
Dropbox taking entire building in Mission Bay – biggest lease in city history - minimaxir
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Dropbox-taking-entire-building-in-Mission-Bay-12267749.php
======
awad
Inevitably, someone will make a comment about how Dropbox is overstaffed and
could do this with ~10 employees since 'they just sync files'. To save you the
trouble, consider that they also need to hire support, sales, marketing, and
operations staff beyond the engineers and designers it takes to keep the
product(s) running, especially as they shift into an enterprise-focused
business.

~~~
dx034
I just wonder why all of them have to be in the most expensive part of the US.
Tech talent might be more accessible in SF but support staff and marketing
shouldn't be. Having offices in a cheaper location would not only save the
company money but also be potentially nicer for employees. It would probably
cut most people's commute time and increase cost-adjusted salaries.

~~~
codecamper
Isn't that the part that is built on landfill & so the buildings will simply
sink into the earth during the big one?

~~~
vnchr
So you're saying Dropbox is going to drop...into the ocean?

~~~
e40
No, the landfilled earth will turn into a liquid, briefly, during a big
earthquake and the buildings will sink into them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction)

~~~
vnchr
So it’s going to sync?

------
olivermarks
I'm local and have a memory...unhappily this reminds me of the end of the dot
com boom...

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/san-francisco-real-
estate-l...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/san-francisco-real-estate-
looking-like-it-did-before-dotcom-crash-in-2000-2015-11-20)

------
Xcelerate
Naive question, but why would large companies favor leasing instead of just
outright purchasing the property? It seems that when the terms of the lease
are up, the leasing company has almost unlimited leverage in the next
negotiation (unless the tenant company doesn't mind relocating all of its
employees).

~~~
chimtim
1) managing an office building is a lot of hassle.

2) startups are always growing or shrinking. no point putting so much
significant capital unless it is an established in for a long haul at a
location where talent is surplus.

3) if you indeed have that much capital, you can pretty much dictate what you
want and get some tax benefits (amazon, second HQ) or work with a city build a
new building suitable for your long-term needs (apple).

4) not much inventory that meets your needs in SF market because the property
prices are always going up.

5) the leasing company actually has limited leverage. finding another tenant
esp. the size of dropbox is not easy. you can bin pack other tenants but you
lose lot of money until all new tenants move in.

~~~
morganvachon
" _the leasing company actually has limited leverage_ "

This can be true even at the SMB level. My employer sees only a couple of
million in revenue yearly, we lease our warehouse/office space and we have
more or less free reign to make any non-structural changes. If we decide to
clear out a corner of the warehouse to put in more office space, we can (and
we have). We just have to pay for the materials and labor. We've actually had
our lease renewed on better terms over the years for being good tenants.

~~~
IgorPartola
The ability to modify stuff structurally (which isn’t really structurally but
rather just the non-load bearing walls) is pretty standard in commercial
leasing. Your employer isn’t getting anything special.

~~~
jjoonathan
Yes, because even a SMB has a lot of leverage compared to, say, a residential
leasee. I believe that was the point.

~~~
dx034
It's more the duration of the lease. If you'd rent a house on a fixed contract
for 10 years, landlords would also allow changes under the condition that
they're reversed at the end.

Interestingly that's exactly the case in Germany. Home ownership there is one
of the lowest in the world so that tenants stay in one place for longer. It's
normal for tenants to change apartments as they like during the tenancy.
Landlords don't care as long as it's in a good state at the end of the
tenancy.

------
matt_wulfeck
Still one of the only providers of its kind to provide a Linux client. I wish
them success in their expansion.

~~~
alexnewman
What competitor of dropbox has no linux client?

~~~
jbermudes
Google Drive

~~~
imglorp
[https://github.com/vitalif/grive2](https://github.com/vitalif/grive2)

~~~
ISL
"It simply downloads all the files in your Google Drive into the current
directory. After you make some changes to the local files, run grive again and
it will upload your changes back to your Google Drive."

