Instagram Designer Tim Van Damme Is Leaving Facebook For Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

Instagram Designer Tim Van Damme Is Leaving Facebook For Dropbox

techcrunch.com

56 pointsdevonleigh44 comments

I can't help thinking that these sort of articles remind me of the "entertainment" industry's gossip headlines. I would much rather read about the acquisitions and business decisions being made by the tech giants, then the gossip about the career decisions of the "celebrities" in the tech world

Couldn't agree more. Typical TechCrunch. Nonsense. Should we throw this guy a party or something?

People leave companies to go to other companies. Happens all the time, every day.

That's funny, I was just thinking, "I would love to be well-known enough one day that my switching employers would make the front page of HN."

I hear you, though. To me, it matters a lot what I think about the "celebrity." Christopher Hitchen's becoming an American citizen, for example, felt like news to me because he's a thoughtful, worldly person who presumably considered his decision. If Russell Brand became a citizen, though, I wouldn't care and would just presume it was for tax reasons, or a joke, or whatever.

Considering that I haven't heard of Tim Van Damme before, I'm inclined to agree with you and consider this gossip.

Apropos of not too much that's healthy for discourse, but I'm inclined to give Russell Brand a token amount of redemption: he is, at the very least, articulate to a very finely sharpened "t" - that's the impression I've gotten from his writing in the Grauniad [1]; and while I'm not wading into the debate on whether he's simply just looking deeper into the usual tropes it indicates a broader awareness than a vox no-so-pop.

[1] Here's his version of the bog-standard "Thatcher's dead: this is what I remember of her years" sketch - he raises it from the dead by tossing the tread-lightlies around The Classes and makes it about what Thatcherite individualism meant for him as a prime target. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand...

Dropbox is quickly unseating Facebook, who unseated Google before it, as the premier bigco employer.

These kinds of talent shifts tend to accelerate as the company becomes more successful. Remember when google was giving $1m offers to keep engineers from going to Facebook pre-IPO?

Anecdotally, it looks like this is true for top college grads as well.

Yeah -- I think a lot if it is "based in SF" and "hasn't IPO'd yet, but is big enough that IPO or destruction is the only likely outcome."

Why is that not Twitter?

Dropbox seems to be growing faster (maybe mattermark knows for sure), and I think Dropbox intentionally hires technically-overqualified people (like Google and Facebook did) as a way to attract other competent people. My perception, which may not be accurate, is that Twitter doesn't do that. From the Twitter employees I've spoken to, it's also not a place people who could otherwise work at Facebook or early-Google would want to work -- it got late-Google political before becoming wildly profitable.

It went from really shitty infrastructure to somewhat less so to somewhat less so, vs. starting from crap and doing amazing work to make it work well (Facebook), or technical excellence from day one (Google).

OTOH, Twitter is way "cooler" than Dropbox, in terms of having political impact, standing up for users vs. the US Government, used by "cool" (non-tech) people, etc.

> My perception, which may not be accurate, is that Twitter doesn't do that.

Twitter employee here: Always surprised at the amount of ridiculously talented people I work with. :)

You do realize that almost everyone in tech companies says, thinks and believes the same thing, right?

When you're in such a situation, a lot of people don't realize how strange and self-involved it sounds to say things like that.

To me, it feels like "We have the best people! You don't work here, so you must not be very good. Therefore, I'm better than you."

That's obviously not what they mean, but it strikes chords of jealousy and social exclusion when shouted in a public square.

Twitter has always been known for their Super Ego Employees though. Work 12 hours a day, go home, run twelve miles, cook a gourmet dinner, have three dates (sleep with two of them), check email before bed, sleep for four hours, then start over the next day. (with oversharing online humblebrags every step of the way, obviously)

I don't know much about Twitter internally but from the outside they seem to have a pretty impressive stack. I personally love their Scala, Storm, Bootstrap, Twmemproxy, Cascading work.

http://twitter.github.io

Because Twitter's peaked in every interesting way.

Because two years ago Twitter raised at $8 bil valuation http://allthingsd.com/20110801/twitter-confirms-funding-with... and private market transactions have valued them in the neighborhood of $10 bil, which might have impacted the FMV for new hires.

If you're joining the company today, there better be significant growth story to justify 4x-5x growth from $10 bil baseline. If it's just 2x-3x, heck, joining GOOG, YHOO or AAPL might yield the same results if you timed it right.

