Four-year-old file storage startup Dropbox has experienced explosive growth in the past year, jumping from 5 million users to more than 25 million users.And together, these users are now saving more than 300 million files each day and 1 million files every five minutes. In total, Dropbox users have saved more than 100 billion files, CEO and co-founder Drew Houston said.
Houston, speaking at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco on Monday afternoon, shared the massive figures in a presentation detailing how his startup has managed to scale under such enormous demand.
In the past year, Dropbox has added 35 employees to meet demand, growing from a 20-person team to a 55-person company. Roughly 50% of the startup’s team is comprised of engineers, Houston said.
Part of Dropbox’s ability to scale successfully, said Houston, is the startup’s focus on hiring fewer, better engineers and creating an office environment that its employees want to work in. The startup does not force mandatory office hours, nor does it instruct team members on how or where to work, Houston shared.
Another key, stated the CEO, is to set and reset company goals on a quarterly and annual basis in order to minimize overhead and reduce waste.
But when boiling it down to just the basics, Houston’s advice to founders is to, “Build the right thing, and build things right.” If forced to choose just one, founders should build the right thing, he says.
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