That's a far cry from

    
    
       mount ~/gDrive/
    

with company-level support.

------
keypusher
> File-sharing giant Dropbox has signed the biggest lease in San Francisco
> history, an agreement for 736,000 square feet, the entirety of a new office
> complex under construction in the southwest corner of Mission Bay. [...] The
> space will represent an expansion for Dropbox, which occupies 182,000 square
> feet at 333 Brannan St., a building Kilroy also owns, as well as 115,000
> square feet at 345 Brannan. Dropbox currently has about 1,500 employees and
> 102 job openings in San Francisco, according to its website.

So, they currently have ~300k square feet. They are expanding to a space with
736k square feet. And they have 102 job openings posted, which they were all
filled would expand their workforce by less than 10%. What exactly do they
need all this new space for? Even if they have huge plans to somehow expand
their filesharing business, doubling their workforce at this point seems quite
optimistic.

~~~
tehwebguy
Servers?

~~~
jmcgough
There's certainly cheaper places to house servers. They were probably a big
cramped already, and expecting to need that space as they hire more (they
aren't limited to their current job listings).

~~~
handedness
Not to say that's Dropbox's reason, but in my experience many, many large
companies host servers in places that are far from being the most cost-
effective option.

~~~
jdavis703
Bloomberg used to have (maybe they still have it) a data center at 525 Market
Street, a skyscraper in the heart of the Financial District. Sometimes cost
effectiveness isn't the sole option companies use, maybe it made sense for
Bloomberg to have servers close to their customers.

~~~
solatic
The financial sector isn't the best counter-example. Every little bit of
latency matters in HFT, so there's probably a competitive advantage to running
servers there compared with the countryside.

------
boulos
I mentioned this to someone, but Salesforce had already publicly disclosed at
least 714,000 square feet in 2014 for the (now) Salesforce Tower with rumors
they'd already expanded another 200k [1]. I don't think it's a particularly
meaningful number either way, as what matters (if any of it does) is total
square footage in the city not in a single building / lease.

[1]
[https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/05/24/sal...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/05/24/salesforce-
tower-wework-leases-crm-bxp-hines.html)

~~~
pavlakoos
Exactly - isn't Salesforce's deal bigger?

------
salqadri
Here is the original Dropbox YC application from 2007:
[https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox/](https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox/)

~~~
orb_yt
Is there a directory of these?

~~~
salqadri
No this is the only one I am aware of. It is listed here as a sample
application:
[https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/](https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/)

------
kaishiro
This is tangential, and I'm not a designer so this is just one dev's opinion,
but I found Dropbox's latest rebrand (dropbox.design) to be a bizarre
departure for them. It was so off the wall I just assumed it was some sort of
parody site until I realized it was official. I'm in no place to determine if
it's "good" or "bad", but it's certainly an...interesting direction, if
nothing else.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
For my taste dropbox.design is borderline ugly. It is definitely not pretty.
The colors look like they were picked in MS Paint.

[https://www.dropbox.com](https://www.dropbox.com) is in the same style and I
find it looks very unprofessional, even if it is targeted to regular users. It
looks like an art gallery?
[https://www.dropbox.com/business](https://www.dropbox.com/business) on the
other hand looks clean and trustworthy.

~~~
mkohlmyr
Dear God I can't believe they've gone and done that to their consumer brand.
It inspires no confidence, the visual style actually overwhelms the content on
the page to the point where the product itself and its values fail to be
communicated. On mobile it is particularly bad. If I didn't already have an
account, the website design might be enough to keep me from creating one of I
land on that front page.

~~~
jjoonathan
> If I didn't already have an account

So do I, but now I have a reason to finally finish that nextcloud VM I've been
meaning to set up for ages :-)

------
sp332
16.8 acres sounds like a lot! But at over half a billion dollars for the
development it sounds insane - about $44 million per acre. It really drives
home how space-constrained they are. Across the street from where I work
there's a 64-acre vacant lot asking $325k. I wonder how many stories of office
building you could cover it with for $500,000,000.

