Dropbox handing over 25% of San Francisco HQ back to landlord | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox handing over 25% of San Francisco HQ back to landlord

cnbc.com

102 pointspseudolus80 comments

Riffing on that, I wonder how much of Bay Area wages "do not pass go" and go pretty much straight to landlords.

If they figure out how to reanimate historical figures with AI, I’m voting for Henry George.

Good luck. Rich people really like getting paid for being rich.

a lot lol. When I relocated temporarily from Berlin to the Bay Area a few years ago I thought the pay raise was crazy. Then I saw that I'd almost pay 2k more in rent per month. And then I learned what friends with kids pay for schools and childcare.

When housing and commercial space gets expensive, EVERYTHING gets expensive

Probably on the order of a few to ~10 billion a month directly via apartments. Not counting secondary effects due to costs on business rent and wages to pay personal rent, nor tertiary effects like increased tax burden spent on homeless, subsidies for 'affordable housing', etc.

est 1-3 million renters @ avg $1,000 /month excess rent over fair value due to government enforced shortages. Personally it boggles my mind how this isn't the single issue among the relevant voting bloc.

> Personally it boggles my mind how this isn't the single issue among the relevant voting bloc.

based on what i seem, not even the ultra woke social issues is enough to stem the bleeding of liberals away from treaudue in canada to someone willing to take on the renter industrial complex. real estate and perpetual renting seems to be the biggest issue of millenials onwards.

>Personally it boggles my mind how this isn't the single issue among the relevant voting bloc.

It is the single biggest issue, and is discussed constantly, but there are no "fight the landlords" or "lower rents and build more housing" options on the ballot.

There's no one to vote for who could fix these issues, because the government is completely captured by those who benefit from high land values and rent extraction.

> There's no one to vote for who could fix these issues, because the government is completely captured by those who benefit from high land values and rent extraction.

That's... not true. A lot of YIMBY groups are doing endorsements these days. Our mayor has shown up to our events.

Get involved:

* https://new.yimbyaction.org/

* https://welcomingneighbors.us/

It’s funny how we like to pretend there isn’t an aristocracy and landed gentry here.

Pretend? Those landlords aren't that, they're companies like your employer. They borrowed money for the building and are living from the difference between what they earn and what they pay the lender. The lenders are often funds of some sort, "ABC US Real Estate A" or somesuch if it's managed by a company called ABC, owned in turn by other funds and some small individual investors. I probably own a bit of such a real estate fund, maybe $1k or $10k, not sure, I'd have to check.

If you go all the way back and disregard small fry like me, the ultimate big owners are often pension funds. Landed gentry it's not.

Borrowed) They worked hard for this washing columbian snow and collecting exotic crystals. Some of them just extracted essential oils from dessert sands, landlording there, cursed with resources as.. a landed gentry.

Owning a few slivers of a company doesn't make you nobility. Let's draw a few lines. Do you work for a living or own things for a living? In other words, which flavor of incentives is predominant in your life? Whenever a company pulls a Scrooge McDuck move, do you own enough shares that on net this benefits you or does it still hurt you like it hurts most? Do you have enough of a stock that it make sense to hire a lobbyist for a 10% chance of pumping its value by 10% (i.e. does lobbying look like an expense or an investment)? Do you always pay 30% income tax or sometimes pay 15% capital gains tax?

For most of these "are you nobility" questions, you can draw a line on a net worth chart where the incentives and privileges are one thing below the line and a different thing above the line. Each question gives you a different line, but for the most part you and I are on one side of the lines and, say, Bill Gates is on the other. It's important to understand that the world is mostly owned by people who feel a structurally different set of incentives from what you and I feel.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I fully agreee that owning a few slivers of a fund doesn't make people like me nobility.

Further, I also don't think pension funds are similar to nobility. They have a lot of money and own a lot of buildings (indirectly through funds), but also a lot of future obligations to a lot of people who aren't any kind of nobility. Their assets don't add up to more than their obligations, certainly not to so much more that the difference can sustain a nobility.

