Barksdaleism

Traditionally attributed to Jim Barksdale during his tenure as Netscape CEO (1995-1999), described by former colleagues as something he said in executive staff meetings. No primary source has been located. The verbatim wording appears as the Preface epigraph in Kohavi, Tang & Xu, Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments (Cambridge University Press, 2020), in Google re:Work’s people-analytics guide, and in Christine Lagarde’s IMF speeches, but none of these supplies a primary-source citation. Former colleagues have referenced an internal “Barksdaleisms” book of Netscape-era sayings; whether this specific line appears in it has not been independently confirmed.

The first sentence is the operating rule. The second is the joke. In practice the line is shorthand for “bring data.”