Bill Watkins is a hard driver. The CEO of Seagate, the $13 billion hard disk drive maker based in Scotts Valley, Calif., is racing to take advantage of the boom in storage as digital media spreads everywhere: to iPods, home servers, game consoles, handhelds — not to mention desktops and laptops.
The Texas-raised son of an oil man has been CEO since 2004. He joined the company in 1996 after Seagate bought rival disk drive maker Conner Peripherals. Watkins, a former enlisted soldier with Army, views morale as critical. That’s why he started “Eco Seagate,” a week-long endurance program in New Zealand, way back in 2000. At a cost of $2 million a year, he puts 200 employees through the grueling adventure program – which culminates in a rock-climbing, mountain biking, and kayaking endurance race. Fortune just posted a story on the most recent trek.
He recently talked loudly above the din at the Foreign Cinema restaurant in San Francisco with a group of journalists. He is outspoken, crass, and he pulls no punches. His style invokes the same gregariousness of Seagate founder Al Shugart, who favored Hawaiian shirts and ran his dog for Congress. What doesn’t quite come through here is the cackling, almost maniacal laughter that punctuates most of Watkins’ sentences. These days, he is glad that storage is on the upswing because everybody needs it to store all of their music, videos, pictures and games. Here’s an edited transcript of the interview.
VB: Is storage a commodity?
BW: It is and it isn’t. We thought it was a commodity. But I’ll tell you, in the last four years, the most money in electronics has been made by storage companies. Intel’s growth is slowing down. In storage, the profits and revenues are up. It’s because storage is everywhere, not just in online businesses. You have a terabyte of storage in your home now, or you soon will. Look at an iPod. The music has to be stored somewhere on servers. That uses our enterprise hard drives. And guess what? It has to be backed up. More drives. Then the user downloads it to a desktop or notebook. More storage. And they need more backup. Then they transfer it to a hard drive on the iPod. It’s all about content being delivered digitally. It creates an ecosystem of storage devices. The center of that is all hard drives. A seven-megabyte song is stored a lot of times. Video is even more data. Then you take it, mash it up, and put it on MySpace or on YouTube. The number of petabytes being stored is consistently up 60 percent a year. That’s not even counting new applications, like on a storage device in the car.
VB: So digital media is driving growth?
BW: It’s going to go on and on and on. Look at all of those bootleg copies of concerts and music recordings out there. They’re getting digitized.
VB: That would be crazy if all of the bootlegged recordings got uploaded and stored again.
BW: This is going to be phenomenal. If all content in the world gets digitized, then you’ll have multiple copies. You will have a copy. It’s going to sit in the server cloud. It’s going to get backed up. That’s our Kool-Aid and we’re grateful for it. I talked about this bootlegged concert thing in the Wall Street Journal. You wouldn’t believe it but three billionaires emailed me and asked me about digital recordings of Grateful Dead concerts. I said I didn’t have it. But it’s amazing how social media gives a new life to these things.
VB: There are a lot of Deadheads out there in the corporate world. I guess the Grateful Dead were the start of social media?
BW: I don’t think I would have made it through my teenage years without the Grateful Dead. People emailed me and said they’ve got Dead tapes. That’s just a small thing. But it goes back to social media. The Dead had a huge social following.
VB: You’re thinking of putting storage servers into homes?
BW: If you look at the ’90s, it was all about digitizing the work place. Now it’s about digitizing the home. How do you bring this to a unified system. We think the handheld has a little storage. The car has a little. But the home has a lot. You carry it with you.
VB: Is Seagate going to manage that experience?
BW: Yes, that’s the ideal. We’ll become a big software play. We will put our software on the storage to manage it for you.
VB: What’s your thinking behind Eco Seagate?
BW: It’s a way to break down barriers and get to know people. We’ve got more than 50,000 employees. The only way you can handle the scale of a company like ours is structure and function. How do you break down those barriers and bring back human nature into our company? I had a discussion with a guy on one trip. I told him that the most important thing in my life was to get my daughters through high school without them becoming pregnant. That guy said it was his No. 1 goal too. We may be a billion dollars different in income but we are really just the same humans. I’ve done 10 of these Eco Seagate trips now. The stories from those trips about teamwork come back into our culture. I want to create the right stories in the right atmosphere so those people come back and use those stories at work. We’re creating the culture of our company this way. Read the rest of this entry »