You're mixing two very different classes.

The land belonging to an aristocrat can only go to another. Sales are regulated by the central government. Additionally, aristocrats have a de jure place in the government hierarchy, military rights, and the right to enforce laws on their own land.

Gentry are just rich people.

The nobility doesn't directly control the monopoly on violence like they did under Feudalism. However, they still make a living by owning things rather than by working, this still gives them crossed incentives to most commoners on a wide variety of issues, and they still exert outsized political influence in furtherance of those crossed incentives.

So did the gentry, the religious institutions and the upper elements of the mercantile class including those in various guilds.

However being wealthy and having soft power via your wealth doesn’t make one a noble.

If a poor ”noble” isn’t still “worth” more than a rich commoner merchant in some circumstances then you don’t have a real class system.

Who are more often than not just the front of organized crime storing washed money..

Dropbox got weird. First it was great. Then awesome.

Then something happened. Weird features were added. It felt very forced.

Probably had to stoke that VC-fire once growth leveled off and add new "billion dollar ideas".

They successfully built their core product and got it to the point where it only had long-tail improvements and maintenance left to do, but even if it didn’t have the complication of being VC funded you can’t really lay off half the company and declare yourself in maintenance mode once you’ve scaled up.

> You can’t really lay off half the company and declare yourself in maintenance mode once you’ve scaled up.

You actually can.

How? Psychologically a company that size can't say that and then just maintain status quo: if it aims for that, it will instead rot and die.

> if it aims for that, it will instead rot and die

Source? Most companies seem to fall striving to reach the next rung on the ladder.

Organizations in aggregate tend to underachieve whatever goal they set out to do. As a leader, "If you run, they walk. If you walk, they stand. If you stand, they sleep.“

That’s quite the statement. Source?

That's when you are supposed to have started building a new offering, not overgrow your existing one.

Might have been around the time they stopped focusing on users and tried to embed themselves in the National security state. I guess around 2014 when Condoleezza Rice joined the board of directors.

> embed themselves in the National security state

What's that about? Sounds unusual.

Basically every big corp implemented their own cloud storage, so they had to compete by adding extra features I would guess? I’m still happy customer for personal needs since I’ve had it for ages and too lazy to switch. But when it comes to work needs, it would be a hard sell. If you’re a corp you probably have everything integrated with Microsoft or Google. If all of your devices are Apple, you can just go with iCloud and not deal with 3rd party integrations. At the end of the day, you’re left off with less number of potential customers, and even then you have to fight with Box for customers.

Dropbox was amazing. The ability to share a url to any HTML file basically made the service a micro blog host.

Of course they then added “productivity” tools and removed the actually productive features like sharing HTML.

I’ve moved to Google too but still prefer the Dropbox GUI.

*ten year user of Dropbox

Their product teams really dont know what they are doing. I dont think ive seen company that was trying to do so many thing over the years just failing with everything.

I dont even mean Dropbox Paper - thats actualy useful (acquired company).

* Paper documents after years of trying are still separate service and wont show up in you dropbox. Only new accounts have this.

* At some point they started to be universal API/backend for third party apps. Something they years later started to kill off.

* Vault their e2e part of dropbox got suddenly killed (was probably gimmick anyway but you were 100% that these files wont get accidentaly shared).

* They have half baked password manager that probably nobody uses because they might kill it on a whim.

* Bloated but somewhat ok screencapture tool that creates normal videos which is limited by recording 120 minutes at time. So you are already paying them but get this lol limit. You either have to delete old videos or pay more. Actually you can move the video to your dropbox but dropbox still counts it in their limit because the file has some metadata (which you can probably delete).

* The last nail is they started to play ball with Apple moving their client to some Apple API loosing bunch of features (including stuff like not being able to sync/backup projects from Final Cut) https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected...

