dhouston

Joined 19 years ago

Karma
3,803
Submissions
262
Member since
Mar 29
Founder/CEO of Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com ; yc summer '07)
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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
Fair criticism. The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism -- so account recovery has to be conservative by default, which means legitimate cases sometimes get caught in the friction. Not an excuse, but it's a hard problem at scale and not just e.g. a cost-cutting thing or not giving a shit.
Comment · 5 months ago
Hi Josh -- Drew here -- our escalations team should be reaching out shortly. (Losing phone, 2FA keys, etc. can be tricky but they should be able to work with you and hopefully verify enough to get you unblocked.)
Comment · 1 year ago
+1 — cut my teeth on learning C in middle school by hacking up a DikuMUD derivative. So many great memories of that period.

And not just C but Linux (Slackware!), sockets, even kludging the single-player DOS port to be two-player by playing over a serial cable to another PC. And annoying my future Dropbox teammates by including an extra space after/before parens in function calls (and if/for/switch statements), putting { on its own line, etc as was the convention in that code base IIRC.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.

Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office (since a large percentage of the team isn't there on any given day, and folks that come in the office less tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of visibility & recognition).

Comment · 7 years ago
IMO this post has some good points but makes the executive sound like a passive referee, ultimately misunderstanding what High Output Management (also one of my favorite books!) is about. (Admittedly adding my own editorial here from my experience founding a startup and now running it as a ~3,000-person public company.)

The basic principle of HOM is that the fundamental job of an executive is to deliver results ("output"), and that the measure of an executive is the output of their organization. Importantly, there is no one right way to deliver results -- successful CEOs can have very different styles and techniques.

That said, for every effective way to deliver results there are vastly more that are ineffective. Complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty are not your friends. Time is not your friend. Everything is situationally dependent. There are many skills to develop and principles that can help but there's no formula.

This also partially explains why the median CEO or exec is perceived as ineffective, often because they are. It's a hard job, otherwise everyone would do it well and there would be a surplus of good (and cheap) execs.

Contrary to what the post suggests, HOM does not say not that the job of an executive is to wave some kind of magic culture or "values" wand and rubber-stamp whatever emergent strategy and behavior results from that. CEOs and executives absolutely do (and must) make important decisions of all kinds, break ties, and set general direction. Occasionally they need to give commands but more typically you work collaboratively with and (as the post correctly suggests) empower your team and avoid doing too much as an individual contributor.

If you're curious about what execs do and how to be a good one, HOM is an incredible book. The Effective Executive by Drucker is another favorite.

https://hbr.org/2009/05/what-only-the-ceo-can-do is one of my favorite articles about the responsibilities of the CEO.

https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-leaders-calendar is a fascinating study of where CEOs spend their time and what they actually do day to day.

Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 14 years ago
yes we are :)
Comment · 15 years ago
wildly out of context (comically so if you know me IRL) -- oh well :)
Comment · 15 years ago
UI isn't the only platform-specific thing in the code; we have a bunch of (non-Python) native code on each platform to monitor filesystem changes.

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