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Dropbox

dropbox

Dropbox values product health and developer productivity. Since its first product release in September 2008, Dropbox has focused on delivering a modern workspace where users can store, access, and collaborate on content. Today, Dropbox’s global collaboration service provides a wide range of business and personal offerings around cloud storage, document collaboration, and file synchronization that are accessible on web, desktop, and Android and iOS mobile applications. “Product health is one of our highest focuses,” states Angella Derington, Dropbox Mobile Staff Engineer. “One of the things we want to achieve for all of our mobile apps is to hit the three-nines on user availability. To do that, we need tools that any engineer can utilize to troubleshoot where crashes come from and identify what’s happening in each release.” Moving From Homegrown to Crashlytics to Bugsnag Years ago, Dropbox built a homegrown crash reporting system. However, staffing and resourcing dropped off over time, which led to a stagnant system that did not provide the features required to monitor application health. Approximately two years ago, the observability team, which owned all tooling to observe behaviors on client applications, recognized the need to adopt a new error monitoring solution that would evolve faster and enable Dropbox to benefit from the expertise of a third-party provider. Evaluation of external crash reporting solutions began, with the objective to find a solution that could be implemented company-wide. To bridge this interim period, the mobile team decided to try a free solution. “We moved to Crashlytics for about a year, which was an improvement from our homegrown solution but lacked a lot of things, especially breadcrumbs and query tools,” states Angella. “The mobile engineers were easy to convince because there’s so much functionality with Bugsnag, and it’s easy.” ‍ — Angella Derington, Mobile Staff Engineer When Dropbox selected Bugsnag as its stability monitoring solution, Angella’s team became the first internal customer. “The mobile engineers were easy to convince because there’s so much functionality with Bugsnag, and it’s easy,” explains Angella. “It was a very smooth transition, and I think the full migration took us only about six weeks. We’d already abstracted our crash reporting library, so it was pretty straightforward to plug in Bugsnag.” Bugsnag provides full visibility during error investigation and experiments with breadcrumbs, automatic grouping, and custom filtering. Today, Bugsnag enables the Dropbox mobile team to monitor stability by release and prioritize and fix errors with speed, precision, and ease. Breadcrumbs is one of the critical Bugsnag features that the team relies upon as a best practice for debugging why a crash happened and for resolving customer complaints. “When we moved to Bugsnag — especially with its breadcrumbs — engineers were suddenly saying, ‘I can look at a crash and know how to fix it!’” — Angella Derington, Mobile Staff Engineer “Bugsnag removes uncertainty and anxiety around the time it takes to troubleshoot a crash and any concerns about reproducibility. Having information that pinpoints where to start looking in the code is groundbreaking for engineers,” states Angella. In addition to breadcrumbs, the mobile team benefits from indexing of custom events, which is particularly useful with its weekly beta releases. “I had never experienced or seen indexing of custom events in a solution before,” states Angella. “We do a lot of A/B testing and feature gates, and it’s extremely helpful to be able to index so you can create queries and bookmarks around them.” Historically, identifying the impact on a class of crashes proved hard to accomplish. “We’ve used Bugsnag a lot to identify impact and be able to fix classes of crashes a lot faster than we would have otherwise,” explains Angella. Out-of-the-box ANR detection and workflow integrations make debugging precise and actionable, while bookmarking and custom alerts help teams stay focused. The team also uses bookmarks on queries: “While Bugsnag does a pretty good job of identifying similar crashes, sometimes exceptions are chained. It’s helped a lot to be able to set up a bookmark that’s looking specifically for the exception message and be able to find all of those errors.” The Android team especially appreciates Bugsnag’s ability to handle Application Not Responding (ANR) errors. “I love that ANRs are in the tool. On previous teams, we’d forget about ANRs until customer complaints start coming in because we weren’t monitoring them in our tool,” states Angella. “Bugsnag is the first crash reporting tool where it’s actually being sucked in from Google Play, which is perfect.” Dropbox uses Bugsnag’s integrations with Jira, Slack, and PagerDuty to automate tickets and provide targeted, customized alerting. “In the past, we’ve turned off alerting because this fragmentation amounts to so much noise that no one pays attention to,” states Angella. “The ability to be specific about what you want to be alerted about from your crash reporting tool is very helpful.” With a passion to deliver high quality apps, Dropbox expands Bugsnag usage, allocating the time-saved ROI towards building new features Dropbox’s mobile teams use breadcrumbs for application health, and this best practice is spreading to the rest of the organization. “With newer Dropbox apps like Passwords, it’s a simpler task to build out breadcrumbs and handled exceptions in our code base,” states Angella. “The original Dropbox app, which has evolved from the very beginning, is around half a million lines of code right now and at varying stages of age, so it will take a little longer before it’s as end-to-end as apps like Passwords.” Today, the teams working on this desktop client application are putting in the work to add breadcrumbs throughout the large code base. This critical step will create consistency with logging and enable other engineering teams to fully benefit from Bugsnag in the same ways that the mobile teams are today. “It’s a passion of mine to deliver high-quality applications, especially ones that I work on. Of course, engineers don’t love fixing crashes; they like building new code. Minimizing that time with Bugsnag is magical.” — Angella Derington, Mobile Staff Engineer Previously published here. Dropbox’s mobile team set the goal to achieve three nines of user availability by the end of 2021, which would bring it in line with the team’s session stability score. With Bugsnag, mobile engineers have the stability management features required to monitor release stability and address errors with speed in order to improve the user stability score.

