9 ms·

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

131 points by aorshan 15y ago

mtogo 15y ago
In related news, Dropbox employees were surprised to find that the new building's locks could be opened with any key and that despite the landlord's Terms of Service, janitors and other building staff can in fact open and view private containers and documents belonging to employees.
- JoachimSchipper 15y ago
  Come on, that's just mean.
- funkah 15y ago
  That's a great point, Dropbox totally had a security bug that one time.
  - dmbass 15y ago
    In my estimation, if their system was decently designed, instead of granting anyone access to everything, nobody should have been granted access to anything if there is an authentication problem. Can you possibly imagine a worse system than they currently use (that still attempts to provide security)?
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      How do you know what they "currently used"? Do you really think their authentication really defaults to "yes" still?
    - funkah 15y ago
      Depends on what you keep in there. For a lot of people, losing access to their documents would probably be worse than the (very small) risk of someone else seeing them. But anyway I don't think a discussion of Dropbox's security model is very germane here.
  - vogonj 15y ago
    the security bug was a lack of authentication that rendered Dropbox nearly useless for its core purpose of securely storing files, that got pushed to production and _stayed there for multiple hours_. giving Dropbox some guff for it is completely reasonable.
rednaught 15y ago
Hiring based on plan compared to need. Does all of this crazy funding raise anyone else's hackles? Maybe it's just that I'm not in Silicon Valley or SF. Update: Perhaps it is just the signaling of going from 65 to 400 that bothers me. I like Dropbox's service and agree they are doing well. Is the mention of 400 employees meant to be a signal for future investors, those interested in working there or perhaps other competitors? A change from 65 to 400 employees is not a single hop but requires quite a bit to fall into place according to plan.
- sabat 15y ago
  I don't know if this is all that crazy. Ambitious, yes, but it's tempered compared to the '90s. Dropbox is doing very well and wants to try and do very, very well.
Spyro7 15y ago
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 incredible. Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well Dropbox is magic to most of the people that I have introduced it to. I know that there are other solutions out there that do similar things to what they do, but I have never really been able to find one that just clicks with so many people regardless of technical ability.
- rednaught 15y ago
  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 address your implementation of the product. Security through simple ignorance of a known deficiency is just disappointing. Maybe it only affects 1 out of 10 users who trust the safety of their stored password lists or similar documents, but businesses hopefully are more demanding. And just a note...I do like Dropbox and use it everyday(for non-sensitive files).
  - qq66 15y ago
    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.
    - rednaught 15y ago
      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...
dreamdu5t 15y ago
Great to hear. I'm glad to know Dropbox is here to stay. Just remember to keep the service simple. Don't fall into the feature pit!
- bronson 15y ago
  In other words, keep 250 of those 400 employees idle!
Sukotto 15y ago
Would someone break down for me what Dropbox needs all those people for? Is Dropbox starting some big new project that can't be handled by the current number of employees?
MikeCapone 15y ago
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 about this is that I'm reading the book by Google employee #59, and Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees. Just not sure what Dropbox can do with 400+ since their product is a lot simpler and they're not dealing with datacenters, though maybe it makes sense if these people are mostly doing marketing and sales.
- pitdesi 15y ago
  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)
  - imjk 15y ago
    Also, don't forget about the copious amounts of manpower necessary for a proactive customer support team.
- qq66 15y ago
  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 these candidates coming in the door... now you need accountants to make sure that all of these people get paid on time...
  - abcd_f 15y ago
    > There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running This part is beyond awesome.
staunch 15y ago
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?
- dagw 15y ago
  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.
  - arctangent 15y ago
    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.
rada 15y ago
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.
- runevault 15y ago
  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.
  - rada 15y ago
    Submit it to the votebox. It's open to user submissions and comments.
    - andrewmcveigh 15y ago
      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-file-extension https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2385/option-to-exclude-by-fi...
      - runevault 15y ago
        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.
- frossie 15y ago
  read/write permissions for shared files/folders Yeah, there's is a lot more that Dropbox can do with sharing, and it really expands the usage past the "backup my stuff in the cloud" core, without necessarily entering feature-itis territory. The real issue that concerns people is that 65 is a small company, 400 is a medium company, and not every tech outfit has successfully managed that kind of transition. It's the kind of size where technical management starts mattering as much as technical ability - and good technical management is notoriously hard to hire for. I do wish Dropbox all the best though, I love their service.
ghshephard 15y ago
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 of legal issues, support issues, infrastructure, etc... (B) is going to require an entirely new model of sales - SEs, RFP writers, Marketing, Salespeople, Finance people working in many markets, channels, etc... 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. The challenge comes when you start charging for these services and/or take on the corporate customers - if you run it ala CraigsList - you let the community police itself, and just hire a core infrastructure team, call it a day. Companies that start actively marketing their product, pick up an enormous number of bodies, and, of course, the finance/hr/it/management/executive teams required to support those bodies.
- Sukotto 15y ago
  I find it humorous that (otherwise highly intelligent, and well informed) members of HN are asking "What do they need all these people for" I'm one of those who asked that question. The way I become better informed is to acknowledge my ignorance, then ask questions in the hopes of reducing it. You make some good points. I would feel better about your answer if you didn't seem so condescending though.
- ry0ohki 15y ago
  Eventually profit? Last I heard they were on track to make $100 million this year.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > 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.
LeafStorm 15y ago
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.
code_duck 15y ago
Dropbox has some rather tough competition ahead of them from Amazon, Google and Microsoft at the least - they know they'll need to be rather sturdy to stay the leading provider of convenient cloud storage for consumers. Best of luck!
iradik 15y ago
how many of those 400 are going to be engineer hires?
windexh8er 15y ago
Anybody still using Dropbox needs a head check. They've made too many mistakes that showcase a broken undercarriage. Dropbox is the epitomy of succesful failures in my book. only the unknowing masses will stick with them for lack of understanding.
andrewcross 15y ago
Dropbox is one of the few services I use that I would be seriously upset if I couldn't use again.