So much of this impression is shaped by the narrative that the techblogs are choosing to cover on any particular week. In reality, all these companies have some level of attrition, and people leave one job for another for new challenges. Dropbox has 315 employees[1]. That constraint alone means that the number of slots to fill will be very small.

(I also personally wouldn't really label Dropbox as "bigco" label like Google and Facebook, if only because you can still fit everyone in one medium-large room. I guess it's not a startup anymore, but I don't think anyone would consider it a lumbering corporate behemoth).

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/about

Of all the internet companies Dropbox looks the most precarious to me.

The fact is that the core product kind of sucks. It is slow to upload, very CPU intensive and incredibly slow to receive new features. And its focus on API data syncing as a growth area seems fraught with danger given iCloud and likely similar services from Microsoft, Ubuntu, Google etc.

It also has no stickiness associated to it. I could easily transition to a competitor's product with no loss of data or productivity. And if it wasn't the best of a pretty sad bunch then I would have years ago.

I disagree that their core product sucks. The negatives you mentioned aren't noticeable to 99% of end users; what is noticeable is that dropbox works exactly the way a product like dropbox should work. I'd agree that Dropbox looks precarious but I'd argue it's for the opposite reason: they got the product right the first time and they don't seem like they have anywhere to go from here.

    > The negatives you mentioned aren't noticeable to 99% of end users

I wouldn't say that...Anyone with a laptop has probably noticed that they're battery life seems shorter for some reason, they may not know its Dropbox but it is.

Further, anyone who has used Dropbox knows about the slow upload and download rates (especially noticeable if you have a semi-decent internet connection).

   >they got the product right the first time and they don't seem like they have anywhere to go from here

If you ignore the fact that you can have endless syncing caused by files made on one FS and synced to another (EncFS > NTFS seems to be most troublesome). Or the fact that the dropox system daemon scans the whole FS instead of just the dropbox folder(s). Or that it doesn't run well in multi-user environments. Or that it's easily broken if permissions are changed in a shared file/folder and you wind up with thousands of (conflicted copy) dupes for no good reason.

Dropbox is an amazing product. What are you even talking about? The points you brought up are completely irrelevant to the cloud storage market. New features? Areas for growth? Who the fuck cares?

I don't see it growing as big as Google or Facebook either, not because the product sucks (when I used it last, it worked well), but simply because I don't think many people have a real need for it.

My parents use Google, they reluctantly signed up for Facebook (and got bored and stopped using it), but they'll never have a need for Dropbox. Nor will any of their friends, or most of my friends.

With the trend towards appliance computers and walled gardens, users interact with their file systems less than ever. Their tagline is "Never email yourself a file again!" I can't remember the last time I emailed myself a file. It might as well be "Never transfer a file between computers using a floppy disk again!"

When I was a student, and I had a desktop, a laptop, and lab computer, Dropbox came in handy on occasion. Now, I have a laptop and tablet. What would I sync between my them? Photos? Music? Notes? Cloud sharing is built in, and it's less of a hassle than going through Dropbox.

I'm sure there are people for whom it is essential. But those people are probably in the minority, and their numbers are likely to dwindle.

I assume you are talking about iCloud? Not sure most would agree that it beats Dropbox on ease of use.

Everyone who uses a computer to store any kind of unique content at all is a potential Dropbox user. Many people just don't know it until the first time they want an older version of something back, accidentally delete something or have a hard drive give out.

Dropbox made a move to be the photo/video syncer of choice, so it's not completely out of the question that the next set of photo albums that proverbial you might be sending to proverbial parents is hosted on dropbox.com domain.

Dropbox seems to have two major value propositions: ease of use, and multiplatform. If you just use it on desktops, there are already several far superior options. "Ease of use" isn't sticky.

The big challenge is mobile. Dropbox's main stickiness is when developers adopt the Dropbox API, particularly on mobile. If you just use Apple for mobile, iCloud is in some ways superior (although has Dropbox's same horrible security). There's no one doing a better job than Dropbox of crossplatform on lame devices like iOS and Android in addition to desktops (and game systems, etc.).

(I admit I'm pretty biased against Dropbox because they both lied blatantly and horribly about security for a long time, and then, when caught, did a minimal job of just handwaving and continuing as before. They make file security markedly worse for users than it was before Dropbox.)

I don't think "dropbox for teams" is much stickiness; I don't know of anyone using it in serious deployments, and in a serious deployment, switching wouldn't be that hard, either.

I agree on pretty much all points - and wanted to add why I think Dropbox for teams is a horrible, horrible thing - well sharing anything on dropbox is actually bad.