A Little Dropbox, Bugsnag, and a Lot of Visibility During Error Investigation 

referral marketing campaign is infamous. The company grew between 2008 and 2010. How did they do it? Learn how in this Dropbox case study – and what you can learn from their example. Dropbox’s 3900% in 15 months The timeline Dropbox is a file storage and sharing service that released its first product to customers in 2008. When the site launched, it achieved modest growth – registering 100,000 users by September 2008. A by Drew Houston, the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, outlines Dropbox’s market position when they began the campaign. Houston reports that in 2008 it was a crowded market; there were lots of competitors and SaaS start-ups selling products to companies and individuals at the time. Dropbox itself was mostly staffed by engineers at the time, not marketing gurus. Slideshare presentation The company considered a few different traditional digital marketing options before realizing that referral marketing was already working for them. By December 2009, Dropbox had registered users. By 2017, they had , plus a $10 billion valuation and $1 billion in revenue. That’s how powerful their referral campaign really was. four million 33.9 million users The campaign How was Dropbox’s referral campaign structured? Dropbox set up a double-sided reward, where the participant and the person who they refer are both rewarded. Dropbox was hoping to with a new product. It needed to get people to sign up for storage space on the cloud. gain traction Its incentive, therefore, was to reward participants with more free space not just for referring their friend, but also for accepting an invitation. “In addition to the referred member getting benefits, the referrer was given extra storage space (a key component of product enjoyment),” reported . This meant that participants were encouraged to try the product, realize that it worked well, fall in love with it, and then share it with others. Entrepreneur The program permanently , with more than 2.8 million direct referral invites sent the first 18 months. increased signups by 60% Lessons from the Dropbox Case Study Interested in replicating this success for your business? Take these key lessons from the Dropbox case study. Pick an incentive that aligns with your brand. Houston says that the structure of Dropbox’s referral program was inspired by a similar one set up by Paypal. Paypal offered cash incentives for participants who signed up a friend; that makes sense, as Paypal is primarily a peer-to-peer cash transfer platform. For Dropbox, their incentive needed to accomplish two things: give the participant something they wanted, and validate their product efficacy for a large market. More cloud storage is a win-win for Dropbox, a referral participant, and their friend. What can your company offer participants that creates value while building brand loyalty? Make it easy to refer others Dropbox made it easy for referrers at a few key points. Firstly, their call-to-action was part of the sign-up process. It invited a user to become a referral participant while they were already excited about the product and willing to spread the word Secondly, Dropbox made it possible to invite your friends and family to . Referral links could be sent via any messenger app, email, social media, SMS, and more. It even offered a way to sync your contacts from Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, and other mail providers to share your link without having to cut and paste individually. This is where a tool can make setting up your campaign so easy! sign up without too many clicks referral marketing software Tell participants where they stand A final component of Dropbox’s campaign that contributed to its success: an invite status dashboard. Participants could see from their Dropbox account how many of their invited friends and family had completed the sign-up process, thereby granting that participant extra storage. It motivated users to follow-up on invites or send the link even more frequently to get even more storage space. Referral marketing software can come in handy here, too. Tools like show you, the company, a timeline of a participant’s activities: when they signed up, who they referred, and how many referrals turned into customers. You can send updates to participants letting them know each month how successful they were, or set the platform to automate rewards. GrowSurf Dropbox’s referral marketing campaign is admirable, but by no means irreplicable. All it takes is knowing your audience, offering the right incentive, and having the right tools in place to manage your referrals as they start to grow This is an exclusive original content contributed to Hackernoon.com written by Emily Heaslip and Kevin Yun. Submitted with permission. For more resources you may visit Blog GrowSurf

