At Dropbox, Over 100 Billion Files ServedAnd Counting

Once upon a time, in the year 2007, Dropboxconsisted oftwo engineers coding in their boxers out of a sharedapartment in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. To co-founder and CEO Drew Houston, launching a successful company, looked like a never-ending trail up Mount Doom and there is all this fog ahead of you, and nobody tells you what its like.

Despite a flair for the dramatic, Houston appears to have emerged from the fog in good shape.

On Monday, Houston shared the latest Dropbox figures during a presentation at the second annualStartup Lessons Learned. Theday-long event in San Francisco was designed to bring together entrepreneurs and engineers interested in the lean startup movement.

Last year, the file-storing startup claimed a staff of 20 employees and 5 million users. Today, Dropbox hasmore than 60 employees and over 25 million people using the service in175 countries. Its attempting to translate Dropbox into a whole host of languages, starting withFrench, Japanese, German and Spanish.

The system has saved an astounding 100 billion files. As of today, people are saving 300 mil! lion fil es a day.Thats 100 million more files than users uploaded in April. And a fun fact from Houston: people save more files on Dropbox than there are tweets on Twitter.

As Dropbox grows, Houston said hes had to spend a lot of time thinking about the companys vision, corporate culture and organizational structureor whathe used to think of as Office Space bull s***, referring to the 90s cult-classic movie about draining cubical culture. He says a large amount of responsibility at Dropbox is in the hands of a small number of people. The company employes 25 engineers, all organized in small, loosely coupled teams. On the infrastructure management side, just three managers handle thousands of servers. And the sites visual designer was actually hired as the Dropbox community manager. In fact, he had no professional experience as a designer.

With startups, you just kind of have to get lucky and find the right people, Houston said.

He says one of the biggest challenges to growth has been something banal inter-office communication.

When the team was small enough to fit in one room, information just spreads naturally, Houston said. But as we grew larger we had to start deliberately trying to figure out how to get the right info in the right peoples hands.

However, when it came to attracting the right team, andgetting everyone prepared to scale up, Dropbox resorted to a strategy similar to others before it. We spent a lot of money and time making the office nice. he said, And we stocked the place with good food.

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