If their product/management knew anything about their product they would make the invisible features and be the “pro” solution. Instead they compete with google drive on bloatedness.

In addition to the other excellent comment here:

I think it's largely that they discovered the real money is in B2B. And once you go down that route, all you care about is checking feature-boxes, not whether anyone actually uses it willingly.

Pretty much every company that does that starts hemorrhaging users at some point. And there's not really any going back either, because they definitely won't shut down features to improve the core.

The first dinner I ever ate after arriving in SF was at their original HQ's cafe/restaurant, thanks to some friends who worked there. It was so good! I regret not having gone as a guest more often.

Off-topic, but doesn't the guy in the article look like the "Aliens meme" guy?

https://cdn.geckoandfly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ancie...

LOL I'm not saying it's binary diffed syncable storage for any OS, but it is that.

/u/dhouston has turned into "the guy in the article" what a day

important piece of hacker news history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

One day something's common knowledge; the next, it's something nobody around you has heard of.

I've been wondering if Dropbox is struggling financially. I stopped using Dropbox a couple of years ago because Google Drive is a better deal, and now some weeks ago they started emailing me. I think I've gotten like 3-5 emails touting how great Dropbox is and that I should really be using it again.

I stopped using my a year or so ago. The cost just seemed ridiculous compared to competitors.

I was a pretty happy user for a few years but I couldn’t justify it anymore.

KKR will lose quite a bit of money on that property when they offload it, perhaps unless they can lobby the govt to do some kind of residential conversion.

Opportunity to convert office space to living space?

Nimby-proof housing increase?

Apparently it is incredibly expensive to convert office to living and meet most housing standards (windows, bathrooms, HVAC, etc.)

I recall a story about a month ago that a firm said they would be willing to have undertaken that cost for a tower in downtown San Francisco but the city, and it's wisdom, had passed an ordinance that required a certain percentage of new housing to go for low income people and thus for low rent and when that was baked in it made absolutely no sense (or cents).

So not only do you have the trouble of the cost of conversion, you also have the trouble of meddling do-gooders messing things up (because one of the easiest ways to reduce rent for everybody is to slam a lot of supply into the market)

See also good podcast dedicated to this topic: Why can't we turn all the empty offices into apartment buildings?

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/why-cant-we-turn-all-the-empty...

When I moved to San Francisco for the 2nd time in 2016, I was looking at bottom of the barrel apartments. One unit was a studio in an office building, but without a bathroom. For some reason the shared office bathroom had a shower. I was imagining it walking down the hall in my underpants while accountants and lawyers came to work.

Was it cheaper than living in a storage unit or someone's rented closet?

I kid you not that people in SF both live in storage units (with power, cooking, fridge, and TV) and rent walk-in closets to live in.

Oh boy, I remember 10 years ago living in SF and renting out an alcove in our 3 bedroom apartment for $350/month. It was a 10 foot by 10 foot nook off a hallway without a door. That was after converting the living room to an extra bedroom. All to pay the monthly rent (no profiting). Fun times though!

Haha, I don't remember exactly, but I do recall that everything below about $1600/month was a little too weird.

Those ordinances are commonly called “Inclusionary Zoning” ordinances. Even their supporters acknowledge they frequently adversely affect housing production. It’s effectively a tax on new homes.

From my experience going through a lot of offices in SF, they are really good at flexibly up and downsizing workspaces. This space will open to smaller companies or will be sliced and diced into sizes appropriate for anyone willing to buy for commercial purposes. Granted my experience comes from before work from home, so maybe things have changed, but I doubt it will change to residential unless the location was already mixed use.

I don't think that would mesh well with the neighborhood character

Zoning issues, time, and money.

An airbnb for hotdesk coworking is one possibility for space monetization, but I would probably want to limit it to people with Fortune 1000 email addresses and certain designated floors/areas for security reasons. One key enabler would be integration with corporate building security systems.