How Dropbox Grew 3900% Using Referral Marketing

Credits: Thank you to our chapter sponsor, Dropbox-Seattle and the Advancing Women in Product Seattle team: Trina O'Brien , Laura Ulmer , Alice Tang , Victoria Tkatch For many Product Managers who have grown mature product lines, a natural question to ask is: "What's next? How do we continue to grow and expand into new markets?" For those of us who have wondered how senior product leadership considers these questions and when/how they would add products and lines of business to your companies portfolio, served up wisdom from four stellar product leaders in the Seattle chapter: (Chief Product Officer, , (Director of Product, Dropbox), (Senior Product Manager, Tableau), and (Senior Manager of Product Management, Amazon Web Services). Each product leader represented a different facet of this question: from startups like Yapta (which is vertical-focused) to large companies like Amazon Web Services (which is known for its horizontal expansion). Advancing Women in Product Valerie Layman Yapta) Vishal Kapoor Anushka Anand Nancy Wang (From the left to the right: Anushka Anand, Valerie Layman, Vishal Kapoor, Nancy Wang.) We present the highlights of the discussion below: Deciding when to expand the product portfolio The first step can be knowing when a good time to expand the current product portfolio can be. A unifying theme among our panelists was product-service delivery metrics: product-driven organizations focus on successful delivery of the core product and service to the customer and measure that success based on metrics such as Cost to Aquire a Customer (CAC), rate of churn (a negative rate of churn is especially desirable), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Life Time Value (LTV), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). These indicators can provide visibility into how the product is performing, and if any potential acquisitions may add (or subtract) from the current product performance. Delivery, as our panelists defined, is validating customer personas, designing, and evolving their journeys across the lifespan of a customer's relationship with the product. Having worked at a venture-backed startup prior to Amazon Web Services, Nancy Wang (Founder & CEO of AWIP) remarked: "Silicon Valley has popularized these metrics (LTV, CAC, CSAT) within the startup community. But learn which ones are most important to telling your product story and when." Example of a not-so-great acquisition To this question, Vishal from Dropbox gave a very candid answer. He said, "Mailbox was not a great acquisition for the company; we needed to stay focused on enterprise productivity software and it was diverting our attentions to customer-oriented tech." (Read about the Wired coverage .) He then gave pointers to the audience if they were ever to consider an acquisition for their organization: here "Product Market Fit: Focus on ensuring your product is doing the job it was hired for. If your current product business line is struggling, look there first to see what gaps you can solve." Total Addressable (TAM) and Net Addressable Market (NAM) assessments should precede any decision to enter into any new line of business. Expanding to include adjacent "Jobs to Be Done" can be met by either acquiring or building in-house. Valerie added: "Don't seek to stray your core competencies." Stay connected with your customers As a PhD Computer Scientist, Anushka provided the audience with unique insight on how customer feedback could be systematic and analyzed. She mentioned work that she had done at Tableau around customer advisory boards and detailed analysis to show customer trends and thinking. She says: "Listening to your customers is essential to finding product-market fit. It will give you the answer to what new jobs can be done and when to expand." Looking for more events? Come check out the , , , and for our upcoming events! With over 10,000 members worldwide, we have AWIP chapters in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Paris. Drop us a line. website Facebook page Twitter Meetup Supportive Reading: Harvard Business School Press: "Know Your Customer's Jobs to Be Done'" https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done Service Design Thinking: http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com/

