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.
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...
> 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.
> 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
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the 400 people will be for building our their own storage system. I'm willing to bet most of their operating cost is storage and I believe they currently use S3 which is very expensive. Unless they can get some great prices from Amazon, they will certainly at some point build their own storage system in order to scale up.
One easy thing they could do is put a folder in everybody's dropboxes called "my website" or something, where people can simply start dropping files in and have db basically "just work" as a site publisher.
I know it sort of does this now, but I've heard many problems about it when the traffic starts to scale. Presumably you'd need some serious engineers talent to solve that issue.
Imagine no more fussing with ftp clients or publishing tools to get a site up and running, just copy files into a folder. With a little fiddling and some simple rules it might even be possible to support modernish web frameworks behind the scenes...and db just assembles it and "makes it work".
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
How do you propose they pay for the development? I personally doubt they will suddenly have businesses with deep pockets knocking on their door with fistfuls of money.
I've once or twice mused about building and selling an app that backs onto tarnsap. The service itself is fantastic, but it's not aimed at the mass market.
Maybe that's what they are going to use the intended 340 new hires to build. I think that a much higher priced enterprise version that included client-side encryption & much more storage than currently available could be a game-changer for the business. Wouldn't be surprised if they were already working on it
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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, people build cross-platform apps making it more useful. They are already doing this, but they need to take the "next step", which is probably what they want to do with their incoming 400 employees.
Generally, people store all their files on their home computer, and to solve the problem of "I can't access my files on the go" people started using laptops as their primary computer. That's not really a good solution because then you have to carry a computer around. Smartphones and tablets are sort of solving this, but they bring the same overall issue of "My stuff on here is different from my stuff on there". What Dropbox could do is host people's actual "computers", where computer is defined as software, files, and settings. So when you load up your smartphone or you friends smartphone you can access the smartphone version of your computer, and the tablet version of your computer on tablets, and the desktop version of your computer on desktops.
It wouldn't feel like you're using "your laptop" or "your friends tablet" or "your iPhone" because the only difference between any kind of computer is whose signed in right now. Dropbox is in a favorable position to do this, but so is Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
It's a pretty crazy (and unlikely) notion, but how else will Dropbox grow?
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 companies many, many times larger and more experienced than dropbox backing them.
File storage is certainly a critical piece of the puzzle and I could see them making some major inroads towards standardizing the cloud, but I think the full breadth of your vision is still pretty far off. Fun to speculate on though for sure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.