[Cookingboy]

Love this following paragraph:

"Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company. It’s a philosophy that appeals to many Dropbox employees. On a chilly night in San Francisco’s Financial District, Ilya Fushman, head of business and mobile products, and Agarwal join Houston and me for dinner at the Battery, an exclusive restaurant and private club. Despite the posh surroundings, Fushman and Agarwal wax poetic about the egalitarian culture Houston and Ferdowsi have created. "It’s really hard to pull off creating an environment of peers," says Agarwal, a former engineering director at Facebook who oversaw the development of its News Feed. "We hold ourselves accountable to expectations, and at a bunch of companies, that ends up being centralized. Drew’s my boss, but I prefer to think of him as a peer and friend.""

I really don't know if the author was being facetious or the surroundings really did distort his perception of reality. But either way, as someone who grew up in a communist country, I really can't believe how people in SV are spewing these kind of second rate propaganda while keeping a straight face.

[dguaraglia]

This is purely a PR piece. I'd guess there's not much editing going on, so claims like that will go through to the reader as long as they make it through Dropbox's PR (which is originating the piece to begin with.)

So, yeah, those are some extraordinary claims there, and nobody's going to check on them. Journalism is mostly dead in this country (except for some rare exceptions.)

[vonklaus]

A HNer made this same point in a different thread today. The child comment pointed out that (i'm paraphrasing) "people don't pay for journalism or content, so the only way to monetize it is as a vehicle to drive traffic and push ads.

[dguaraglia]

Absolutely. My thinking is the problem in today's world, specially on the web, is that you can't tie people down to consume the advertisement, so you have to fool them into consuming it.

In the good ole' days of pre-cable/pre-TiVo TV, people who wanted to watch a program would have to sit through the ads because they didn't know when the next segment of the show would start. Websites can't constrain you the same way because you are free to take an action against the ad: close the tab, change tabs, install an ad-blocker.

So what's the solution? You mask ads as content. You get a press release from a company, do some basic editing on it so it doesn't look exactly the same as in the other 50 or so blogs affiliated with the PR company, and you are good to go. You get paid, the client company gets good publicity and the PR company gets their slice. The consumer is none-the-wiser and thinks s/he got something for their time. Win/win/win/kinda-lose.

[kzhahou]

> Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company

But that surely doesn't extend to equity, where the founder holds an order of magnitude or two more than his VP of Engineering, who holds an order of magnitude more than his rank-and-file employee "peers" who built and continue to build the company towards success.

[vonklaus]

That's how most companies work. The risk diminishes as the company becomes more established and recruiting becomes easier. Houston wrote the prototype himself and became accepted to Y-Combinator on that platform. Before attending he met Ferdowsi and they went through Y-Combinator and iterated on the design and built a great product, they made the viral Digg video and released to a waitlist of +75,000. Before another employee was hired YC was in the cap table and 7 participants had funded in the seed stage (included sequoia).

I am not sure if the group dynamic functions as peers, in that decisions and features and such are developed by discussion and there is mutual respect. However, I think Houston and Ferdowsi are more responsible for DB success than others and thus have a bigger slice of the Cap table.

[kzhahou]

It's typical for the founder to hold 2-5 times as much equity as all employees combined. We can argue risk all day long. I claim this is a severe imbalance, and one day silicon valley workers will wake up to it and demand more for their services.

[electic]

Makes you think of a scene straight out of The Hunger Games. These guys, surrounded by opulence, building the perfect society, all while ignoring the reality of the middle class rats that surround them.