Expanding the product portfolio with Dropbox

How the world’s top tech teams set and hit goals “Unless we have a purpose there is no reason why individuals should try to cooperate together at all or why anyone should try to organize them,” Wrote legendary management consultant Lyndall F. Urwick in the 1964 issue of Harvard Business Review. Alright. What are we doing quoting a more than 50-year-old article in a post about goal-setting in 2018? Well, because despite all our technological and societal advances, we still seem to be struggling with this exact issue. As the authors of , a mere and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve company goals. The Strategy-Focused Organization found 7% of employees today fully understand their company’s business strategies Goal setting is a serious problem. Once your company or team , making sure everyone has goals that align with the company’s purpose and vision is no small task. expands beyond a one-room operation It’s easy enough for marketing or sales teams to set goals like “Acquire X users” or “Double email list.” But for technical teams? When you’re in charge of your core product and need to react quickly to changes, you can’t stick to the same old static goals. So, how do the best technical teams in the world with products bringing in billions in revenue keep their eyes on the end goal while staying nimble and agile? Let’s find out. A version of this post was originally published on the Planio blog . Check it out for more essays and actionable tips on project management, building a remote team, and thriving as a startup! Goals are the reason your team wants to come into work every morning First off, there’s more to goal setting than just telling your team what they need to do. When done properly, goals aren’t just a to-do list, but a direct line to your company’s vision and purpose. Think about this stat for a second: FitBit users take 43% more steps than non-users. Why? Well, it turns out that just having insight into their data and progress towards their personal goals is enough to get people to put in extra miles every day. Imagine what would happen if every member of your entire company knew for a fact that the work they were doing was moving the whole organization forward. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Studies have shown that and across your team. But more specifically, research has shown that in attaining those goals. committing to a goal can help improve employee performance help build a sense of togetherness and motivation setting challenging and specific goals can further enhance your team’s engagement Setting proper goals for your technical team doesn’t just keep your team and devs aligned with company goals. It leads to higher performance, a sense of happiness and ownership, and ultimately, success across the board. Proper goal setting throws grease on the wheels. It makes your team run smoother than Vin Diesel’s head. And with a bit of work up front, it’s not that hard to master. Goal-setting exercise 1: Effective goal-setting starts at the top and cascades down If you want to set effective goals for your company, you need to know exactly what goes into that goal. It’s not enough to say “We want to do X.” You need to clearly define what X is, why it’s important, how you’re going to get there, and what your expectations are of everyone helping you reach it. To do this, I like to think of the goal-setting process like a house of cards. At the very top of the stack is your company vision. It’s got the best spot and is (or should be) extremely visible to everyone. But it’s also vulnerable. If anything shifts too much at the bottom, the whole thing collapses. So what supports your company vision? Goals (as well as sub-goals, objectives, and strategies.) Goals are the execution of your company vision. They’re the actions that translate high-level business objectives into actionable steps so everything your team does is pushing you in the right direction. As former SVP of Product at LinkedIn, Deep Nishar, : explains “Vision without operational excellence is just a dream. Great enterprises marry a sense of purpose with amazing operational excellence and put processes in place for how they will achieve that vision.” Or, as Don Sull, Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, explains: . They provide a wireframe for your company, giving a clear view of what every individual’s role is in getting that card safely to the top of the stack. goals are the missing link between strategy and execution The problem is that getting all these pieces to work together and have visibility into them is a challenge. Teams get siloed. Communication slows down. And all of a sudden the goals you set aren’t in line with the company vision. But as a team leader, you can change this for the better. “As the team and org scales, communication of your values, the stories that illustrate those values, and the context behind the decisions being made are so important,” Kelly Graziadei who led product and marketing teams at Facebook for 7 years. explains “But communication often falls to the bottom of the priority list. As you scale your teams this must be front and center. With communication comes stories, priorities, and context. Context gives meaning to the work, creates alignment, and gives people the power and confidence to make decisions. Context and good goal setting is critical.” It all starts with communication around what kind of goals you’re setting, your culture of success, and then tying individual objectives to larger team goals and your company vision. Before we get into what types of goals you should set for your engineering team and how to set them, we need to answer a couple of questions about the kind of goals you’re setting in general. This is all about your company’s goal setting culture. How do you set goals, what types of goals do you set, and how do you know what success of those goals looks like? 1. What types of goals are you setting as a company? Not every company or even individual treats goals the same way. But in order for you to work together and support the system that will get you there, everybody needs to know where the goal line is. In other words, when you set goals, are you setting goals that are: Moonshots (aka, pretty damn impossible to hit) Pretty hard (but you’ll hit them 70% of the time) Slightly more than your current skills and resources (80–95% chance you’ll hit them) A walk in the park (you’ll hit them with a 20-hour work week) It might not seem important to know this right now, but think about this for a second: Let’s say Engineer A thinks you’re setting goals that are in bucket D — nice and easy. While Engineer B thinks you’re setting goals in Bucket B — pretty hard. When it’s time to check in and see how everyone has progressed, there’s going to be all sorts of issues and not nice words being thrown around. To keep everyone on an even playing field, you need to know what the field looks like. Ultimately, your culture will determine this. So make a decision and until it becomes a part of your company DNA. communicate it 2. What does success look like? Goal hit = good. Goal missed = bad. Right? Maybe. It depends. Just like you need to define what of goals your company is going after, you also need to know . types how you deal with meeting or missing those goals Here’s a few of the options you might pick, as explained by : Pinterest BlackOps Engineering Manager, Marty Weiner You MUST hit your goal! Strive hard to meet your goal. Big kudos if you do. Discuss what could have been better if you don’t. Goals are just guidelines. No big deal. Just reading those out, you can probably see how not being on the same page could be more than a little awkward for your team. Communicating what success looks like helps keep your team aligned and motivated. . And there’s a big difference in the way you approach a problem (and its associated goal) if you think it’s a “MUST hit” versus just a guideline. No one likes to feel like they failed Goal setting exercise 3: Use OKRs to choose the right goals for your engineering team Now that you understand the playing field for how you’re setting goals: You know they need to relate to and support the company’s vision You know what of goals you’re setting type You know what looks like for them success The next step is to translate that company vision into the actionable goals your engineering team can work towards every single day. A good method for doing this is to use OKRs — or, Objectives and Key Results. First popularized by Intel CEO Andy Grove, OKRs have been used by major tech companies like Google, Amazon, Adobe, Dropbox, Slack, and more to align higher-level company objectives with the results that each individual team member does to help get there. In Grove’s famous manual , he introduces the idea of OKRs by asking 2 questions: High Output Management Where do I want to go? How will I know when I’m getting there? is the thing you’re working towards. It should be qualitative, inspirational, and tied to company goals. Think something like: Make our homepage the best on-site experience. (As a general rule, Weiner and the leadership at Google suggest setting 3–5 personal OKRs for any given quarter. Any more and you have the potential to distract from what really needs to get done.) Your Objective are the metrics you need to keep track of to see if you’re making progress. A key result should be qualitative and specify a