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Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

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Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#31

Post by abcd_f »

qq66 wrote: post #23
MikeCapone wrote: post #9

Maybe I'm just an ignorant not-involved-in-a-startup person, but what is Dropbox doing with these 400+ employees? To me Dropbox seems like it's a pretty simply and mature product feature-wise. Have they announced that they're expanding into other products? I just hope they won't bloat Dropbox the way that some of these one-main-feature softwares were inflated in the past (ICQ, etc). edit: I guess what got me thinking…

Any organization at scale just needs a lot of people to deal with keeping the wheels on the bus. There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running, a team to handle billing problems, fraudulent payments, a sales team to go after corporate customers, now you have so many people in the office that you need inhouse HR... oh look, now you need a recruiter to start keeping all t…

> There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running

This part is beyond awesome.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#32

Post by meterplech »

rednaught wrote: post #20
Spyro7 wrote: post #6

I know that they have taken some heat for security issues of late, but, frankly, I love this company and their product and I am happy to see them doing well. The magic of Dropbox is that it strikes just the right balance between simplicity and power. When my mother deleted a book that she had been writing for almost a year (and its backup), I was able to show her how to retrieve deleted documents from Dropbox. It was…

It's unfortunate when most are so mesmerized by great but incomplete magic that the magic creators are unwilling to conjure something even more magical to include safety like client-side encryption. Reworded for the downvotes: Don't punish users because most may not even be aware of the lack of security in Dropbox by not using client-side encryption. If it's too difficult to explain, then it's time to go back and add…

Maybe that's what they are going to use the intended 340 new hires to build. I think that a much higher priced enterprise version that included client-side encryption & much more storage than currently available could be a game-changer for the business. Wouldn't be surprised if they were already working on it

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#33

Post by ry0ohki »

ghshephard wrote: post #29

I find it humorous that (otherwise highly intelligent, and well informed) members of HN are asking "What do they need all these people for" - DropBox is getting a rumored $5B valuation - which implies, no, requires they start to ramp up both their revenue and, eventually, profit. That's going to require either (A) a LOT more customers, or (B) More profitable Customers. (A) is just going to be a huge headache in terms…

Eventually profit? Last I heard they were on track to make $100 million this year.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#34

Post by cfgvjkljhgfb »

rednaught wrote: post #25
qq66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client-side encryption severely worsens the economics of Dropbox, and not everyone needs it. If you want that you're perfectly entitled to go build your own competitor, which will have higher costs.

It's already been built such as Spideroak and Wuala. Dropbox could capture more of the market and even concerned businesses if they make this even as much as a simple configurable option. If the data deduplication costs higher because of client-side encryption, then charge me the commodity price of storage for that option. Not everyone needs it but some do...

Customers that want encryption - aren't the sort of customers you want.

"We need encryption for our business data" = indemnify us against any financial loss, PR disaster and legal implications of us losing any data, however we manage to do it.

ps. did we mention we need it to be acceptable to our credit card processor, our military customers, the data we hold about peoples health records.

pps. and this is all shared with our European subsiduary so it has to be acceptable to all their rules as well.

ppps. sorry did we mention china ?

We will happily pay $5/month for this simple encryption service

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#35

Post by andrewmcveigh »

rada wrote: post #14
runevault wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only feature I give a crap about personally is blocking extensions I don't want to be caught. I like my vim to create the files it needs while editing, and I kinda like them in folder, but I don't want dropbox syncing and unsyncing them.

Submit it to the votebox. It's open to user submissions and comments.

It's already been submitted... it's quite popular. My top feature need for dropbox.

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2385/option-to-exclude-by-fi...

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#36

Post by danenania »

Jarred wrote: post #28
rada wrote: post #12

To all those wondering about 400+ new hires, you can view and vote on the proposed featureset at dropbox.com/votebox. Some popular requests: - sync folders outside of the My/Dropbox folder - read/write permissions for shared files/folders - remote destroy/purge if laptop is stolen - streaming audio/video - windows mobile support - reseller/branding program - internationalization ... and much more.

This is just some speculation as to why I think Dropbox is going to be something awesome (it's good right now, but not awesome). I'm not really in any position to make these suggestions (or expect them to be followed), so I'm going to more than likely sound crazy. I don't really know what the vision behind Dropbox is, but (in my own opinion) it should be the place where people's personal files are stored. From there,…

It definitely seems to be the direction things are converging, but what you are talking about is much more than file storage, it's a full scale cutting edge multi-platform cloud OS. While it is definitely conceivable, if you look at how far the various single-platform client-based OSes still have to go, it sheds some light on how monumentally complex the task truly is. Especially considering that these OSes have companies many, many times larger and more experienced than dropbox backing them.

File storage is certainly a critical piece of the puzzle and I could see them making some major inroads towards standardizing the cloud, but I think the full breadth of your vision is still pretty far off. Fun to speculate on though for sure.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#37

Post by madiator »

abcd_f wrote: post #31
qq66 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any organization at scale just needs a lot of people to deal with keeping the wheels on the bus. There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running, a team to handle billing problems, fraudulent payments, a sales team to go after corporate customers, now you have so many people in the office that you need inhouse HR... oh look, now you need a recruiter to start keeping all t…

> There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running This part is beyond awesome.

No he is right. They also need to continuously innovate before somebody else, for example, comes up with say a better storage scheme.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#38

Post by rokhayakebe »

rednaught wrote: post #20
Spyro7 wrote: post #6

I know that they have taken some heat for security issues of late, but, frankly, I love this company and their product and I am happy to see them doing well. The magic of Dropbox is that it strikes just the right balance between simplicity and power. When my mother deleted a book that she had been writing for almost a year (and its backup), I was able to show her how to retrieve deleted documents from Dropbox. It was…

It's unfortunate when most are so mesmerized by great but incomplete magic that the magic creators are unwilling to conjure something even more magical to include safety like client-side encryption. Reworded for the downvotes: Don't punish users because most may not even be aware of the lack of security in Dropbox by not using client-side encryption. If it's too difficult to explain, then it's time to go back and add…

Found this through Google. Client Side Encryption for DB http://getsecretsync.com/ss/

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#39

Post by LeafStorm »

If you look at iCloud and Ubuntu One, both of those services have Dropbox-esque file storage as one of their features, but they also store and sync things like contacts, settings, and other pieces of data. Dropbox may be planning on doing something like that, with the added advantage that they aren't binding their stuff to a specific OS or platform.

Re: Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ Employees

#40

Post by imjk »

pitdesi wrote: post #15
MikeCapone wrote: post #9

Maybe I'm just an ignorant not-involved-in-a-startup person, but what is Dropbox doing with these 400+ employees? To me Dropbox seems like it's a pretty simply and mature product feature-wise. Have they announced that they're expanding into other products? I just hope they won't bloat Dropbox the way that some of these one-main-feature softwares were inflated in the past (ICQ, etc). edit: I guess what got me thinking…

My guess is that atleast some of those people will be involved in building out a sales and marketing team and going after larger corporate customers. While their current product is mature, they have a long way to go in adoption (though it may not seem that way on HN)

Also, don't forget about the copious amounts of manpower necessary for a proactive customer support team.
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