First, one typically has a private dropbox that they keep a bunch of stuff in. When one joins a company that is using dropbox for teams - it cuts off access to your personal dropbox, and whenever the company has rule over your account - if you leave the company, lets say abruptly, you can lose access to your data.

I don't care what anyone says about any employment relationship - there is some data that is private and crucial, and you should never save any of it in a shared team dropbox.

Finally, sharing things with people via dropbox is a stupid and inefficient way of handling sharing; Assume you have a paid 50-100GB Dropbox. Storing large files/data in there is no-issue. Sometimes you'll want to share out a project directory with another user - but they may not be a paid dropbox user. If they join your shared folder, that data gets replicated to them and they get that data deducted from their available space. So, dropbox is "counting" the space for that data on both accounts. If that other user has a small or mostly full account - that project share could bring them to their cap.

This happened to people I shared data with on large projects many many times.

If I share out a folder from me to you - and you join my share - you should get a free connection to that share, as it is using data from my account limit, not yours.

"(I admit I'm pretty biased against Dropbox because they both lied blatantly and horribly about security for a long time, and then, when caught, did a minimal job of just handwaving and continuing as before. They make file security markedly worse for users than it was before Dropbox.)"

Don't forget they were implicated as "coming soon" in the whole PRISM/NSA saga. No thanks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...

I think it won't matter, because Dropbox could very well be the Kleenex of handkerchiefs or the Hoover of vacuum cleaners; people just associate Dropbox with that kind of task, and I don't know if they need to provide great quality as a result.

As a user I am under the impression - and I do insist that it is a subjective, unsubstantiated point of view - that the moment those companies went on their first talent shopping spree they stopped innovating in significant ways. Am I the only one to feel that way ?

David Cramer has also left DISQUS for Dropbox. (http://justcramer.com/2013/07/16/dropbox/)

He was actually at tenexer in between the two.

tenXer

which is likely more of a true promotion than a lateral, all things considered.

To be fair, Instagram was one of the only other companies that interested me.
Main upside of Dropbox was the role I get to play + its in SF and my commute didn't really change (<20m)

The billion dollar instagram acquisition is becoming the insane-valuation-punchline du jour and will eventually supersede all previous punchlines from the first bubble.

Has Instagram's usage plummeted or does it remain one of the most popular photo-sharing social networks in the world? Does photo-sharing remain one of the most popular activities on Facebook? Is it become less apparent, instead of more apparent, that a Facebook competitor could have leveraged Instagram as a threat?

I know you're asking these questions rhetorically, but for those who don't know, Instagram usage exploded after the acquisition and the consensus in the Valley is that it sold to Facebook for incredibly cheap.

Well, they launched on Android right before being acquired too.

You couldn't be more wrong IMHO.
Instagram is actually looking to be quite a smart acquisition. Not only is it fending off Vine with its video integration but look what is happening in Kuwait. Businesses there are using to sell comics, sheep, makeup - anything which is photo dominated. Plenty of opportunities there to monetise without affecting your everyday user.
And as smartphone cameras become more sophisticated like we are seeing from Nokia and Sony it is likely that Instagram will takeover from Flickr as the primary photo service of the internet as well.

The instagram number was just a numerator on top of facebook's valuation. To say instagram was overpriced is just an indirect way of saying facebook was overpriced.

Compared to OMGPOP, which was a one hit wonder bought for $200 million and shut down after a year?

Of course that's a worse acquisition, but it doesn't have the flashy $1B price tag, and did anybody really expect better from Zinga?
Instagram had strategic timing for its IPO, and nipped a potential competitor in the bud. Facebook probably was worried (and rightfully, IMO) that it has lost its cool factor among young people, and that there was a vacuum of influence in the mobile space. Instagram was spreading insanely fast among young people, was natively mobile, and was centered around Facebook's most popular functionality (sharing photos with friends). Had Instagram incorporated more of the essential social networking features, it conceivably could have become the social networking site to dethrone Facebook. Squashing that threat when they did was very, very smart.

No way. Broadcast.com for $4.5b? AOL/Netscape (which actually destroyed the company, in addition to being a lot of money?) Pets.com (due to the puppet). Etc. nothing going on today could hold a candle to the 1998-2001 bubble.

Don't forget HP buying Compaq. $25 billion well spent.

If viewed on a "Purchase price/employees" ratio, this is an expensive move. The PR of a hire like this is also VERY valuable.

Should be awarded with Medal of Brownian movement.

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