measurement window. For example, lower site load speed 50% in 1 month. You might have 2 or 3 Key Results for each Objective. Your Key Results One of the main things to point out about OKRs is that they’re supposed to be difficult. Your objective shouldn’t necessarily be something you can hit in a couple weeks or even a quarter without killing it. Instead, a good rule of thumb is that “success” of an Objective is around 60–70% complete. This is also why it’s so important that you have a shared understanding of the types of goals you’re setting. If you have teams that are collaborating, they each need to expect that the other will only be hitting that 60–70% and act accordingly. really , describes them: As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner “OKRs are something you want to accomplish over a specific period of time that leans towards a stretch goal rather than a stated plan. It’s something where you want to create greater urgency, greater mindshare.” For your engineering team, this means setting goals as a team and then that will help move you closer to hitting those goals. letting each individual set their own Objectives If you’re using , OKRs are still a great option. Not only do they ensure that you’re moving quickly and regularly re-assessing where you’re heading. But by tying it to a larger business goal. Agile or Scrum project management they help clarify what success is beyond just a product feature This is where you really start to see how Objectives support your company vision and goals. While your mission, vision, and goals state the change you want your company to make, Objectives are the devices used to measure the success or failure of those efforts. So, if your objective needs to be measurable, the obvious question is: How do we measure it? Goal setting exercise 4: Use MMOM metrics to measure your goal progress There’s all sorts of ways you can track your progress on Objectives, but a good test is to ask your mom. Sorry, I meant MMOM (Meaningful, Measurable, Operational, Motivational). Is your metric meaningful? Your metric needs to contribute or relate to your business objective in some pretty obvious way. Or at least in a way that a lot of people can agree on. So, if your overall objective is to increase user experience on your site, it probably makes sense to track something like site load speed. Where you’ll run into issues is when you have a metric that is closely related, but not perfect. As Pinterest’s Engineering Manager Marty Weiner explains: “Does ‘number of times content is flagged’ meaningfully measure bad experiences? Perhaps, but you’d prefer to know ‘number of times somebody has a bad experience’ (which can be impossible to measure).” Is your metric measurable? You should be able to measure your metric on a regular basis. Pretty basic, right? So, in our site load speed example, we can A/B test the time before and after changes to see if we’ve made a positive change. Even if it feels like you can’t measure the metric, there’s probably a way you can. It may not be perfect, but starting with anything will help you push forward and look for better ways. Don’t throw out a metric just because it isn’t obviously measurable off the bat. Is your metric operational? How quickly can you see the effects of your change on your objective? Changing the background color of your homepage is highly operational. You can do it today and see if it makes a change in a couple hours. Measuring how many people are returning to your site after 30 days, isn’t quite as operational. The faster your metric responds to changes you make, the faster you can iterate. However, this doesn’t just mean you should pick the highly operational ones. There’s a tradeoff that depends on their meaningfulness. It’s good to mix it up and include one highly operational one for your team, and, separately, one less operational one that’s more meaningful to the rest of the company. Is your metric motivational? How much do you or your team actually want to move the needle on this metric? You’re working with people here, and people respond to motivation. If you know your team (or yourself), you should be able to say with some level of confidence whether or not this objective is motivational. And if it’s not? Usually this can be remedied by tying the metric to some bigger goal or purpose (Remember, it all works together!) by all sorts of different things: Mastery, prestige, challenge, snacks. Find what works for them and try to connect the metric to it. People are motivated Your metrics will dictate your timeline and when you check in on your progress Setting ambitious goals and objectives (remember, OKRs should be difficult!) means you probably won’t hit them in the initial time frame you give yourself. So the question becomes how much can you move that metric in that moment? Some metrics should cover the whole quarter, such as maintenance metrics. While some metrics, especially covering areas of fast improvement, could be unmotivational if the window is too long. “Choose goals that you can track daily or weekly,” says Facebook’s Kelly Graziadei. “You can only move as fast and change course as the speed of your feedback. Communicate about goals, progress, best practices, and wins early and often.” A good rule of thumb is to look for metrics and key results that you can check in on after a minimum of two weeks. Any shorter and there’s usually too much noise. Goal-setting exercise 5: Make sure team goals and individual career goals connect To this point, we’ve only been talking about setting team goals for your engineering team. But on a personal level, also addresses your team member’s individual trajectories. effective goal-setting We all want to do work that will bring us the things we crave: prestige, recognition, promotions. And treating individuals just like cogs in a machine means they’re going to go looking for something better. “When you’re a technical manager, your job is mostly about humans,” , co-founder of chat startup Zulip that was acquired by DropBox. says Jessica McKellar “There are two things you should always be thinking about: People’s day-to-day and their year-to-year.” This could mean setting goals around learning or getting better at new programming languages and platforms. Or understanding a team member’s areas of interests, and making sure their day-to-day tasks line up with them. You want to be leveling up everyone on your team all the time. Execution will follow. What goal setting for engineering teams looks like in practice Ok, let’s do a quick recap of everything before looking at some goal-setting examples for technical teams: Your company needs a vision that goals are aligned with Step 1: You need a clear culture of what of goals you’re setting and what success looks like Step 2: types Your teams should set goals that connect to business objectives, not just product features Step 3: Each individual is responsible for setting quarterly OKRs that are connected to team goals Step 4: Each OKR needs Key Results that are measured by MMOM metrics Step 5: Goals cascade down from your company vision, while OKRs are quicker, allowing you to change course and redefine team-level goals in an Agile way. So, what does this all look like in practice? Let’s say our team is responsible for a user-facing site like a blog or marketing page, and we want to improve the user experience. Improve the performance of website Objective: Increase availability (aka uptime) of website measured over the last two weeks of the quarter from 97% to 99% Key Result 1: Decrease site load time from 5 to 3.5 seconds Key Result 2: Our Objective of improving performance ties directly to our goal of creating a better user experience. While our Key Results address availability and performance/speed — two factors that directly tie into our Objective. On top of that, our Key Results also tell a pretty good MMOM story. They’re as they tie to our Objective and help us towards our ultimate goal of creating a better experience and bringing in more customers. meaningful They’re also pretty easily as we have tools that can easily benchmark load time and availability and see how our improvements and optimizations are helping. measured , the first Key Result is measured over a few weeks, which might be a little long. However, by adding in a second Key Result that isn’t measured over a longer period of time, your engineer has something to measure and iterate on quickly. Operationally Lastly, site performance affects everything from conversion rates to SEO, so it’s a pretty goal to work towards! motivational Goal setting is important for all parts of your business. But when it comes to goal setting for your engineering team, you need to be especially diligent in your process. Goals are a great opportunity to create a shared vision. To push the purpose of your company. And to challenge the talented team you’ve surrounded yourself with. Make sure everyone knows how and why you’re setting goals. Tie individual goals and objectives to your company vision. And make sure everyone has metrics that keep them motivated and inspired to work every single day. Hey, I’m Jory! I help companies and interesting people tell their stories through smart and focused writing. Want to work together? Email me at hello@jorymackay.com A version of this post was originally published on the Planio blog . Check it out for more essays and actionable tips on project management, building a remote team, and thriving as a startup.

