TechCrunch Tours Dropbox Offices | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch Tours Dropbox Offices

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172 pointsjkincaid79 comments

This was just... awkward. Don't get me wrong - it's very interesting to see what it's like inside the office of an up-and-coming startup, but it just wasn't what I expected. When I think of startups (or hackers in general) I think of some geeky guys with a dose of rebelliousness - especially Y-Combinator startups. I think of guys who want something more than Big Co has to offer. Guys that are passionate, driven, and motivated. From the video, this isn't the vibe I picked up at all. The employees just seemed weird, for lack of a better word. Maybe they were acting for the camera, but nobody seemed to be doing any real work, and everybody seemed okay with that. From the artwork to office layout, the company culture almost appeared forced and unnatural. Am I alone in thinking this?

FWIW, I haven't watched any other "TC Cribs" videos, so I don't want to generalize. Maybe it's just Dropbox. I'm checking out other videos now.

(I may get downvoted for my slightly negative view here, but it is my opinion and I'm sticking with it)

Of course it's unnatural. There's people walking around with big cameras and I'm sticking a microphone in their face. We could show people coding with their head down, but that would be pretty dull. So we get some shots showing people doing actual work, and then explore some of the things that make the office unique, and what they do to blow off steam.

Hi Jason, I appreciate the response. You're right that a video of people coding with their head down would be pretty dull, but that's not exactly what I was getting at. Digging deeper than that, nobody you interacted with showed any enthusiasm or charisma. In my mind (and maybe I'm overly optimistic/idealistic), startups are generally the most enjoyable and satisfying jobs out there - and it's not because of arcade games in the office. Undoubtedly it's nice (and practically essential) to have outlets for releasing stress, but the satisfaction comes from doing real, valuable work, and I guess I just expected some of the passion and enthusiasm to come through in the personalities of the employees. I'm not saying they don't love what they do - I'm just saying I didn't see it, which is slightly disappointing. At any rate, I appreciate the perspective of the videos and look forward to seeing more.

Software startups are still desk jobs. The best one can hope for is to stave off completely becoming "Office Space" until after the acquisition or IPO.

Great work Jason. I love it. I think it would be good to interview some engineers as well. Like what time did they roll in the office that day, what interesting problems they are working on, what is exiting them about the company etc. A bit more insight on the work they do themselves, and not where they do sit.

Also it would be great to know what kind of perks they do get (eg food, free lunches, dinners, or whatever).

Looking at the offices is nice, but it would be great to hear more from the people themselves (i.e. not just the ceo or the chaperon).

This is pretty much what startups are like. The unique feature of this office is actual instruments in the music room. Usually there's just a Rock Band setup somewhere.

There was an awful lot of "I'm too busy showing off how awesome our amenities are to do anything else". But I figure it was staged for the shoot.

yes, hence the title "TC Cribs"

The Yelp video was more natural because it was one guy giving the tour and some people working and sneaking a peek at the cameras every once and a while.

I swear it's the Jason's goal to create as many awkward situations while filming these Techcrunch office tours.

He walks into people, unsuccessfully tries walking backwards while talking, missed fist pound etc. It's amusing.

That's just me :)

Keep being awesome! :)

well, I'm guessing they did pick the most imposing dropboxer in the office to give the tour so Jason continued the tradition. :D

Wow. I don't mean this as negative towards Dropbox at all but I never thought I'd see that level of decadence again. I mean, the Phelan Building (where they're located) is massively expensive (its a 105 year old historic landmark). Custom art on the wall, band rooms, arcade games, free food and all the amenities.

Again no slight intended. If they have the money they might as well enjoy it (I did when I was young and in the same situation). But for a company that had its first release what about 2 years ago they're living large.

The 90s are back after all.

Is it really massively expensive?

When I left SF all those old buildings off Market were the cheapest options in The City. Also, you could usually take over the lease for cheap from some other startup wipeout.

I guess expensive is relative but last I checked it was about $1,100 for a 300sq ft office (and they clearly have a lot more than 300sq ft). That was a few years ago when I had a friend who moved his offices out of there because the location wasn't worth the cost to him.

Thats extremely cheap (about $3/sq foot). From what I've seen, $20/sq foot is closer to normal.

I'm at a startup in SF - we saw nice places for about $2.5/sqft

What does it cost in terms of talent and time for every block away from BART and the Underground you decide to locate your office?

It's a more expensive than an extra $5K or $10K a month in rent, that's for sure.