131 points by aorshan 15y ago

mtogo 15y ago

In related news, Dropbox employees were surprised to find that the new building's locks could be opened with any key and that despite the landlord's Terms of Service, janitors and other building staff can in fact open and view private containers and documents belonging to employees.

JoachimSchipper 15y ago
Come on, that's just mean.
funkah 15y ago
That's a great point, Dropbox totally had a security bug that one time.
- dmbass 15y ago
  In my estimation, if their system was decently designed, instead of granting anyone access to everything, nobody should have been granted access to anything if there is an authentication problem. Can you possibly imagine a worse system than they currently use (that still attempts to provide security)?
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    How do you know what they "currently used"? Do you really think their authentication really defaults to "yes" still?
  - funkah 15y ago
    Depends on what you keep in there. For a lot of people, losing access to their documents would probably be worse than the (very small) risk of someone else seeing them. But anyway I don't think a discussion of Dropbox's security model is very germane here.
- vogonj 15y ago
  the security bug was a lack of authentication that rendered Dropbox nearly useless for its core purpose of securely storing files, that got pushed to production and _stayed there for multiple hours_. giving Dropbox some guff for it is completely reasonable.

rednaught 15y ago

Hiring based on plan compared to need. Does all of this crazy funding raise anyone else's hackles? Maybe it's just that I'm not in Silicon Valley or SF. Update: Perhaps it is just the signaling of going from 65 to 400 that bothers me. I like Dropbox's service and agree they are doing well. Is the mention of 400 employees meant to be a signal for future investors, those interested in working there or perhaps other competitors? A change from 65 to 400 employees is not a single hop but requires quite a bit to fall into place according to plan.

sabat 15y ago
I don't know if this is all that crazy. Ambitious, yes, but it's tempered compared to the '90s. Dropbox is doing very well and wants to try and do very, very well.