5 Goal Setting Exercises from the Engineering Teams at Google, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and more

In the past month, two of the largest unicorns, Dropbox and Spotify, filed for initial public offerings (IPOs). Dropbox followed the traditional route, seeking to raise $756mn on its 23 March , with an expected valuation of $8.2bn. This would make it the largest IPO since Snap, and one of the 10 largest exits since 2009. Meanwhile, Spotify — which could potentially debut at double the size of Dropbox — initiated a direct listing of its shares on 3 April. Rather than raise capital for the company, the direct listing will offer liquidity to its current shareholders. How shares for both companies perform once they hit the open market remains to be seen, but the two IPOs combined with a strong first week of performance for fellow unicorn Zscaler, which held its IPO on 16 March, are promising developments for a market that has been relatively quiet in recent years. IPO venture capital-backed The IPO market has historically been cyclical, moving in pace with the public equity markets. This was demonstrated following the Global Financial Crisis, when US IPO activity dropped off sharply, only to slowly rebuild itself and hit a post dot-com boom with 119 US venture capital-backed companies holding an IPO in 2014. However, despite strong performance for the S&P 500 Index since then, IPO activity has tapered off over the past three years, as seen in Fig. 1. This is a trend among current unicorns, which have chosen to remain private for longer periods as they wait for the perfect market conditions to file for IPO. Since 2009, the only venture capital-backed US-based companies to file for IPO with a valuation over $7bn are Facebook, Snap, Twitter, Groupon and Zynga. Looking at each of their post-IPO performance (Fig. 2) shows why other large unicorns may be hesitant to open themselves up to public markets, as only Facebook has experienced positive all-time performance. Investing in companies planning for an IPO exit is generally a long-term investment: of the venture capital-backed companies that have held an IPO in the past 10 years, both the mean and median length of time between their first venture investment and the date of IPO is seven years. These investors are often subject to post-IPO lock-ups, which keeps them from selling for another 3–6 months and opens them up to the risk of publicly traded equities. New Enterprise Associates and OrbiMed Advisors have been the most active investors in companies to file for an IPO over the past five years, and with strong first- or second-quartile performance for their recent vintage funds, lend proof that IPOs can offer viable exit opportunities. Access more at www.preqin.com/blog Special thanks to Jesse Fahy, and Justin Hall for contributing. Follow me on twitter @felice_egidio

Can Dropbox and Spotify Jump-Start the Venture Capital IPO Market?

