Q&A: Hard-driving Seagate CEO [Bill Watkins] talks about making money in storage

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? …

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