Spyro7 15y ago

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 incredible. Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well Dropbox is magic to most of the people that I have introduced it to. I know that there are other solutions out there that do similar things to what they do, but I have never really been able to find one that just clicks with so many people regardless of technical ability.

rednaught 15y ago
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 address your implementation of the product. Security through simple ignorance of a known deficiency is just disappointing. Maybe it only affects 1 out of 10 users who trust the safety of their stored password lists or similar documents, but businesses hopefully are more demanding. And just a note...I do like Dropbox and use it everyday(for non-sensitive files).
- qq66 15y ago
  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.
  - rednaught 15y ago
    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...

dreamdu5t 15y ago

Great to hear. I'm glad to know Dropbox is here to stay. Just remember to keep the service simple. Don't fall into the feature pit!

bronson 15y ago
In other words, keep 250 of those 400 employees idle!

Sukotto 15y ago

Would someone break down for me what Dropbox needs all those people for? Is Dropbox starting some big new project that can't be handled by the current number of employees?

MikeCapone 15y ago

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 about this is that I'm reading the book by Google employee #59, and Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees. Just not sure what Dropbox can do with 400+ since their product is a lot simpler and they're not dealing with datacenters, though maybe it makes sense if these people are mostly doing marketing and sales.

pitdesi 15y ago
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)
- imjk 15y ago
  Also, don't forget about the copious amounts of manpower necessary for a proactive customer support team.
qq66 15y ago
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 these candidates coming in the door... now you need accountants to make sure that all of these people get paid on time...
- abcd_f 15y ago
  > There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running This part is beyond awesome.

staunch 15y ago

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?

dagw 15y ago
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.
- arctangent 15y ago
  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.

rada 15y ago

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.

runevault 15y ago
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.
- rada 15y ago
  Submit it to the votebox. It's open to user submissions and comments.
  - andrewmcveigh 15y ago
    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-file-extension https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2385/option-to-exclude-by-fi...
    - runevault 15y ago
      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.
frossie 15y ago
read/write permissions for shared files/folders Yeah, there's is a lot more that Dropbox can do with sharing, and it really expands the usage past the "backup my stuff in the cloud" core, without necessarily entering feature-itis territory. The real issue that concerns people is that 65 is a small company, 400 is a medium company, and not every tech outfit has successfully managed that kind of transition. It's the kind of size where technical management starts mattering as much as technical ability - and good technical management is notoriously hard to hire for. I do wish Dropbox all the best though, I love their service.

ghshephard 15y ago

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 of legal issues, support issues, infrastructure, etc... (B) is going to require an entirely new model of sales - SEs, RFP writers, Marketing, Salespeople, Finance people working in many markets, channels, etc... 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. The challenge comes when you start charging for these services and/or take on the corporate customers - if you run it ala CraigsList - you let the community police itself, and just hire a core infrastructure team, call it a day. Companies that start actively marketing their product, pick up an enormous number of bodies, and, of course, the finance/hr/it/management/executive teams required to support those bodies.

Sukotto 15y ago
I find it humorous that (otherwise highly intelligent, and well informed) members of HN are asking "What do they need all these people for" I'm one of those who asked that question. The way I become better informed is to acknowledge my ignorance, then ask questions in the hopes of reducing it. You make some good points. I would feel better about your answer if you didn't seem so condescending though.
ry0ohki 15y ago
Eventually profit? Last I heard they were on track to make $100 million this year.
jpdoctor 15y ago
> 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.

LeafStorm 15y ago

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.

code_duck 15y ago

Dropbox has some rather tough competition ahead of them from Amazon, Google and Microsoft at the least - they know they'll need to be rather sturdy to stay the leading provider of convenient cloud storage for consumers. Best of luck!

iradik 15y ago

how many of those 400 are going to be engineer hires?

windexh8er 15y ago

Anybody still using Dropbox needs a head check. They've made too many mistakes that showcase a broken undercarriage. Dropbox is the epitomy of succesful failures in my book. only the unknowing masses will stick with them for lack of understanding.

andrewcross 15y ago

Dropbox is one of the few services I use that I would be seriously upset if I couldn't use again.