------
drewda
It's exciting to think ahead to what that part of Mission Bay and Potrero
might feel like someday when the train tracks are put in an underground tunnel
(for Caltrain and high-speed rail to the Transbay Center) and I-280 is turned
into a surface-level boulevard (like Octavia).

~~~
vidoc
> I-280 is turned into a surface-level boulevard (like Octavia).

You meant a parking lot, didn't you ? :D

~~~
texuf
Octavia is quite nice and traffic flows through there pretty well.

~~~
vidoc
I actually have to admit I am honestly not qualified to say whether the
traffic on Octavia worsened after the redesign! I guess this is my
subconscious tricking me there, since the redesigned Octavia, looks a lot like
redesigned Chavez, which in fact has bike lanes, trees, and all, but became a
parking lot !

------
kqr2
736,000 square feet is pretty sizeable when you consider that SF has a
building cap of 875,000 gross square feet of office space per year:

[http://sf-planning.org/office-development-annual-limitation-...](http://sf-
planning.org/office-development-annual-limitation-program)

~~~
selectodude
Which says more about why the real estate market in San Francisco is such a
disaster.

~~~
fortyten
Because people keep using valuable space for offices instead of affordable
housing?

This is exactly why SF sucks to live in. You have to live there to be close to
work, but you're in competition with your damn office. Talk about screwing
over your employees.

~~~
selectodude
That isn't how affordable housing works. You can't will it into existence.

~~~
fortyten
Right, step one is to leave the bay area.

~~~
selectodude
I’m doing my part. Live nowhere near it.

------
linarism
Good for them, I gladly pay the yearly fee for their service. Haven't had as
much reliability with any other cloud storage service.

~~~
disiplus
i think they are shooting themselfs in the foot, a month ago after my samsung
promo expired i lost my 30gb of space. the only plan they have is 1TB for
8.25eur. my whole macbook drive is 512gb, and i dont like to waste something,
so paying 1tb and using only 50 feels like im paying for all those using 1tb.
so i switched to hosting owncloud on my downloadbox at home, the benefit is
that i can access everything downloaded thru owncloud. if this does not work
out im gonna try gdrive, they have a 100gb plan.

~~~
Chromozon
I had the same situation, and I ended up buying the 1 TB plan. I really wish
they would have an intermediate tier between 10 GB and 1 TB. I would gladly
pay for 100-200 GB. I use Dropbox to back up important documents but not
everything I have on my machines, so I'm still using way less than the 1 TB
right now.

~~~
cat199
IMHO That is the whole point..

(speaking from webhosting experience, same deal applies)

You are paying "more" for "1TB" that you won't actually use to fund the cost
of people who actually do use it..

If the price was 1/10 of the TB price for 100GB, all the physical storage
would be full and they wouldn't make any money since they couldn't ride the
float from the overprovisioning..

------
dopamean
What do you think the per sq foot price is of something like this? A couple
years ago I read that the average price for office space was in the high 60's.
That would put this place at nearly 50 million dollars per year. Does that
sound right/make sense? If so that's a pretty quick turn around for Kilroy.

~~~
sp332
It says the price for development was a bit over $500 million, so for a
10-year return, $50 million/year is about right.

------
garganzol
This is just a file sync. A good one. But 1500 employees for that? This goes
way beyond my imagination.

~~~
a2tech
There’s a ton of stuff around that though. Tens of thousands of paying
customers need support. Credit card teams. Data center guys. Guys to right
deployment tools. Security guys to monitor the credit card system. Hacking
together a proof of concept is simple, running a big business is complicated.

