Dropbox founder talks about the company's early days | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox founder talks about the company's early days

ecorner.stanford.edu

107 pointsboopsie12 comments

Drew is a really bright guy, you have to give him credit for standing in front of an audience like that and speaking without any sort of presentation aide.

Most notably, his points about hiring "the best people" (around 20 minutes in) are extremely similar to the notes in the leaked Valve employee handbook on hiring, and the old Jobs quote about "A+ players." For everyone seeking a position somewhere in the industry, the emphasis placed on this element of business is really telling; good people at amazing companies don't want just another guy who can code in C++/Java/D-/ChaiTeaLatte, they want individuals with strengths in all aspects of engineering and business. Thanks for the link, and if Drew still reads HN even though he's in the big time, thanks for the talk and indirect educational advice.

From what I've read, the "A players" mantra seems to be pretty prevalent in the valley, maybe even being decades old?

He emphasizes hiring great people essentially because that's the only way you'll be able to hire more great people. He goes on to make the point that if you lower the hiring bar and start hiring lower quality people, that in itself may cause you to lose the best people. This process, he says, is irreversible.

Reed Hastings' slides on Netflix culture[1] from a few years ago also reflect this.

Paraphrasing: If you grow as a company, you encounter more complexity. To handle complexity you can either 1) hire people who are able to stay ahead of it or 2) create killjoy bureaucracy which ultimately drives away innovative people.

The whole deck is worth a once-over at least once a year.

[1]: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

Great talk, I really love Dropbox as a company because they just make things easy. I too have forgotten my humble USB on my desk table even though it's normally in my wallet. Now I don't even need a USB.

Off-topic comment though: anyone else annoyed at his sweater's design? The word "Drop" should be completely on the left side of the zipper, with "Box" and the picture of the box on the right side.

I noticed it too, but my last impression was that it is good to be like that. I see it as an attempt to cut the link between the new word dropbox as a brand and the two words drop and box. Drop has a negative conotation.

Completely off topic and doesn't belong here but since we're already talking about his hooldie, the asymmetry of his hood cord REALLY REALLY bugs me :(

Great presentation, for anyone that hasen't checked out Drew's application to Y-Combinator, here it is:

http://sulemanali.com/blog/2010/11/29/drew-houstons-y-combin...

*On a side note, one thing (if you can) is to add a little humor/personality in your application:

Q:Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

A:The ridiculous things people name their documents to do versioning, like "proposal v2 good revised NEW 11-15-06.doc", continue to crack me up :)

While funny, if you reveal something like that and it is something you're not supposed to know for privacy reasons (don't know if that was the case here or not; maybe it showed up in a log entry and their privacy policy indicates that this will happen), and the information becomes more public you can get yourself into trouble (like 37Signals did when they say that the 100,000,000th file on BaseCamp was a picture of a cat. (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3076-i-heard-you-like-numbers...)

It's linked from the YC "How to Apply"[1] page.

Don't try scaring people unless you are very sure of what you are talking about.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

I work for a document management company and we regularly see people transitioning from naming systems like:

1) Document draft

2) Document draft v2

3) Document final

4) Document final updated

5) Document final final

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/winter-schedule-20112012... has a talk about the different dropbox architectures as they scaled.

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