This is exactly the logic that our mteam used in the '99 bubble when we built out offices on 2nd. I'm not saying Dropbox is extravagant, but this isn't a compelling argument to me.

That's not the logic that sank the company.

Seriously, $5 or $10K increase in monthly rent is a pittance. There are a lot more wasteful things I could bitch about than that, and I'm a cheap-ass.

Is Dropbox overspending on employee perks? I highly doubt it.

Does that make every expense that can be rationalized in comparison to headcount, revenue, or (worst of all) potential pull-through revenue valid? No! Some are valid, some aren't.

All I am saying is, this notion of "we need the very best talent, and we need to make it is as happy as can be" is a platitude that was used by execs to justify a lot of excess.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/off/2202446793.html

Around $3/sf

When you are big enough, you can buy anything and that's considered natural. It's only when you are young and can enjoy such thing. I think for a startup, what matters is doing what you want to do and they are doing it.

> The 90s are back after all.

What? Company that generates a metric shit-ton of revenue is spending some of it on employee perks, and this is somehow indicative of a bubble?

I was under the impression that the 90s were all about lavish spending without revenue. Although I guess people will see any trend they want to see if they try hard enough...

I'd be interested to know exactly how much revenue Dropbox has at the moment. I know they have plenty of paying customers, including many of us here, but there's an order of magnitude more customers with free accounts. Does anyone know how Dropbox' revenue stands right now? Are they actually profitable yet?

You're not going to find accurate answers to questions about bottom-line numbers of a privately held company by asking in a public forum.

What is publicly known is that Dropbox passed 4 million users a year ago (http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=339), and that according to Crunchbase they have not raised any outside funding since 2008. Infer from that what you will.

Considering that Facebook has like 500m users, yet doesn't charge any of them, and they're valued at $50B or whatever, and yet DropBox has 4m users and does bring in $10+/month from a good percentage of them, I'm going to guestimate that DropBox is profitable in at least the millions of dollars annually range. And that's a very conservative guestimate.

Typical conversion rate is 1-2%. That's at least 40,000 paying customers. At $10/mo (that's the maximum revenue per subscriber) that's $400,000 a month, or $4.8M a year. The key here is they are a growing, revenue-generating company.

You are factually incorrect in almost everything you say. There's really no place to start.

I'd agree with you about watching out for dotcom excess if it wasn't so inaccurate in this case. :-)

I really don't think people understand the implications of Dropbox's model. I think I stumbled upon it - http://marcgayle.com/how-dropbox-is-printing-money - so I am not surprised with this level of decadence.

At the rate at which they are going, I can almost guarantee you that their public filings - or the first public confirmation of their financials - will be bombshellish (if it is anything like I suspect, and I am seeing no evidence to suggest that it is not - in fact, this video further confirmed my impressions).

Btw, I don't mean it as a bash against Dropbox. I just feel like they have discovered a pot of gold, and are being shy about it - heck, that makes total sense. If I were them, I would probably do the same thing until it was too late for anybody to clue in and catch up. So that might be what they are doing. Can't say I blame them, just wish I got confirmation - for my own curiosity's sake.

If that is the case, it's a HUGE deal. No hyperbole can do it justice.

The article you quoted is confusing for me. It says they store only one copy of each file and serves it to all requests originating from different users. Sounds good!

But how can it be viable? Like most files in my account are personal. Only few are such that others too might have them. Isn't it same for everyone? I think most people have mostly unique files in their account.

So how can dropbox rely on the model mentioned in the link?

Great question Andrew. That's why I think most people underestimate the power of what Dropbox has done, because most don't understand it.

Well, this is what I think happens. For some people, the majority of their files will be unique - but for many people, they won't be. The more people they get using dropbox (with the free account) is the more files they can get, which means the more things they have access to that they can charge for.

In other words, as their network of files grows and their user base grows, their costs shrink and their margins get wider - because the higher the likelihood that they are to be able to charge for files that are already there.

So to put some numbers to it.

Say when they had 100 users, 5% share the same files. That means, essentially they are charging 5 people for access to the same files. However, when they reach 10,000 users more people upload similar files I suspect that 5% increases to say 7%. That means that they can now charge 700 people for access to the same files.

Imagine when they reach 1,000,000 users and 10% have the same files - that's 100,000 users they can charge for access to the same files.

I don't know what the true percentage breakdowns are, but I suspect they will be much higher than many people expect. Double digits.

