Employee #1: Dropbox
themacro.com
themacro.com
I think the one thing that stuck with me, personally, is the issues Dropbox had in the early days (TC 50 tech issues) and that it took six months to get Aston on board. From what I understand, pre-YC was not easy for Drew either.
As a stubbornly impatient person, this has to be hands-down the hardest part of building a startup. You're running an endless marathon as if your life depended on it, and you have to stop at the sidelines and calmly ask people if they'll run with you. And then be okay if they don't - because the course will change, and as it does it will become more attractive to different sets of people. You might see the finish line, but you have to understand that not everybody will see it the same way you do.
The thing that I'd add here is that Aston kind of downplays how important having a business model is as an employee / founder (at least per Drew joking around about pricing). I don't think he did this intentionally, but generally we're over saturated with these ideas that you just need a product people love. These stories inspire technical founders, but having a defensible business is something you should think about sooner rather than later. Not everybody can be a Dropbox, so learn as much as possible about every aspect of what your company can and will be, learn how to communicate that, and stack the deck in your favor. It's an ongoing process and I certainly am not one to claim mastery (far from it), but as somebody who's in the weeds it's the perspective I have.
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 for good reasons at the time) ended up declining. I actually reconsidered about two months later and asked if the position was still open, but they had long since filled it - I think they got some very good MIT grads literally later the afternoon after I had declined.
So they were hiring very aggressively, but they started recruiting before they were in a position to actually hire, to warm up potential employees.
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.
I appreciate your thoughtful responses so I was wondering what your thoughts are on importance and corresponding compensation of the 1st employee at a company.
If the first employee is important enough that in your mind, it's possible that with depending on the first employee they may or may not be a billion dollar company, do you think the first employee compensation is commensurate with that? Aston also mentions specifically the commitment he has as a first employee, and how he feels "you're basically a founder" in terms of responsibility.
In my opinion, he made off about as well as any first employee could reasonably expect (even unreasonably I'd argue).
I don't have the perspective of either a startup founder or the first employee anywhere so I'm not trying to slight the Dropbox founders in any way.
I guess my question boils down to two parts 1. What do you think a reasonable level of compensation is for a first employee 2. Given the success rates of startups (low), why would someone want to be the first employee somewhere versus either their own startup, or a later stage company that could pay them a much higher salary then the typical startup compensation. My unstated assumption here, which you might disagree with, is that someone who could have the impact of Aston, could become a staff engineer at somewhere like facebook/google/microsoft/etc and pull total compensation of 300/400k with a significantly higher chance.
Aston (presumably) made out with a lot more than the $300/400K a year that a Google/Facebook engineer tops out at. He also took on more risk, but the risk was largely technical risk: the possibility that him and his teammates couldn't deliver what 65,000 people said they wanted. That risk is largely under their control, while as a founder, the primary risk is that nobody wants your product or it can't be built economically.
I do think that the large amount of money in the funding ecosystem lately has distorted this bargain somewhat. In boom times, you get cases where the founders get funded on hope & pedigree and draw a salary immediately (meaning that their financial risk is more akin to an early employee's), and then they go and hire a bunch of naive employees at below-market rates before getting any validation that people want their product (meaning that the employee now takes on market risk that was previously reserved for the founder). This doesn't do either the company or the employee any good; these companies are significantly more likely to fail than ones who stay founder-only while they prove out the market, and they ruin more peoples' lives when they do. If you look at employee #1's who have actually made out well - eg. those at Google, DropBox, Thumbtack, AirBnB, SnapChat, etc. - all of those companies had validated demand, had raised funding, and in many cases were already in use by thousands of people when they hired their first employee.
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!
I love this. There have been so many times I've run into a bug that makes me wonder if anyone on the engineering team actually used the product.
So leadership made the decision to dogfood our own app environment. Any new features that are not part of the core experience or modifications to existing features are now apps. And guess what? We found some limitations to our app infrastructure, corrected them, and now we have a (again, relative) ton of high quality apps. Turns out no one was making apps because the experience sucked, until the developers found that out first hand and course-corrected.
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/prof...
On the last web-app project I worked on, we had a middleware that activated automatically in dev mode and just inserted a delay in every request to bring a local delay up to our users' median delay. It was intentionally a bit of a pain to turn off, so almost everyone ran in that mode.
Dogfooding is so under utilized especially in big companies.
It's harder but in my experience it's still necessary. At least I've never seen a good product come from a team that didn't also use the product. That I know of, anyway.
If you haven't set down ground rules with a partner for working at a place like that, it's not a technical issue re: dogfooding, but a communication issue with your partner.
For things like military jets, nuclear reactors and the like, many times companies hire ex-military jet pilots (test pilots like for example Chuck Yeager), and former nuclear power plant operators, or even university profs who developed/calculated the nuclear fission equations in the first place (ie Manhattan Projected hired basically all nuclear physicists in all universities in the US for the effort) - they also do "testing" - which could be a form of dogfooding.
I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?
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 stretched more broadly than people that are experiencing the dissonance between (e.g.) mercurial and git.
Edit: clarifying words
No, git is not really that much better than hg (I personally find hg to be superior).
The reason I switched to git was mostly inertia. Many open source projects were going to git, Github was starting to really take off, and just generally there was a bigger community around git. This mean git got more (and likely better) choices for tooling, more help, and personally I would have to deal with fewer SCM's when working on open source/etc stuff.
I suspect the author was talking on those lines, and the other thing already pointed out in this thread: ability to find experienced people.
Facebook picked mercurial over git because it's easier to customize.
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.
That's a level of understanding I have trouble getting from very experienced developers and system admins, let alone a fresh college grad. I wish more people would realize that.
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.
It's certainly not true that you have to come from a privileged family to be a successful entrepreneur. Look at examples like Larry Ellison.
It's basically our duty to take that risk.
Privilege is a fuzzy term. A lot of people are born into good families but achieve way less than what he has achieved. So his background would not matter much for his achievements but it might matter a bit in giving other people hope just the way whether Tim Cook is gay matters very little for him but it matters a lot to little gay kids who want to be like Tim Cook.
As for being "randos that aren't very impressive in their own right", you're zeroed in on a set of people who joined a startup before there was much traction, let alone profit, with almost the same risk as the founders but with less upside. That group is going to skew young and/or unsuccessful before they join and, since the interviews are conducted with #1 employees at successful companies, will skew towards having FU money for their post-exit careers.
Larry and Sergey certainly would qualify as "great founders", given their level of success, and, while they continue to run Google competently, they really haven't done anything else (Google still really only has one line of business, after all).
Whereas on the other hand, we have someone like Bezos who, with AWS, has created not one, but two ten billion dollar plus businesses and whose ambition seems to be boundless. Or, of course, Elon.
I've been lucky enough to know Aston over the past two years, and have always been super impressed by his insight.
[0] http://www.autoadmit.com/ [1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/
Draw your own conclusions.
The guy had an odd view of himself but I always found he provided excellent well thought out analysis and arguments. I'm not saying he is always right, but he wasn't a troll.
Every time I read a comment about Church, I find myself asking, "is this how a normal person would write about someone best known for commenting on message boards?"