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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

And yet I can't help but wonder what they need that many people for? The core of dropbox is still file syncing with extra tooling to enhance that. Figma had just over 200 people when they sold to Adobe and that is a pretty complex application.

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The HN rule of headcount: if you have to ask, it’s because it’s Sales.

Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x. Sales reps, account managers, CSMs, solutions engineers, forward deployed engineers, priority support, compliance...

> Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x

Can you expand on this. Why is this the case. Does it even mean increase in engg headcount, if so why. Can you link to somewhere if possible. Always had this question, and this pattern is very similar in other places. So maybe it works?

Because you enterprise customers expect it. They pay large multiples above SMB to get dedicated (human) service

It does increase engineering headcount because you are expected to add a lot of features to your offering that end users wouldn't necessarily care about, like DLP, eDiscovery, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, admin controls, compliance with a hundred industry regulations (HIPAA, FINRA, SOX), key management, custom retention policies, data residency. The larger increase comes from the fact that large companies aren't using the checkout form on your website to buy the product, but expect a dedicated team to negotiate the contract and help with product rollouts and customization across their company.

Dropbox's revenue is about $2.5B/year. They want to grow too. You need a lot of people to support that. Sales, marketing, customer success, etc. It's not just the engineers who build and maintain the product. You cannot ignore revenue and growth potential when comparing head counts between companies.

Sales, marketing and support probably make up a majority of their workforce.

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