In any case, even if it is not higher than people expect, network effects work for their model - like nothing I have ever seen before. The more people join, is the more files they have which increases the % of their userbase that they can charge for. So not only is the absolute numbers of users growing, but the portion of the userbase they can charge to the same files are growing too.

It's FRIKKIN BRILLIANT!!!!!

Thanks. This makes sense. Numbers of similar files will surely increase with the increase in the number of users.

Also, there could be several users who do not consume the allocated space completely all the time. Using your argument, this too will have positive effect on their revenue model.

It IS brilliant!

Exactly...see the thing is, in my model - I never even accounted for that case (the users that don't use up all their space), because technically that is like a current liability. In that at any time, those users can lay claim to their free space - so Dropbox has to be able to give them that free space.

So technically, it wouldn't make much sense for them to really consider that against their profit margins. Although, over time I am sure they have realized that X% of their users never use up more than say 1GB (and various levels) of their storage - so you may be right. But I didn't want to get into all of that because of the questions surrounding it.

It's really the structure of the way they charge for storage and the way they pay for it.

I can't think of any other company that can do what they are doing.

Amazon with their web services can't. A car rental company can't. Neither can a restaurant, retail store, manufacturer of anything, nor a hotel or anything of that nature.

I can't think of any other business model (in history) that is as lucrative of what they are doing.

I would love for someone to provide a counter example, because I think I am going crazy - because it is very rare that you find something 'too good to be true'. But this might be one case, for the founders and investors, that truly is.

Unless they mess it up.

> its a 105 year old historic landmark

As a Brit, this made me laugh.

All your buildings were hewn out of raw granite by neolithic cavemen, amirite?

Obligatory 'An Englishman thinks 100 miles is a long way, an American thinks 100 years is a long time'.

I think showing people's workspaces in some real detail would be fun. Everyone loves a cool setup. I don't know a developer that doesn't judge a company in part by how they equip their programmers.

That's a good idea — I'll start asking about the standard setup.

Yes, I agree. I was more interested in Drew's setup than the sign taped to the wall (but I get why you did that).

What I want to know is how these engineers at these startups avoid visual distractions? It seems to me that a lot startups create environments like this. It's clear that Dropbox has the money for cubes/offices. Is it a cultural thing? What gives?

Open works spaces are far better for collaboration. People avoid distraction with huge monitors that take up a lot of their field of view and headphones. Such offices are actually very quiet.

somewhat agree, except: collaboration == distraction

Nah. This is dogma.

Anybody else watched the whole thing hoping to see people actually working? And how they worked? And where they worked? Desks, computers, OSs, software, hardware, meeting rooms, etc.

No such luck.

Instead, that looked like the tour of a kindergarten: here we dance, here we play, here we sing, here we eat, and the view is great.

There are numerous sites that already cater to that sort of thing. LifeHacker and the Unclutterer's Workspace Flickr pools are rather large. Usesthis goes into greater detail about specific setups.

While I find that stuff interesting, that's not the show they are doing. It's MTV Cribs for startups. And that really didn't exist before this.

Great tour video. Lots of fun.

But if I were one of the investors, I'd probably be pretty PO'd to see how my money was being spent.

Not since the dotcom boom have I seen that kind of place. Startups seem to want to run kinda lean these days, so they can be more agile. (That's not to say that the folks shouldn't be well equipped, which it looks like they are, but custom artwork and a DDR machine?) And clearly too much floor space for their size. It'd be a far better use of their funds to operate a smaller office, then move when they outgrew it.

It could be worse, the whole place could be full of $900 Aeron chairs.

Oh wait, it was.

The amount of money that it costs to outfit an office comfortably is minuscule to real recruiting costs.

How about paying $20,000 for a recruiter to find a world-class engineer and get them to leave Google to join your never-been-heard-about startup?

How about paying $50,000 to a recruiter to conduct a VP of Sales search and run the process for you?

Aeron chairs, cool pictures and desks all make an office more enjoyable, and are cheap by comparison.

Not to completely dispute what you've said, since I agree with it for the most part. But my takeaway from the video certainly did not leave me with the impression that the team there was somehow so short on time that they couldn't just do their recruiting themselves (not to mention the tons of free publicity dropbox already gets acting as a useful recruitment tool). In fact, quite the contrary.

I'd be PO'd to find that these guys dropped $50k recruiting a sales VP also. I'd imagine that that custom stone conference table probably ran around $50k (they ain't cheap). I'd probably even be able to make a safe bet that just the "stuff" in their conference room cost somewhere between $100k to $200k.

