Dropbox Leases Giant New SF Office, Plans To Grow To 400+ 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.

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.

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".

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.

While their current product is mature, they have a long way to go in adoption (though it may not seem that way on HN)

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).

  I find it humorous that (otherwise highly intelligent, and
  well informed) members of HN are asking "What do they need 
  all these people for" 

You make some good points.

I would feel better about your answer if you didn't seem so condescending though.

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.

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?

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.