Ruchi Sanghvi on Sweating the Details

So after about a year of working on Cove, it was the best year ever because I learned the most. Cove was acquired by Dropbox. We wanted to build at scale, and Dropbox gave us a bigger stage to do just that. We loved the people, and we loved the product, and we were so excited about our potential impact there.

Aditya and I were bent to accelerate progress and to scale the company and the product. My first reaction was that we needed to move faster; we needed to launch faster. I couldn't understand why we only released the desktop client in Dropbox once every couple of months. Maybe we needed a faster release cycle like the one we had at Facebook, every day or every other day. I couldn't understand why we spent large amounts of time fixing esoteric bugs like the desktop client for Scandinavian Windows XP version 3, when it only impacted less than 0.1% of our user base.

But then it sunk in. It would be terrible if you lost those wedding pictures or that PhD thesis that you were working on, or your life's work. I realized that values like "move fast and break things" didn't apply to Dropbox. They worked at Facebook because Facebook was fundamentally about connecting people, and the only thing that mattered was adding as many people as you could onto the service. Back then, if you built beautiful, reliable software, no one cared, and for an engineer, that was absolutely mind-boggling. It essentially meant I could build and launch; I would catch these errors and bugs by trailing the error logs and then would fix them in real time.

Now, if I cultivated these same values at Dropbox, things would have just been a disaster. We needed to foster what was unique to Dropbox, and at Dropbox that was sweating the details. The only way I can explain that is if you click that little blue box on the upper right of your computer and it stopped working once every thousand times, you would think your computer was broken and then try to get it replaced. Quality was really, really important to Dropbox, and as a result, we moved slower—not slowly, mind you, but slower than Facebook—because that last 10% of polish took about 50% of engineering time.

Once I realized that, I understood that the fastest way to accelerate progress was to grow the size of the team. When we joined Dropbox, there were only 30 engineers, and everyone was spread too thin across all the different platforms: web, desktop, mobile, and across all the different OS's. So when Drew, the CEO, asked me what I wanted to work on first, I said recruiting. I surprised even myself. Having been an engineer, a product manager, a product-facing CEO all my life, I picked recruiting. I had never done it before, but I was determined to change how it was done at Dropbox.

I set this audacious goal of growing the company from 90 people to 270 people in less than 7 months. We all here in the audience know that hiring is an extremely difficult problem in Silicon Valley. It was even harder for us to reach that goal, but we did. Not only did we reach the goal, but we were determined to hire people that we could learn from, hire people that would help us improve our definition of quality, and then also make sure that they were culturally integrated into the company.

After recruiting, I did a lot of other things at Dropbox, everything from communications to marketing and even product. My role, title, or position didn't matter; the only thing that mattered was doing what it took to win. Ten years from now, no one is going to remember that title, but they are going to remember you by what you built and its impact on the world.