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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

#41

Post by arctangent »

dagw wrote: post #18
staunch wrote: post #10

Why does Dropbox need 400 employees!? Really high headcounts are the guaranteed path to eventual mediocrity. Why do almost no companies see this and prevent it?

My guess is they're moving towards the high end corporate market, which is where the really big bucks are. And to break into that market you need a sales and support team on an entirely different scale than what you need for the consumer market.

I hope that you are right. Where I work our IT department has banned the use of Dropbox because in theory it would allow sensitive data outside of the organisation. However, they've not been able to provide any kind of alternative. My team could in theory do this but the politics we'd need to wade through would be horrendous. If Dropbox were to offer a way to run their service entirely inside your own firewall (with support) then I am sure that my company (and many others) would happily pay huge amounts of money for it.

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

#43

Post by runevault »

andrewmcveigh wrote: post #35
rada wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah it was requested long before I even started using it, they just haven't bothered to DO it yet, no matter how many people ask.

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

#44

Post by jpdoctor »

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…

> Regardless - 400 employees for a $5 Billion company is on the absolute low end of where they will be if they actually justify that (rumored) valuation.

This is backwards thinking reminiscent of the bubble. "I want my company to be worth $5B, therefore I need 400 people working for it."

The lesson, which apparently was not sufficiently relearned, is that a public company should be worth about 1-3x revs or 13-18x earnings.

Ah well, another bunch of 401k money will go to money heaven just like it did last time. On the plus side, it will be taken by technologists who apparently have no compunction about relieving financially illiterate people of their retirement cash.

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

#45

Post by dabent »

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…

> Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees.

But now Google has over 20,000 employees and is still hiring. It's possible that Dropbox is building on its core product and developing entirely new products to amaze us and entice dollars out of our wallets.

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

#46

Post by dstein »

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 wild guess is they're going after the enterprise market.

Dropbox would need to expand in some big ways to provide a secure "all-cloud" filesystem that enterprises could use to replace their own data centers with.

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

#48

Post by jallmann »

qq66 wrote: post #21
rednaught wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Tarsnap. http://www.tarsnap.com/

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

#49

Post by doctoboggan »

danenania wrote: post #36
Jarred wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

Those large single-platform client-based OSes have not produced a cloud OS because it would be too radical of a change for their current business model.

Some company with the explicit goal of developing a cloud based OS could do it today if they wanted to. Monetizing it might be a different question though.

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

#50

Post by qq66 »

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.

From an engineering manager that helped scale Facebook: http://www.quora.com/LikeALittle-startup/Why-do-you-need-gol...
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