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Goldberg: In hypergrowth, spending 80% of your time hiring is essential

Mark Goldberg · 20VC: Index Ventures Partner, Mark Goldberg on The Questions Founders Must Ask A Multi-Stage Fund Before Taking Their Money At Seed, Why Most Angels Will Lose Their Money & Why We Will See Our First $100Bn Neo-Bank Shortly · Mar 2, 2020 · at 5:07

Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures, reflects on his experience in business operations at Dropbox during its growth from 200 to 1,500 employees, detailing lessons learned from CFO Ajay Vashi.

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“My boss at the time, who's now the CFO of Dropbox, Ajay Vashi, took me aside and said, you're going to spend 80% of your time the next six months hiring. And I was furious. It sounded crazy to me. All I wanted to do, there was so much work, was to put my head down and do the job I'd been hired for. And I was just totally wrong. The right decision when you're in hyper The investment in people. And it's so funny looking back because we hired tens of people into the organization together and those people all created wonderful talent pyramids beneath them. So it was one of those things where it was counterintuitive at the time, but absolutely the right thing to do for the company.”

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