Hacker News Reader

Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

Things like Dropbox are striking. I guess it was mostly written originally by Drew Houston over a year or so and was cool.

Then 2011, 50 million users 70 employees. Seems fair enough.

Now about 1500 employees. It worked fine and scaled fine with 70 employees so you wonder if hiring the other 1430 was good business. I guess if VCs are throwing money at you you may as well spend it on something. Though that's probably what Yahoo was thinking when it went to 11,700 employees and that didn't play out so well.

View on HN

I bet its mostly sales. I had no idea about how much sales ppl you need at certain scale.

Sales persons are necessary when continuing growth requires efforts that do not scale as effectively. Marketing and advertising campaigns work sufficiently well for b2c with 1-2 people but you hit a wall if you want to selling to, for example, the Pentagon because the way those with the deepest pockets buy is nothing like how most efficient individuals and organizations buy. Groupon's massive needs for salespeople is an example of how even lower margin b2b even needs sales due to how scaling out b2b is so much less cost-effective. But for investors, landing a huge contract is not as much about the revenue as much as an indicator of stability in terms of both revenue and market signal (no Fortune 100 will buy some random fly-by-night vendor's stuff without code escrow even if it's the best thing ever because their sourcing overhead is so poor and big companies are immensely risk-averse by design).

Atlassian's 'b2b without salespeople' approach has worked well for them.

They definitely have sales roles in more recent years and have a sales ops team [1][2][3]. The Federal channel manager description even acknowledges that there's unique challenges in selling to the government that necessitates someone that knows the different contracting vehicles. What they've done with little turn to sales culture is pretty admirable but at the same time only possible with organic, engineer-to-engineer driven growth Github and Atlassian suites.

Salesforce grew somewhat similarly via rogue accounts on expense accounts, but to actually clinch the biggest growth there was no way to avoid salespeople to get over $500MM in revenue probably.

[1] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/99086565 [2] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/95395260 [3] https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Atlassian/93068238

Yea, looking at the employee page for Stack Overflow shows a vast majority of the staff being in sales.

Well VCs want to know what their money does. So expect a large part of controlling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com