Dropbox

“Dropbox hit a home run basically out of the gate. And there was kind of an expectation that that's how you built products. And like people came from different places and very different experiences, but pretty deep in the culture was this idea that you build it…”

“Dropbox was a very unified engineering culture, unified practices, unified technology stack, unified hiring, all of those things. And Adobe is not like, it's just a little bit of a wild west in a way that's kind of crazy. And that's just the history of its of …”

“At Dropbox, Dropbox didn't ever care to talk about money. And so understanding, like, let's go with the basic unit economics. How much does a gigabyte of storage cost? I'm not going to answer that question because that's, you know, a secret for Dropbox and it'…”

“The switching costs are very high. And we also have everything you've seen that are heard up until you start, since you use our rewind. So even if tomorrow, Some big tech company launches what we do. You know, we've got a lot of users who say, well, why'd I sw…”

“We didn't have the dynamic that Dropbox and Slack had where you have 30% of a company using it, especially when you go outside of the big tech companies. And so, A lot of times it would be like five percent of employee base”

“We look at every single category that's been created, it's very noisy in the beginning, but there's a period of like, there's like a two to three year window, where there's a massive competition, but coming out of that, the category leader is kinged or queened…”

“Winning the enterprise is really, and winning a more traditional PLG motion, it's almost like two separate companies. I think it's a very different way you think about building product, different way you interact with customers, and certainly a very different …”

“And so Dropbox and Slack, if you ask me what's the company value, well, the company value was securitizing, in a way, the bottoms-up problem that we created for them, which is all this rogue usage.”

“Dropbox is a really interesting case study, and it is one that I think too many people look to emulate, but they just can't. Because what happened with Dropbox, amazing product, perfect market timing.”

“And I would say maybe five percent of your enterprise customers are able to actually leverage that access to IT's interest and security to drive a bigger deployment.”

“I would say, there's a scenario where there is no box, and I think that was, Dropbox could have made that happen”

“The product feedback loop at Dropbox, it existed. I learned that to operate really well with engineering and product design teams, but they were never going to go build what sales was asking at Dropbox. You can ask anyone that worked there in my time. They wou…”

“Dropbox always had a bit of an identity crisis. We were this consumer company that was just, you know, printing money and a large portion of the revenue base came from that. And then we built this really great B to B business that got into the hundreds of mill…”

“Dropbox would have people calling them and they'd be consumer customers to yell about their files being deleted, and all of a sudden you'd have ESPN or, you know, a large bank calling you as an inbound lead, and so we had these really interesting challenges in…”

“And it was all license-based as well. And that was the interesting thing. So it was, you know, you would buy the license of, I don't know what password, four, maybe it was, or three. I can't even remember the version back then. And you would hold that and then…”

“Even though I would largely say Dropbox looks like a failure from the outside, like, or to me, from my point of view of like, they haven't really done much. They make a lot of money. And so it's a successful business, you know, just like IBM somehow is still a…”

“Dropbox was a tool for everyone. So that made it harder to be specific about what needs you were serving even as you moved into enterprise. Whereas like, Figma was way more focused on the core audience, and even for prosumers, even for SMBs, it is a profession…”