Hi Dan,
This was a fantastic post! Possibly the best I’ve read in years!
I’m brand new to Saul’s boards, interestingly having stumbled upon them via volfan’s post on either the RB or SA ANET boards. Though a Fool member for more than a decade now, my interest in taking part on the boards had waned. I was very content to let my investments, which have done amazingly well over that time, ride. I was getting bored and starting to dabble in options, but found they leave me unfulfilled as an investor as compared to sinking my teeth into a really, really great company. Recently a friend of mine asked me to help him invest, and after making him join SA, we started having lots of chats via texting and IM, with the occasional phone call thrown in. As a result, my interest in reading the boards has picked up again, and it was my friend who asked me about ANET. And so I started digging in. And found Saul’s boards (OMG, what a goldmine of information. 10 years of subscriptions to TMF, and this board is worth every penny and more! 
And here I am reading your post today.
It reminds me of the kind of thing I used to write for the SA NFLX boards many years ago. And having dug into ANET recently, I’m finding exactly the same sort of thing with ANET that I have absolutely loved for years about NFLX. I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around the numbers. Despite being an engineer, and a math person, for some reason, the numbers don’t tell me what I need to know. And that’s the intangibles. The people, the story, the struggle. With NFLX, I knew who Reed was, I knew where he came from, I understood the companies he had led, I had used and been trained to manage some of their software. I understood the battle against the Goliath that was Blockbuster at the time, etc. I’ve been searching for another NFLX for 10 years. I found one with Amazon. I thought I had found one with GMCR, but they sold out. I thought SBUX might be one, but no, not really.
But ANET. This could the next one for me. Jayshree seems like the real deal, Andy goes back to my roots as a UNIX geek having co-founded Sun Microsystems, a company I have a very long history with, and was deeply upset they sold out to ORCL a few years ago. And it’s as that UNIX geek that makes me intuitively understand exactly what ANET has accomplished (ironically, something I was thinking about 20 years when Linux first came on the scene!). SDN is something that is desperately needed in today’s data centers. It’s what rules the networking of cloud computing in AWS. But data centers have no real way of doing this. In order to change your routing rules, or firewall filters, it’s almost always done via request to the networking group who then has to figure out exactly what you want, try it out, have you test it, go back, fiddle with it, etc. in an endless loop until they get it right.
With SDN, though, combined with Infrastructure as Code, I get to define not only my entire infrastructure in code, but now my networking as well. Routing tables, firewall filters, etc. All as lines of code in the same place as the application I may be deploying! This is already the way things are in “the cloud”. But not so in the data center, where static hardware still requires human intervention to make the majority of changes. It’s a slow, tedious, manual way of doing things and building, managing, and updating infrastructure. ANET makes my data centers look more like a cloud environment. And, as much as I love AWS, and as unbelievable as they are, there are and will always be terrestrial based data centers for a variety of ways. But developers won’t want to develop for them unless they can deploy to them in a similar manner as they do to the cloud. And that’s where the private virtual clouds come in using things like Nutanix, VMWare, or even OpenStack. And with ANET’s SDN thrown into the mix, private virtual clouds have it all!
Anyway, that’s a very long-winded way of saying Thank You! Thank you for addressing the intangibles of the personalities, the characters, THE fundamentals. I’ve always invested more based on those than I ever have on numbers, and this is the first company since NFLX and AMZN that to get me this excited to want to post anything to a TMF board in a very long time
So, Thanks!
Paul - making ANET a significant portion of his portfolio!