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Dropbox S-1

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Re: Dropbox S-1

#261

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #250
throwaway93192 wrote: post #247

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good…

It never was and never will be. We like to pretend that employees are so fairly compensated, and yet I had to fight tooth and nail to get a mere 2% equity. The thought of an equity stake closer to 10% was almost unheard of. But you bet I'd have had an impact large enough to justify those returns, in the sense of http://paulgraham.com/equity.html Except... It's not quite that simple. Most people don't care. The vast m…

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox S-1

#262

Post by maxaf »

stanfordkid wrote: post #256
throwaway93192 wrote: post #247

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good…

The guy majored in physics and computer science. There's nothing wrong with compensating people who have proven they can scale things (organizations) commensurate to their record.

I find it difficult to believe that any sort of scaling of the org could have occurred in the span of six months thanks to the efforts of a single individual.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#263

Post by wglb »

kccqzy wrote: post #258

Congrats to everyone at Dropbox! It has come far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I was hoping someone would find that. It is interesting how many negative and middlebrow comments were on that submission. As there are this one as well.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#264

Post by tetrazine »

anonytrary wrote: post #249
ironjunkie wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you state, this comment equals to: "I like Drew, so let me make a donation of 30$ to Dropbox" That's why I like economics so much. A lot of irrational behavior come simply from the fact that humans are usually terrible to understand the underlying economic transactions taking place. One of my favorite irrational behaviour is the one in which people value object they got more than the equivalent price in which they…

> One of my favorite irrational behaviour is the one in which people value object they got more than the equivalent price in which they could buy//sell that object. Art is also a good example. Art is globally unique, so what does it even mean for art to be worth $X? Seems like the only "value" of art is the price the next guy is willing to pay. The price is undefined until it's not. On the other hand, if I have a fak…

This is actually a subject dealt with widely in the humanities. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a good start, for instance. It does seem odd for art to be valued by the market, but there are clear ways to construct standard valuation (based on utility, etc) around it.

  some computer and printer somewhere can easily reproduce the piece if I ever need it again [...] well-defined manufacturing cost
This is not as straightforward as some might think! Some people agree with you. Some don't. "Fake" is a spectrum as well. Is it a reproduction of an original work, or an original work falsely attributed to a particular artist? In the second case, if the quality is high and scholarship has emerged around that work, is it "less valuable" to own after it is revealed as fake (for one individual, not at market prices) or is it in a sense more interesting? Is it perpetrated to be real or simply a print? Even if it's an authentic creation of the artist, was the work been authorized outside of their canon in a less official way? What about photographs, and later editions of them (by either the artist themselves, their estate or family, a dealer, etc)? Check out Richard Prince and his "decertifications" of paintings.

Startups offering blockchain solutions to this landscape, of course, are emerging. But they face the same problem everyone does in that market: how can physical assets, and their movements, be indisputably registered to a blockchain?

Re: Dropbox S-1

#265

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

wglb wrote: post #263
kccqzy wrote: post #258

Congrats to everyone at Dropbox! It has come far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I was hoping someone would find that. It is interesting how many negative and middlebrow comments were on that submission. As there are this one as well.

HN is generally very bitter. People here are quick to find faults.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#266

Post by ryanburk »

maxaf wrote: post #262
stanfordkid wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy majored in physics and computer science. There's nothing wrong with compensating people who have proven they can scale things (organizations) commensurate to their record.

I find it difficult to believe that any sort of scaling of the org could have occurred in the span of six months thanks to the efforts of a single individual.

not saying value is right or wrong. but that is the present value of a stock award that vests over time. this is valuing his expected contribution and whatever it took to get him to join versus previous company / other opportunities. to be paid out over 4 years.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#267

Post by maxaf »

ryanburk wrote: post #266
maxaf wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it difficult to believe that any sort of scaling of the org could have occurred in the span of six months thanks to the efforts of a single individual.

not saying value is right or wrong. but that is the present value of a stock award that vests over time. this is valuing his expected contribution and whatever it took to get him to join versus previous company / other opportunities. to be paid out over 4 years.

Good point: considering the time frame, the comp does look like a forward looking statement.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#268

Post by bad_user »

jest3r1 wrote: post #255
bad_user wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is moving that direction (Proton Mail, Tutanota) No it doesn't. I've never heard of Tutanota, but Proton Mail is hardly evidence of anything. In fact the attack vector for email is very different when compared with other channels, as for email I'm not afraid of my email provider as I'm afraid of hacking attempts. Yes, I value security over privacy for email. Therefore I would trust Gmail more than I would tru…

> Curious, which competition? I clearly outlined many competitors similar to Dbox that offer end-to-end encryption: (SpiderOak, Tresorit, Sync.com, pCloud). NextCloud (open source self-hosted Dropbox alternative) also just launched end-to-end encryption. >Therefore I would trust Gmail more than I would trust Proton Mail. Google: don't expect privacy when sending to Gmail: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/a…

SpiderOak has a high price, has been very slow in my tests and their client doesn't work well. There have been reports of throttling on large uploads. Plus they've been stagnating. All of this is a symptom of them not being popular enough I'm sure, but that's not a good sign.

pCloud doesn't do 2-factor authentication yet, which is freaking important for your non-encrypted files at least. I asked them about it because I could not believe it and they said it's "on their roadmap". But ALAS my trust in them dropped to zero. The chances of implementing reliable encryption while not getting basic security straight are next to none.

Plus you cannot trust encryption that is not peer reviewed ;-)

I haven't tried NextCloud, but ownCloud is shit. It's really slow, could not handle the several hundreds of GBs I have stored and there have been situations of users losing their data. Plus I'm not inclined to host my own stuff, because that would get very expensive.

Actually you haven't mentioned the only real alternatives ...

(1) Resilio Sync (https://resilio.com) which I use, in combination with a cheap VPS with 2 TB of storage on it (time4vps.eu in case you're wondering, not affiliated)

(2) Syncthing (https://syncthing.net), the open source alternative, which is OK, but hard to configure and Resilio does stuff out of the box, like encrypted folders

And I'm using Resilio Sync in addition to Dropbox. Well, I've actually migrated to Google Drive (on GSuite) this month, due to Dropbox Support pissing me off, but that's another story.

But the interesting part, which should be clear after a single day of usage, is that all Dropbox alternatives, except for Resilio and Syncthing, fail at the most basic task that users want, which is to reliably synchronize your files. Even the big guys, like GDrive or OneDrive, have an incredibly broken sync by comparison.

Just the other day I noticed for example how Google Drive can start deleting files from your local hard drive, only God knows why, in order to re-download them. And before that I dropped OneDrive because their client was freezing on my Mac, not to mention a couple of months back they weren't doing the one month file versioning thing, which is retarded in the age of ransomware.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#269

Post by throwaway93192 »

maxaf wrote: post #267
ryanburk wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not saying value is right or wrong. but that is the present value of a stock award that vests over time. this is valuing his expected contribution and whatever it took to get him to join versus previous company / other opportunities. to be paid out over 4 years.

Good point: considering the time frame, the comp does look like a forward looking statement.

Every employee's stock package is forward looking in that same way, no?

Re: Dropbox S-1

#270

Post by rdlecler1 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #250
throwaway93192 wrote: post #247

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good…

It never was and never will be. We like to pretend that employees are so fairly compensated, and yet I had to fight tooth and nail to get a mere 2% equity. The thought of an equity stake closer to 10% was almost unheard of. But you bet I'd have had an impact large enough to justify those returns, in the sense of http://paulgraham.com/equity.html Except... It's not quite that simple. Most people don't care. The vast m…

Or you could try to start your own company. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
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