I love . I know I am weird but S-1s are loaded with great nuggets of insights about business models, company performance and have fascinating stories embedded in the sometimes turgid prose. S-1s has been one of my favorite startups for many years. I have taught a on Dropbox in on Launching Technology Ventures for many years regarding their scaling their sales and marketing operation. We also teach an to all first year students at HBS. And a few of my former students joined the company early and became key executives over the years. So, when the came out yesterday, I was excited to read through it and see what I could learn. To be clear, I am not an investor in the company and don’t own any shares (as far as I know!) Dropbox Stanford Business School case my HBS class early stage case on Dropbox Dropbox S-1 In short, Dropbox is a cash machine and possesses a magical business model. Anyone who concludes otherwise doesn’t understand the difference between cash flow and GAAP and the power of negative churn. Let’s jump in. Is The Business Model Working? Yes! Dropbox has a magical business model and the data in the S-1 proves it. The company reports that “we generate over 90% of our revenue from self-serve channels”. Think about that for a minute. The free product is so attractive that it drives massive adoption and the conversion from free to paid is so obvious and smooth (more usage leads to more storage leads to paid product) that the company has a customer acquisition engine that derives from a simply great product and a compelling value proposition. Forget sales and marketing, at Dropbox, the product itself is a massively effective and efficient customer acquisition machine. Does it cost too much to service all these free customers? Happily, Dropbox is following a cost curve of declining storage and cloud costs. Gross margins have soared from 33% in 2015 to 54% in 2016 to 67% in 2017. If a CEO tells you she is going to increase gross margins from 33% to 67% in two years on a $1 billion revenue business, you would check her in to an insane asylum. Dropbox did it easily. The other magical part of the Dropbox business model is that it’s so darn viral. Every time I share a Dropbox document to someone, they need a Dropbox account. Every time they set up a Dropbox account, it drives more document sharing and storage. And the cycle keeps going. 100 million new accounts in 2017 is another stunning number, proving that the viral machine continues to work well despite what some may worry is a growth saturation point. Cohorts and Negative Churn The other compelling part of the Dropbox business model is the power of negative churn (i.e., revenue from your existing customers, on a net basis, are growing not shrinking) and the behavior of its cohorts. We see this similar behavior in one of our enterprise storage portfolio companies, and our database software company, . Every year, the company starts with a customer base that grows 20–30% per year on a net basis. Thus, if you theoretically fired the entire sales force and shut down all marketing activities, these companies would still grow 20–30% per year. Nasuni MongoDB Dropbox’s cohorts are behaving in a similar fashion. There is a chart buried on page 63 of the S-1 that tells the story. Cohorts of customers are growing rapidly months after signing up for the service. The January 2015 cohort grew to 2x the monthly subscription amount paid two years in. The January 2016 cohort grew to 2x the monthly subscription paid after 20 months. And the January 2017 cohort grew to 2x the monthly subscription amount paid after 10 months. In a word, wow. When cohorts are getting better over time, that dramatically, something very right is going on. But What About the Losses? Now I know many of you are wondering — if the business model is so magical, Jeff, what about the losses? The company reports a net operating loss of well over $100 million in 2017. How can you reconcile these incongruous data points? Many business reporters don’t seem to understand that GAAP net income is a meaningless measurement for a subscription-based business model. Dropbox users sign up for an annual fee and pay in cash up front and then the company recognizes that revenue over the entire year. Further, there are massive non cash charges that hit the income statement, such as stock-based compensation. What you really need to examine is free cash flow. Page 67 tells the free cash flow story. The company’s free cash flow has gone from negative $64m in 2015 to $137m in 2016 to $305m in 2017. Think about that for a minute. Here you have a company growing at over 30% year over year in top line revenue that is able to achieve a positive swing of nearly $400m in annual free cash flow over two years. And they did this while improving gross margin by 34% points. Again, wow. Miscellaneous Tidbits A few other things struck me as interesting. After raising so much in private capital, most founders can expect to own 5–10% of their company in aggregate. According to the S-1, CEO/founder Drew Houston owns 25% and his co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi owns 10% for a combined 35%. Drew and Arash built a company from zero to $1 billion, raised a ton of money, and still own over a third of it. If Dropbox ends up being worth over $10 billion, these guys will each become billionaires on paper while still retaining complete control over their company. Amazing. Another fascinating thing to me is that it has taken 11 years since inception to get to this point. I’d be shocked if Drew wasn’t still CEO of the company for many years after the IPO. Thus, building real businesses takes a long time, even if your business model is magical and you hit every major platform trend just right (i.e., massive secular shifts to cloud, storage, big data and mobile in the case of Dropbox). Final fun tidbit: the company dumped $11 million in cash and stock into the Dropbox Charitable Foundation at the end of 2017. An interesting use of free cash flow and a nod to interesting initiatives ahead. Conclusion When I teach the Dropbox case at HBS, I end the class with a checklist of the business model elements of the company: strong virality, strong network effects, recurring revenue model, high gross margins, negative churn, low customer acquisition costs. I guess that’s how you get from zero to $10 billion in market cap in ~ 10 years.