I still have fortune 1000 email address, they forgot to turn it off. I'll swing by and say hi (:

> An airbnb for hotdesk coworking

WeWork was just ahead of their time!

> we’ve taken steps to de-cost our real estate portfolio

> remote work is the primary experience for our employees,

Why do they talk like that? Like inventing new stupid words and torturing existing ones, instead of just straight forward saying what they want to say?

It's like using "certified pre-owned" instead of "used".

So just double-speak as regular english

Except that one actually makes sense, because “certified” means it was inspected and warrantied by a dealership versus a “used” car which is most often sold as-is.

Right. Certified preowned is not just a marketing term.

"Americans have trouble facing the truth," [George] Carlin said. "So they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it" (Parental Advisory, 1990). [1]

But instead of it being americans in general, it's corporates.

[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/soft-language-euphemism-1692111

Narcissism. They like to hear themselves talk.

Press releases as big companies is like playing operation with connotations, everything is fine tuned to minimize amortized risk

I figure it's because they're trying to sound corporate, because that's just how people imagine "official" communications have to sound. Clear, simple writing would be too casual!

It's possible to write corporate communications in a straightforward and effective style, but it requires a level of writing skill and a level of confidence that employees might not have, especially when the writing has to go through several levels of internal review by managers and subject to internal politics. The result is writing by committee that intentionally avoids even the semblance of personal voice.

Maybe a rhetorical question but I think there are a few answers. One is that some people think that's what professional sounds like, this sort of dated, verbose corporate "believe us, we're big and competent" messaging strategy.

I think it just lands as inauthentic and cold to modern audiences.

But it's been a popular strategy for generations, and people tend to market/message the way they've been marketed to.

Definitely notable that Dropbox doesn't seem to be thinking about brand strategy when writing these sorts of releases.

Look to your own tortured words. Referred to a system as ‘performant’ recently?

Using nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns a la "de-cost" is classic corporate nonsense.

"What's the solve" etc

Both and "cost" and "de-cost" are verbs.

but the way it's used here is clearly noun-as-verb

I think here it’s taking the noun meaning of cost and endeavouring to re-verb it, if you will.

Reduce costs, would be the clearer way to put it.

Verbing weirds language

I always imagine that it's an intense statistical overview of the release by speech-writers.

"Reducing costs and saving money polls negatively, people relate it to dwindling cash reserves and that may affect share price, open up the book and find an as-of-now untested phrase that means the same thing, let's try that! 'de-cost' ? Might as well!"

The truth (plain English) hurts. Obfuscation works. God only knows on who, though. I just treat press-releases as puzzles, if only to work out the doublespeak.

Layoffs aside, I still hope that the office space doesn't get left behind as a project. The real interactions really matter.

For example, if there was a world were education was entirely digital, I would still want a place for students to interact in real life, not just online.

If (one poll) shows a 6% [1] preference for in office work, and employers can cut down on their costs, I fear that it might just not exist for the future.

[1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397751/returning-office-cur...

> For example, if there was a world were education was entirely digital, I would still want a place for students to interact in real life, not just online

You don't need an office or a school for that. However, we as a society somehow made all the activities outside office and school awkward, inconvenient or expensive.

True, did not say against this. Just a place, not necessarily a school.

Yes, we should build better places. That is the whole sentiment.

This might be an excellent chance to improve public libraries.

Really, everyone should have places to meet and work in person, not just people employed by corporations. I wonder how these spaces could be configured to help clubs, hobby groups, support groups, political organizations, volunteer groups, part-time workers, and other people who may have difficulty finding a space to meet.

True, did not say against this.

Plenty already exist, and you can even choose what kind you prefer.

Support your local restaurant, bar, library, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

The logical conclusion is that if the poll is accurate, we only need 6% of the space currently allocated for office space.

It wouldn't disappear, it would only be severely reduced.

You can have real life interactions outside of office life. It might even be more meaningful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com