~~~
mypalmike
Yeah, it surprises me how often even tech people don't understand the
compounding complexity that comes with scale. Just consider the engineering
involved in this story:

[https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-
ama...](https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-amazon-cloud-
empire/)

That is just a portion of their infrastructure engineering activity. They also
have product engineering - frontends, backends, mobile clients, integrations,
etc.

It's not just a server under some college kid's desk.

------
mosselman
On a somewhat unrelated note: If you scroll down to the second image in the
article (not counting the slider) there is an image of some people standing in
a room with a table that has a few lamps above it. Can someone tell me which
lamps those are? I'd like to find out if I can afford them for my living room.

([http://ww1.hdnux.com/photos/66/50/52/14322364/3/920x1240.jpg](http://ww1.hdnux.com/photos/66/50/52/14322364/3/920x1240.jpg))

~~~
Arnt
Haven't seen those exact ones, but many like them. Expect a three-digit price
for each cluster of four, and you can get those or similar ones from expensive
lamp shops that sell primarily to architects. Those shops have pleasantly
clueful consultants. If you can't find one, ask for a recommendation from an
architect or perhaps an office furniture shop that sells aeron chairs and/or
sit/stand desks with motors.

------
5_minutes
The “business” and “personal” dropbox combo can become a real mess.

Syncing quite often fails for small files too. I hope they will be able to pay
some attention to these things in their nice new building.

~~~
GuiA
_> The “business” and “personal” dropbox combo can become a real mess._

I had a personal Dropbox account, that I upgraded to a business one (because I
wanted certain of my devices to only have access to a subset of my files, for
instance when traveling). Except that breaks auto photo uploading from mobile,
so I reverted back to personal. Everything seems to have reverted, except the
auto photo uploading tab, which now is stuck on telling me that I need to
connect a personal account.

Keep in mind that this is one of only 4 tabs in their mobile app, so you think
it'd get pretty thorough debugging. It blows my mind how so many companies can
blow tons of money on useless signaling things (like the recent redesign)
while neglecting to test very basic functionality of their product.

------
z6
It baffles me why software companies spend so much money on leasing prime real
estate in one of the most expensive markets, v.s. pursuing a more remote
workforce strategy.

~~~
majani
From my experience, the "creators"(developers, marketers, writers etc) in a
company tend to favor remote work, while the "money men"(VCs and salespeople)
tend to favor office space. Remote work only stands a chance if it's
introduced in the early stages of a company when the creators have more power
than the money men. In the latter stages of a company, the money men wrestle
control of the company and going remote becomes less and less of a
possibility.

------
JohnJamesRambo
In a year though it downsizes to 125k square feet and they have to upgrade to
pro to access all the offices.

~~~
troydavis
As dogfooding, when the office is more than 90% full, all employees will
receive daily popups like this one:
[https://twitter.com/bobdegol/status/774627424801787904](https://twitter.com/bobdegol/status/774627424801787904)

------
jonknee
Here's the gallery of renderings... Not exactly an architectural masterpiece.

[http://theexchangesf.com/gallery/](http://theexchangesf.com/gallery/)

~~~
dagw
My wife worked in an iconic and eye catching office building designed by a big
name architect. She said it was by far the worst office building she has ever
worked in.

------
e12e
Obligatory link to the "show hn" that kicked things off. I'd quote some of the
comments, if I wouldn't feel bad about singling someone out. It's come a long
way :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

------
guhcampos
I would love to work in San Francisco - if I could afford to live there.
Working for Dropbox sounds like a dream job for a guy like me, yet merely
thinking about the commute to such an office, given an engineering salary
capacity, makes me feel just right where I am (tip it's not even in the US)

------
fjksksvdjsjd
Hopeful, eh?

------
alexnewman
Welp I am selling all of my stocks. Apparently we have 365 days til the next
doc bomb

------
amatecha
This just in: NSA opens new offices in Mission Bay! ;) ;)

(Dang, I was just joking, but then, "NSA document indicates that it is
planning to add Dropbox as a PRISM provider":
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-
giants...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-
data) )

