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Comment by MikeCapone | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm just an ignorant not-involved-in-a-startup person, but what is Dropbox doing with these 400+ employees?

To me Dropbox seems like it's a pretty simply and mature product feature-wise. Have they announced that they're expanding into other products? I just hope they won't bloat Dropbox the way that some of these one-main-feature softwares were inflated in the past (ICQ, etc).

edit: I guess what got me thinking about this is that I'm reading the book by Google employee #59, and Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees. Just not sure what Dropbox can do with 400+ since their product is a lot simpler and they're not dealing with datacenters, though maybe it makes sense if these people are mostly doing marketing and sales.

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Any organization at scale just needs a lot of people to deal with keeping the wheels on the bus. There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running, a team to handle billing problems, fraudulent payments, a sales team to go after corporate customers, now you have so many people in the office that you need inhouse HR... oh look, now you need a recruiter to start keeping all these candidates coming in the door... now you need accountants to make sure that all of these people get paid on time...

> There are Computer Science problems that need to be solved every day to keep the site running

This part is beyond awesome.

From an engineering manager that helped scale Facebook: http://www.quora.com/LikeALittle-startup/Why-do-you-need-gol...

No he is right. They also need to continuously innovate before somebody else, for example, comes up with say a better storage scheme.

> Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees.

But now Google has over 20,000 employees and is still hiring. It's possible that Dropbox is building on its core product and developing entirely new products to amaze us and entice dollars out of our wallets.

> Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees. Just not sure what Dropbox can do with 400+ since their product is a lot simpler and they're not dealing with datacenters

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the 400 people will be for building our their own storage system. I'm willing to bet most of their operating cost is storage and I believe they currently use S3 which is very expensive. Unless they can get some great prices from Amazon, they will certainly at some point build their own storage system in order to scale up.

One easy thing they could do is put a folder in everybody's dropboxes called "my website" or something, where people can simply start dropping files in and have db basically "just work" as a site publisher.

I know it sort of does this now, but I've heard many problems about it when the traffic starts to scale. Presumably you'd need some serious engineers talent to solve that issue.

Imagine no more fussing with ftp clients or publishing tools to get a site up and running, just copy files into a folder. With a little fiddling and some simple rules it might even be possible to support modernish web frameworks behind the scenes...and db just assembles it and "makes it work".

Wouldn't it be possible to do this with webdav ? RW+ permissions for you, R for world.

Yeah, basically webDAV, but integrated into Dropbox.

My wild guess is they're going after the enterprise market.

Dropbox would need to expand in some big ways to provide a secure "all-cloud" filesystem that enterprises could use to replace their own data centers with.

large-scale enterprise is probably a long ways away, but SMB is a big market that they could get into without nearly as much work.

They already have a small business product:

https://www.dropbox.com/teams

My guess is that atleast some of those people will be involved in building out a sales and marketing team and going after larger corporate customers.

While their current product is mature, they have a long way to go in adoption (though it may not seem that way on HN)

Also, don't forget about the copious amounts of manpower necessary for a proactive customer support team.

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