Melissa Tan: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's a great question. And having been at Dropbox for close to five years, I did a lot of reflection while I was there. So I was there from 2013 to 2017, around 200 people. I think about a billion dollar valuation to essentially ... I think when I left we were 1,500 people and we're valued at 10 billion at the IPO. I think the things that Dropbox got right, one of them was definitely hiring. So when I think about 2013, Dropbox was actually known in the tech circles as a place that was very selective, very difficult to get into. You could have an amazing resume, and Dropbox was really selective about the type of people they brought in. So I think they looked for two main things. They looked for first principles thinkers, so not necessarily your experience, but how do you approach problems, how do you know the right questions to ask? And then create your own framework around that. Dropbox also hired for people that were just really humble, collaborative and team oriented. And the combination of those two things, people that were just first principle thinkers also just really collaborative to tons of innovation. And so when you think about freemium product led growth, even we created a high velocity sales motion there, there was just so much innovation because you had these folks that just knew how to solve problems and worked really well cross-functionally across product growth, sales, et cetera. And also, broadly speaking, the company just infused the topic of hiring and recruiting into the culture. It was something that as I was there, everyone knew we were all going to be spending a ton of time interviewing. We all were trained on how to sell Dropbox and how to sell the roles we were recruiting for too so that we could close top talent. So I think that's something we definitely got and I learned a ton about. The other thing was the importance of execution. So a lot of times at Dropbox we would try something and it didn't work the first time around and it was easy to be maybe say that just doesn't work for us, like growth. We actually had tried to do some growth experiments back in 2013 and they didn't find much traction, but what we found is the devil, I like to say the devils and the details and the devils and how you execute. And so coming back to how do we execute just a little bit differently and some of the learnings there where I think the first time we started growth, we could have been more user-centric and been a lot more hypothesis driven. We were following a lot of best practices that just didn't really apply to Dropbox. And so the way that you execute ends up really mattering. That was the second learning. The third is just focus. en. We were following a lot of best practices that just didn't really apply to Dropbox. And so the way that you execute ends up really mattering. That was the second learning. The third is just focus. I think you alluded to this, I think the blessing and the curse of early success is that you can get pulled in so many different directions and Dropbox had a consumer business, a B2B business, and I think we could have clarified what is our point of view on what the overall motion should look like, how do we blend and think about the journey from consumer to B2B really early on, and I think a learning was that we just started our sales motion and our enterprise a little bit later than we should have and a lot of competition caught up to us. And then finally, I think the fourth one that I really believe in is how do you engage the whole company in thinking about go-to-market growth and revenue. Back in 2013, in tech growth was kind of like this dirty word and revenue was a dirty word, and so we were like, "Oh, a good product should sell itself. And it wasn't until our self-serve business started to slow down that we started our team because we realized there's a ton of opportunity in just optimizing the experience. And because we started a bit later, it always felt like growth was a layer on top of product. I think the best way to execute is just to have that be front and center from the start. What is our go-to market strategy? How are we thinking about monetization and having that infused into how you think about product development? And that's something both JZ who leads product at Webflow and myself been really intentional as we've thought of the collaboration across product and growth. So that was definitely a learning. So I guess the four things there are just the importance of hiring, execution. Think about your go-to market early on and then how do you engage the whole company on thinking about go-to market and growth. You said Dropbox essentially there was a late investment in sales and there's a sense maybe product led growth's going to take us really far. And I imagine look at Jira and Atlassian, they're just all product led and that's amazing. I guess what's your current framework for when it makes sense to start leaning into sales and hiring a sales team for say a product led product that is working?…

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