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Employee #1: Dropbox

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Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#61

Post by nostrademons »

mkagenius wrote: post #37
nostrademons wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't have funding (other than YC, which at the time was $6k/founder, not nearly enough to support an employee) until right before they hired Aston. Drew had approached me about being employee #2 for DropBox, and I had lunch with him, Arash, and Aston in Feb 2008. They'd only closed the Sequoia seed round about a month before. IIUC, Aston had been officially hired the day before. I (stupidly in hindsight, but f…

Interesting example. Genuine question, had it been the opposite, if you circle back in time, would you really take that job? (Trick question: Are you less happy than you think you would have been in other case?)

Complicated question. It certainly would've been better financially, though honestly, the difference is "set for life" vs. "set for a long time", so I'm not certain it would make a material difference in my life now. Besides, I think it's fairly likely that even if I were set for life, I'd be doing something fairly similar to what I'm doing now. I think that in terms of lifestyle & personal goals during the 4-5 years I would've been at DropBox, I actually did better (I ended up folding up the startup I was working on and working for Google, and I had a relatively stress-free, enjoyable, lucrative, and personally fulfilling time at Google where I grew a lot as a person).

I do think that my reasons for not taking the job have been invalidated by future experience. My top reason was "I'm not going to leave my cofounder", and then he ended up leaving me 2 months later. My second reason was "Well, you've got a startup, I've got a startup, it is unclear which of us is actually going to succeed," and of course my startup was dead in 6 months while DropBox is now a $10B company. (Interestingly, I had a gut feeling at the time that I was turning down something important - I could tell Drew/Arash/Aston were crazy smart, and I really liked their product concept video.) But Drew actually told me "Honestly, if I were in your position - and I have been in your position - I wouldn't take the job" and he was right. The bargain we make as entrepreneurs is getting to call the shots, and the consequence of this is that sometimes we make the wrong call, and in a way it's not wrong after all because the whole point was making the call in the first place.

There's also the issue of whether DropBox would be a billion-dollar company at all if they'd hired me. I think my skillset actually duplicated Aston's to a fairly large extent, and we would've argued over technology choices (I would've pushed for Django, JQuery, and git over Pylons, Prototype.js, and Hg - the fact that these won in the wider webdev world is immaterial, just arguing over them would've cost precious time that a startup can't afford). Instead they hired some very talented MIT grads instead, and my understanding is that these engineers were responsible for things like reverse-engineering the Finder and writing the syncing algorithm that were what really contributed to DropBox's success.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#62

Post by saintzozo »

idlewords wrote: post #51
pensive_returns wrote: post #49

An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…

What is the connection between AutoAdmit and Church? I don't understand how he's relevant here.

Yes, this is very puzzling.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#63

Post by Bjartr »

marcosdumay wrote: post #42
bch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how large that friction is. I look at git, mercurial, etc as distributed version control first and foremost, and that they're more alike than different. It could be that I witnessed the popular adoption of all this via Linux going from tarballs/patches/mailing lists -> bitkeeper -> git, and have used and witnessed-the-evolution-of rcs, cvs, subversion, various DSCMs, and so my concepts of source control are…

If you are used to an "always branch" workflow, mercurial can impose a lot of friction.

Do you have anything you can point to for that friction? I'm always looking to do better than I already am and would be interested in understanding the issues here.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#64

Post by JonFish85 »

nostrademons wrote: post #61
mkagenius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting example. Genuine question, had it been the opposite, if you circle back in time, would you really take that job? (Trick question: Are you less happy than you think you would have been in other case?)

Complicated question. It certainly would've been better financially, though honestly, the difference is "set for life" vs. "set for a long time", so I'm not certain it would make a material difference in my life now. Besides, I think it's fairly likely that even if I were set for life, I'd be doing something fairly similar to what I'm doing now. I think that in terms of lifestyle & personal goals during the 4-5 years…

"It certainly would've been better financially, though honestly, the difference is "set for life" vs. "set for a long time", so I'm not certain it would make a material difference in my life now"

Let's not forget that DropBox hasn't exited yet, and in fact may be in a very tricky position. As much as it's fun to look at "I'd have had 0.75% of $10bn, that's $75m!", it's rather unlikely that you'd see that money. Maybe they can pull it off, but it's also possible that they are in a bit of a tight spot where they're over-valued, which can absolutely ruinous to employee options. They have to prove to the market that they're much more valuable than Box, which has a head start on them in that regard.

I'm not sure I'd view it as that clear-cut. If you walked away from your previous company with a life-changing amount of money, there's a very solid chance you were better off there than at DropBox, purely from a financial perspective. I'm not trying to be a jackass, I'm just trying to say that they haven't exited yet, and you can't really compare!

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#65

Post by hoov »

_RPM wrote: post #23
samfisher83 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His dad went to harvard so I am guessing he grew up pretty well off.

Yep. That explains how he was able to focus full time on Dropbox then. He must have always had a trampoline to bounce him back up should he fail. I know it was funded from the beginning most likely, but there had to have been a time before it was funded.

I've been thinking about how to respond to this for a little while, because I'm a bit biased and I don't want to give away to much information about Drew's personal life.

I lived with Drew through college and a bit after. The thing that grew into Dropbox was started in an apartment that I lived in while Drew and I were working at a different startup.

While I would say that I regret not being in the financial position to quit my job and help Drew out early on, I don't think he was able to do it because of his privilege. I also want to call out that I'm struggling justifying that last statement, because I know what a privilege being white, straight, and upper-middle class in America is. That privilege totally helped getting into MIT (by virtue of going to a good high school and so many other things). But, I'm pretty sure he didn't rely on his parents for cash. He probably just stole my leftovers out of the fridge. :)

The fact of the matter is that he's scrappy and smart. During college, we were both presented with an opportunity to make some side cash. Drew took more advantage of it than I did, and it was smart of him. He banked his own cash and lived cheap. Maybe he graduated with less debt than I did, and maybe that helped, but I think that would be the only leg up that he had.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#67

Post by nostrademons »

JonFish85 wrote: post #64
nostrademons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complicated question. It certainly would've been better financially, though honestly, the difference is "set for life" vs. "set for a long time", so I'm not certain it would make a material difference in my life now. Besides, I think it's fairly likely that even if I were set for life, I'd be doing something fairly similar to what I'm doing now. I think that in terms of lifestyle & personal goals during the 4-5 years…

"It certainly would've been better financially, though honestly, the difference is "set for life" vs. "set for a long time", so I'm not certain it would make a material difference in my life now" Let's not forget that DropBox hasn't exited yet, and in fact may be in a very tricky position. As much as it's fun to look at "I'd have had 0.75% of $10bn, that's $75m!", it's rather unlikely that you'd see that money. Maybe…

I assume there have been secondary stock sales. It's pretty common these days for relatively liquid secondary markets to spring up around tech unicorns. The fact that they aren't "public" doesn't mean that you can't sell; it just means you can't sell to ordinary people. Markets treat regulation as damage and route around it.

Re: Employee #1: Dropbox

#69

Post by marcosdumay »

Siecje wrote: post #56
marcosdumay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercurial supports only a subset of the use cases of git, while adding no exclusive functionality. It is true that it is the subset that 90+% of the people need. But there are network effects on VCS, making git a clearly superior choice.

What doesn't Mercurial support?

From the top of my mind, rebase and amend. There's probably more.
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