Everything in the video just didn't give me the impression of being good ways to spend money. I think the number of people in this thread who are acting kinda creeped out about their office lends me some support.

If anything the DB guys should be heads down figuring out their next product. It won't take much for Microsoft or Apple to just build something like this into their next rev of their OSs or in some patch and simply put them out of business. They have a great product and a good revenue stream, time to start figuring out the next step.

If that step is to sell the company? I certainly wouldn't want to think that I'm buying all this crap along with the corporate assets for my purchase price.

All that said, I'm really just bitching, if they are paying the bills and have cash left over for this stuff, more power to them. It really does look like a cool office and it's a fantastically cool company with a brilliant product. Their continued success is something to be praised, that's for sure.

Dropbox is cash flow positive; their last funding round was for $6MM in 2008. All of those $20 a month memberships add up, let alone corporate contracts. They also receive tons of free publicity. It seems as if Lifehacker and Gizmodo both have an "ode to Dropbox" article on a weekly basis.

no revenue startup: run lean. Ramen noodles.

multi-millions profitable proven business: run premium. afford to hire and provide for the very best. you've solved the product-market-money problem. enjoy life. steak, baby.

Aeron's aren't actually a bad bet for a funded startup. They're durable enough that if you buy them used, they retain practically all their value if the company flops and has to auction its assets.

I really dislike the fact they as the average developer doesn't get anything like this at all. Its pretty upsetting that companies that are major software companies spend massive amounts of money on their devs, but those companies that aren't fully software could give two craps about their devs. Its just disappointing that I have to work for the latter.

Employees in the US work some of the world's longest hours. And yet there these folks are in their office, playing games. Is that typical? I don't get it. Why stay in the office playing games when you could go home? I guess this is the sort of question that, as a generally-self-employed 41-year-old father of a preschooler I'm in no position to figure out. That video weirded me out.

It's fun for a while -- like a continuation of school / residence.

Also, it can give you the technical chops, contacts, and pedigree to eventually become a generally-self-employed 41-year-old father who works fewer hours.

Would have been more interesting to see the Dropbox data center, and get some insights into how they operate and scale it.

I believe they use Amazon S3 for all storage.

In fact, they're supposedly the single largest user of S3 by data stored.

If Dropbox is still hosted on EC2 and S3, I guess there's not much hardware to see. :)

There are rumours they're moving away from Amazon, however: http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-moving-away-from-EC2

Anyone has insights on this?

the red-black tree reference is amazing

Yes, that was cute. I love how it seemed to be lost on the interviewer and editors. That makes it so much better.

IMO the recent trend of showing off pimped out startup offices is highly indicative of a bubble. Our startup operates out of a crummy little room, and that's how we like it

why bubble ? Afaik dropbox is highly profitable so what keeps them from having a fancy office to make the work experience better for them and most importantly their employees ?

Is the same true for Scribd? (last office on TC Cribs) What about all the other startups that are setting up offices in lofts around SOMA?

I dig the collaborative workspace. Ever seen the office atmosphere of those companies that design consumer products? That is what Dropbox's space reminds me of.

The best part is that Drew isn't enclosed in some corner office. He sits in the open with his team. Big thumbs up.

As a guy with ADD, i would never be able to work at a place like that! I mean do actual work. I would just be too distracted by all the fun things to do. I think many more developers are the same?

Well, cool office though. I am a dropbox user myself and love the service!

Yes. I've worked in some bad open-concept setups where the mean-time-between-distractions (MTBD) was sometimes 5 min or so. Awful.

Um. Did you just sit your sweaty ass on the corner of my desk so you can lean over and chat to the dude sitting next to me? WTF?

Programming (and games programming, especially) seems to attract a lot of ADHD types.

TechCrunch as HGTV just doesn't do much for me.

yeah. i wasn't buying the MTV Cribs editing style either. Inauthentic.

Why do they need so many people? Customer support?

Dropbox has lots of engineers and needs a lot more: http://dropbox.com/jobs

The support team is pretty solid though. They have a hard job and do it well.

I had no idea.. thanks!

It seems that often people underestimate the amount of engineers a company requires as it grows, I saw similar statements in a Twitter thread a few days back.

Awesome office. Dropbox is doing better than ever! I wonder why they just went 1.0 though--they've been around forever.

haha, I like the end.

It still amuses me how the view is always mentioned before entering the startups office space. Although I have to say that Dropbox's 'Crib' is my favourite TC Crib so far.

That startup looks real lean. </sarcasm>

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