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Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#71

Post by giobox »

cat199 wrote: post #66
garganzol wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gave me a strong vibe of 80thies. Andy Warhol definitely had the influence on those chaps.

except that is way more a 60's / 70's look..

Agreed - far too "Mad Men" looking in style, color, font choices, there's nothing about this that makes me think 80's.

The response from 'ordinary' users on Twitter has been tepid at best, I guess people just want their files reliably synced, rather than "inspiring creative energy" (Dropbox's word choice, not mine!).

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#72

Post by daxorid »

product50 wrote: post #43
garganzol wrote: post #35

This is just a file sync. A good one. But 1500 employees for that? This goes way beyond my imagination.

it is an entreprise focused saas operation. 1500, most of them in sales or sales support, is justifiable.

What percentage of their revenue, would you guess, is generated by traditional sales operations?

Anecdotal, but everyone I know who uses Dropbox is an engineer or engineering organization who has a healthy distrust of salesdrones.

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#73

Post by morganvachon »

chimtim wrote: post #58
Xcelerate wrote: post #30

Naive question, but why would large companies favor leasing instead of just outright purchasing the property? It seems that when the terms of the lease are up, the leasing company has almost unlimited leverage in the next negotiation (unless the tenant company doesn't mind relocating all of its employees).

1) managing an office building is a lot of hassle. 2) startups are always growing or shrinking. no point putting so much significant capital unless it is an established in for a long haul at a location where talent is surplus. 3) if you indeed have that much capital, you can pretty much dictate what you want and get some tax benefits (amazon, second HQ) or work with a city build a new building suitable for your long-…

"the leasing company actually has limited leverage"

This can be true even at the SMB level. My employer sees only a couple of million in revenue yearly, we lease our warehouse/office space and we have more or less free reign to make any non-structural changes. If we decide to clear out a corner of the warehouse to put in more office space, we can (and we have). We just have to pay for the materials and labor. We've actually had our lease renewed on better terms over the years for being good tenants.

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#74

Post by jdavis703 »

handedness wrote: post #69
jmcgough wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's certainly cheaper places to house servers. They were probably a big cramped already, and expecting to need that space as they hire more (they aren't limited to their current job listings).

Not to say that's Dropbox's reason, but in my experience many, many large companies host servers in places that are far from being the most cost-effective option.

Bloomberg used to have (maybe they still have it) a data center at 525 Market Street, a skyscraper in the heart of the Financial District. Sometimes cost effectiveness isn't the sole option companies use, maybe it made sense for Bloomberg to have servers close to their customers.

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#75

Post by cat199 »

Chromozon wrote: post #19
disiplus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think they are shooting themselfs in the foot, a month ago after my samsung promo expired i lost my 30gb of space. the only plan they have is 1TB for 8.25eur. my whole macbook drive is 512gb, and i dont like to waste something, so paying 1tb and using only 50 feels like im paying for all those using 1tb. so i switched to hosting owncloud on my downloadbox at home, the benefit is that i can access everything downloa…

I had the same situation, and I ended up buying the 1 TB plan. I really wish they would have an intermediate tier between 10 GB and 1 TB. I would gladly pay for 100-200 GB. I use Dropbox to back up important documents but not everything I have on my machines, so I'm still using way less than the 1 TB right now.

IMHO That is the whole point..

(speaking from webhosting experience, same deal applies)

You are paying "more" for "1TB" that you won't actually use to fund the cost of people who actually do use it..

If the price was 1/10 of the TB price for 100GB, all the physical storage would be full and they wouldn't make any money since they couldn't ride the float from the overprovisioning..

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#77

Post by tome »

chimtim wrote: post #58
Xcelerate wrote: post #30

Naive question, but why would large companies favor leasing instead of just outright purchasing the property? It seems that when the terms of the lease are up, the leasing company has almost unlimited leverage in the next negotiation (unless the tenant company doesn't mind relocating all of its employees).

1) managing an office building is a lot of hassle. 2) startups are always growing or shrinking. no point putting so much significant capital unless it is an established in for a long haul at a location where talent is surplus. 3) if you indeed have that much capital, you can pretty much dictate what you want and get some tax benefits (amazon, second HQ) or work with a city build a new building suitable for your long-…

> 1) managing an office building is a lot of hassle.

Well yeah, but you can still pay someone else to do it, even if you own the property.

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#78

Post by fortyten »

selectodude wrote: post #31
fortyten wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people keep using valuable space for offices instead of affordable housing? This is exactly why SF sucks to live in. You have to live there to be close to work, but you're in competition with your damn office. Talk about screwing over your employees.

That isn't how affordable housing works. You can't will it into existence.

Right, step one is to leave the bay area.

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#79

Post by mypalmike »

a2tech wrote: post #54
garganzol wrote: post #35

This is just a file sync. A good one. But 1500 employees for that? This goes way beyond my imagination.

There’s a ton of stuff around that though. Tens of thousands of paying customers need support. Credit card teams. Data center guys. Guys to right deployment tools. Security guys to monitor the credit card system. Hacking together a proof of concept is simple, running a big business is complicated.

Yeah, it surprises me how often even tech people don't understand the compounding complexity that comes with scale. Just consider the engineering involved in this story:

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

That is just a portion of their infrastructure engineering activity. They also have product engineering - frontends, backends, mobile clients, integrations, etc.

It's not just a server under some college kid's desk.

Re: Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history

#80

Post by sp332 »

dopamean wrote: post #12

What do you think the per sq foot price is of something like this? A couple years ago I read that the average price for office space was in the high 60's. That would put this place at nearly 50 million dollars per year. Does that sound right/make sense? If so that's a pretty quick turn around for Kilroy.

It says the price for development was a bit over $500 million, so for a 10-year return, $50 million/year is about right.
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