Don Valentine has died

If you want to learn more about Don and how influential his work has been, I recommend listening the recent Acquired episode about Don and Sequoia [0].

[0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/sequoia-capital-part-1

One of his great talks at Stanford: “Target Big Markets” https://youtu.be/nKN-abRJMEw

Very insensitive....

Don was a pretty amazing guy. He was the chairman at NetApp when I was there and told me I was crazy to be pushing NetApp to use an untested AMD processor (Opteron) for the high end filer of the time.

What resulted was a solid discussion that ranged from how reliable AMD was to how important Intel was to Netapp, and how to measure the "betterness" of one technology over another. I really respected that he could be opinionated and listen at the same time, always willing to cede to a well reasoned argument about how he might be wrong about something. He was also really good at poking holes in an argument so I found myself on the defensive a lot!

Great share. I remember the inflection point that Opteron was. Essentially, it killed Sparc, PA-RISC, Alpha, Itanium, etc. That was a unique moment in time. Hearing a personal anectode between someone relatively junior at the time, and a legend, is very interesting to me. It was, really, the moment Linux/x86 "won". That 64 bit hurdle defined where we are today.

At the time, it inspired me to make a pitch that "RISC was dead", despite it's technical superiority. Kind of a VHS vs Betamax moment. My pitch worked out, and was probably the defining moment of my career.

I'm pretty happy that AMD is, again, riding high. Underdog stories are more rare these days. And you had a not insignificant part in that.