visceral, communication wide open, and esprit de corps palpable. The upshot is that the principles of the early entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are alive and well. Their straightforward ideas include employee-ownership, tolerance for failure, unfettered meritocracy, faith in the power of technology breakthroughs, a preference for handshakes and trust over contracts and lawsuits, pragmatism, egalitarianism, and a belief in the primacy of growth and reinvestment over dividends and outbound profits. Tape Sucks is an honest, informed perspective on technology wave riding. It allows you to observe a high-growth business at close range and get an unvarnished picture of how things really work.

Rise of the Data Cloud

Rise of the Data Cloud
Author: Frank Slootman
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-12-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1728373069

The rise of the Data Cloud is ushering in a new era of computing. The world’s digital data is mass migrating to the cloud, where it can be more effectively integrated, managed, and mobilized. The data cloud eliminates data siloes and enables data sharing with business partners, capitalizing on data network effects. It democratizes data analytics, making the most sophisticated data science tools accessible to organizations of all sizes. Data exchanges enable businesses to discover, explore, and easily purchase or sell data—opening up new revenue streams. Business leaders have long dreamed of data driving their organizations. Now, thanks to the Data Cloud, nothing stands in their way.

Amp It Up

Amp It Up
Author: Frank Slootman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1119836417

Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller The secret to leading growth is your mindset Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world's most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time. Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model—and they don’t need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day. Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them. Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.

Ask a Manager

Ask a Manager
Author: Alison Green
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0399181822

From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together

Blockchain Chicken Farm

Blockchain Chicken Farm
Author: Xiaowei Wang
Publisher: FSG Originals
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0374721254

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Product Management Essentials

Product Management Essentials
Author: Aswin Pranam
Publisher: Apress
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1484233034

Gain all of the techniques, teachings, tools, and methodologies required to be an effective first-time product manager. The overarching goal of this book is to help you understand the product manager role, give you concrete examples of what a product manager does, and build the foundational skill-set that will gear you towards a career in product management. To be an effective PM in the tech industry, you need to have a basic understanding of technology. In this book you’ll get your feet wet by exploring the skills a PM needs in their toolset and cover enough ground to make you feel comfortable in a technical discussion. A PM is not expected to have the same level of depth or knowledge as a software engineer, but knowing enough to continue the conversation can be a benefit in your career in product management. A complete product manager will have a 360-degree understanding of user experience and how to craft beautiful products that are easy-to-use, with the end user in mind. You’ll continue your journey with a walk through basic UX principles and even go through the process of building a simple set of UI frames for a mock app. Aside from the technical and design expertise, a PM needs to master the social aspects of the role. Acting as a bridge between engineering, marketing, and other teams can be difficult, and this book will dive into the business and soft skills of product management. After reading Product Management Essentials you will be one of a select few technically-capable PMs who can interface with management, stakeholders, customers, and the engineering team. What You Will Learn Gain the traits of a successful PM from industry PMs, VCs, and other professionals See the day-to-day responsibilities of a PM and how the role differs across tech companies Absorb the technical knowledge necessary to interface with engineers and estimate timelines Design basic mocks, high-fidelity wireframes, and fully polished user interfaces Create core documents and handle business interactions Who This Book Is For Individuals who are eyeing a transition into a PM role or have just entered a PM role at a new organization for the first time. They currently hold positions as a software engineer, marketing manager, UX designer, or data analyst and want to move away from a feature-focused view to a high-level strategic view of the product vision.

Out Of Control

Out Of Control
Author: Kevin Kelly
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2009-04-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 078674703X

Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

Surveillance Valley

Surveillance Valley
Author: Yasha Levine
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1610398033

The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built. In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not outgunning the enemy, but using new information technology to understand their motives and anticipate their movements. This idea -- using computers to spy on people and groups perceived as a threat, both at home and abroad -- drove ARPA to develop the internet in the 1960s, and continues to be at the heart of the modern internet we all know and use today. As Levine shows, surveillance wasn't something that suddenly appeared on the internet; it was woven into the fabric of the technology. But this isn't just a story about the NSA or other domestic programs run by the government. As the book spins forward in time, Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden. With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news -- and the device on which you read it.

The Googlization of Everything

The Googlization of Everything
Author: Siva Vaidhyanathan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-03-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520952456

In the beginning, the World Wide Web was exciting and open to the point of anarchy, a vast and intimidating repository of unindexed confusion. Into this creative chaos came Google with its dazzling mission—"To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible"—and its much-quoted motto, "Don’t be evil." In this provocative book, Siva Vaidhyanathan examines the ways we have used and embraced Google—and the growing resistance to its expansion across the globe. He exposes the dark side of our Google fantasies, raising red flags about issues of intellectual property and the much-touted Google Book Search. He assesses Google’s global impact, particularly in China, and explains the insidious effect of Googlization on the way we think. Finally, Vaidhyanathan proposes the construction of an Internet ecosystem designed to benefit the whole world and keep one brilliant and powerful company from falling into the "evil" it pledged to avoid.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 658
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1610395700

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.