Not to completely dispute what you've said, since I agree with it for the most part. But my takeaway from the video certainly did not leave me with the impression that the team there was somehow so short on time that they couldn't just do their recruiting themselves (not to mention the tons of free publicity dropbox already gets acting as a useful recruitment tool). In fact, quite the contrary.
I'd be PO'd to find that these guys dropped $50k recruiting a sales VP also. I'd imagine that that custom stone conference table probably ran around $50k (they ain't cheap). I'd probably even be able to make a safe bet that just the "stuff" in their conference room cost somewhere between $100k to $200k.
Everything in the video just didn't give me the impression of being good ways to spend money. I think the number of people in this thread who are acting kinda creeped out about their office lends me some support.
If anything the DB guys should be heads down figuring out their next product. It won't take much for Microsoft or Apple to just build something like this into their next rev of their OSs or in some patch and simply put them out of business. They have a great product and a good revenue stream, time to start figuring out the next step.
If that step is to sell the company? I certainly wouldn't want to think that I'm buying all this crap along with the corporate assets for my purchase price.
All that said, I'm really just bitching, if they are paying the bills and have cash left over for this stuff, more power to them. It really does look like a cool office and it's a fantastically cool company with a brilliant product. Their continued success is something to be praised, that's for sure.
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The amount of money that it costs to outfit an office comfortably is minuscule to real recruiting costs.
How about paying $20,000 for a recruiter to find a world-class engineer and get them to leave Google to join your never-been-heard-about startup?
How about paying $50,000 to a recruiter to conduct a VP of Sales search and run the process for you?
Aeron chairs, cool pictures and desks all make an office more enjoyable, and are cheap by comparison.
Not to completely dispute what you've said, since I agree with it for the most part. But my takeaway from the video certainly did not leave me with the impression that the team there was somehow so short on time that they couldn't just do their recruiting themselves (not to mention the tons of free publicity dropbox already gets acting as a useful recruitment tool). In fact, quite the contrary.
I'd be PO'd to find that these guys dropped $50k recruiting a sales VP also. I'd imagine that that custom stone conference table probably ran around $50k (they ain't cheap). I'd probably even be able to make a safe bet that just the "stuff" in their conference room cost somewhere between $100k to $200k.
Everything in the video just didn't give me the impression of being good ways to spend money. I think the number of people in this thread who are acting kinda creeped out about their office lends me some support.
If anything the DB guys should be heads down figuring out their next product. It won't take much for Microsoft or Apple to just build something like this into their next rev of their OSs or in some patch and simply put them out of business. They have a great product and a good revenue stream, time to start figuring out the next step.
If that step is to sell the company? I certainly wouldn't want to think that I'm buying all this crap along with the corporate assets for my purchase price.
All that said, I'm really just bitching, if they are paying the bills and have cash left over for this stuff, more power to them. It really does look like a cool office and it's a fantastically cool company with a brilliant product. Their continued success is something to be praised, that's for sure.