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

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121–130 of 162 posts

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

#121
post #118

It baffles me why software companies spend so much money on leasing prime real estate in one of the most expensive markets, v.s. pursuing a more remote workforce strategy.

From my experience, the "creators"(developers, marketers, writers etc) in a company tend to favor remote work, while the "money men"(VCs and salespeople) tend to favor office space. Remote work only stands a chance if it's introduced in the early stages of a company when the creators have more power than the money men. In the latter stages of a company, the money men wrestle control of the company and going remote becomes less and less of a possibility.

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

#122
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I'm following.

I just meant that if you use "Dropbox for teams" you can upload more than one TB of data. And you pay more, but by default the prices on that page are "billed yearly" for some reason.

Even just switching from yearly to monthly on his current plan would allow him to give them more money for what he's currently using. Yearly is $99 while monthly the same plan would be $120.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don't put servers in office space. The infrastructure requirements are drastically different.

I mean its not unheard of for a company that size to build out a hardware lab on site in what over office space they're leasing. My previous employer did that through 3 office moves (+10 racks of test gear).

Racks of test gear are far from a data center.

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

#124

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).

You can also run into an issue like Zynga: they bought an office for a lot of money, had a downturn, and then were in the precarious position of having their office worth more than them. https://medium.com/halting-problem/zyngas-offices-now-worth-...

I don't know if that's actually true. Halting problem seems to be a satirical blog: https://medium.com/halting-problem/tesla-announces-new-home-...

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

#125
I would love to work in San Francisco - if I could afford to live there. Working for Dropbox sounds like a dream job for a guy like me, yet merely thinking about the commute to such an office, given an engineering salary capacity, makes me feel just right where I am (tip it's not even in the US)

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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…

The ability to modify stuff structurally (which isn’t really structurally but rather just the non-load bearing walls) is pretty standard in commercial leasing. Your employer isn’t getting anything special.

More simply, commercial spaces usually come empty, and the tenant is required to handle "fit and finish."

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

#127

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 don't understand; I have far more stored in Dropbox than on my computer's hard drives or even the sum of hard drive space among my household computers. The Selective Sync features allows me to do this pretty easily. Every once in a while, I plug in an external drive to ensure I have a physical backup of Dropbox -- that is the irony, the Cloud is my main storage, my external drive is the backup of that; not vice-ver…

well i have only one macbook, and not so much data to backup/sync. if i had a use for 1tb of backup i would subscribe to the package. right now with less < 50GB i dont feel like.

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

#128

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…

Unless it is backed up somewhere outside of your house, it doesn't really exist. One fire takes it all out.

some of it exists inside google photos/drive. i know the risk and am willing to take it.

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

#129
post #113

Inevitably, someone will make a comment about how Dropbox is overstaffed and could do this with ~10 employees since 'they just sync files'. To save you the trouble, consider that they also need to hire support, sales, marketing, and operations staff beyond the engineers and designers it takes to keep the product(s) running, especially as they shift into an enterprise-focused business.

While we do hear this a lot — "rsync has been around for 20 years" "I could write that in a weekend" etc etc — it's easy to forget about all the work Dropbox is doing on top of their file system, like building Paper as a competitor to Google Docs.

I agree -- and that's simply their 'big bets' if we give them credit for trying to do other things. The reality is EVEN their core business which, if we simplify to 'rsync that just works for people who have no idea what a terminal is', actually does require substantial overhead at their scale.

In other words, while I appreciate that it's nice to fantasize about the single hacker making $$$ off a side project they built over a weekend, reality is far more nuanced. There exists these people, to be sure, but they are far and few between. Most of the time, big companies valued in the billions of dollars actually do need headcount to help keep that business running.

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

#130
post #26

Here's the gallery of renderings... Not exactly an architectural masterpiece. http://theexchangesf.com/gallery/

My wife worked in an iconic and eye catching office building designed by a big name architect. She said it was by far the worst office building she has ever worked in.
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