Dropbox S-1 Teardown

Intro I will show how to code. upload files to Dropbox from Python Why do I need this? Currently, I am only using for all my web services and also as my private git server. WebFaction I wanted to make an automatic . backup of my git repositories to Dropbox Dropbox App I order to upload files to Dropbox you need to have an . access token And for the access token, you need to register your . app on DBX platform All of this must be done on Dropbox website. The first step is to go to and press “Create App” button. https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps/ Step 1 Just click “Create app” button Step 2 We will use Dropbox API. We will choose “App folder” because we will just upload one backup to Dropbox, we do not need full access to all our files. Name your app and click “Create App” button. Step 3 We will use defaults settings, here we will get the access token so, click “Generate access token” button. Step 4 Now you have your access token, you will need it in your code, so copy it. Step 5 Now we have our “my_git_backup” Dropbox app. pip install pip install dropbox pip install fabric It is always recommended to inside python. use virtual environments At least I use them always. Code For code sample please go to http://buklijas.info/blog/2017/12/01/automatic-backup-of-git-repositories-to-dropbox-with-python/ How I run this automatically I personally run this command from . crontab once per day 35 02 * * * /home/user_name/code/venv/bin/fab -f /home/user_name/code/fabfile git_backup_to_dropbox Conclusion This can be used for . backup of any folder as zip file automaticaly to Dropbox For any questions, please write them in comments. Originally published at buklijas.info on December 1, 2017.

Automatic backup of git repositories to Dropbox with Python

Integration, or “connecting the dots”, is something that is quite difficult to avoid in the modern era of highly globalized business domains. Fortunately, integration, or “enterprise integration” in more “enterprise-y” terms, is no longer meant to be something that makes your hair stand, thanks to advanced yet user-friendly enterprise integration frameworks such as . Project-X Today, we shall extend our helping hand to Jane, a nice Public Relations officer of the (never heard the name? yup, neither have I :)) in setting up a portion of her latest customer feedback aggregation mechanism. No worries, though, since I will be helping and guiding you all the way to the end! HappiShoppin supermarket service The PR Department of HappiShoppin supermarket service has opened up new channels for receiving customer feedback. In addition to the former, conventional paperback feedback drop-ins, they now accept electronic feedback via their website as well as via a public folder (in addition to social media, Google Drive, Forms etc). Jane, who is heading the Dropbox-driven feedback initiative, would like to set up an automated system to sync any newly added Dropbox feedback to her computer so that she can check them offline whenever it is convenient for her, rather than having to keep an eye on the Dropbox folder all the time. Dropbox Google Jane has decided to compose a simple “Dropbox sync” integration flow that would periodically sync new content from the feedback accumulation Dropbox folder, to a local folder on her computer. On HappiShoppin’s shared Dropbox account, is the folder where customers can place feedback documents, and Jane hopes to sync the new arrivals into on her computer. /Feedback/Inbox /home/jane/dropbox-feedback Jane has estimated that it is sufficient to sync content once a day, as the company receives only a limited number of feedback over a given day; however, during the coming Christmas season, the company is expecting a spike in customer purchases, which would probably mean an accompanied increase in feedback submissions as well. For easier tracking and maintenance, she wants the feedback files to be organized into daily subfolders. In order to avoid repetitively syncing the same feedback file, Jane has to ensure that the successfully synced files are removed from the inbox, which she hopes to address by moving them to a different Dropbox folder: . /Feedback/Synced Dropbox Sync: Solution Overview Now, before we begin, a bit about what Project-X is and what we are about to do with it: Project-X is a , which one could also call an (which is also valid for the scenario we are about to tackle). messaging engine enterprise service bus Project-X ingests (or ) from , subjects them to various transformations via , and emits them to other systems via . For a single message, any number of such transformations and emissions can happen, in any order. events messages ingress connectors processing elements egress connectors The message lifecycle described above, is represented as an . It is somewhat similar to a conveyor belt in a production line, although it can be much more flexible with stuff like cloning, conditional branching, looping and try-catch flows. integration flow A set of integration projects make up an , which is the basic deployment unit when it comes to Project-X runtimes such as . integration project UltraESB-X So, in our case, we should: create a new integration project create an integration flow inside the project, to represent Jane’s scenario add the necessary connectors and processors, and configure and wire them together test the flow to see if what we assembled is actually capable of doing what Jane is expecting build the project into a deployable artifact, ready to be deployed in UltraESB-X While the above may sound like quite a bit of work, we already have a cool IDE that can do most of the work for us. With UltraStudio on your side, all you have to do is to the required connectors and processing elements, and everything else will be magically done for you. You can even try out your brand-new solution right there, inside the IDE, and trace your events or messages real-time as they pass through your integration flow. UltraStudio drag, drop and connect So, before we begin, let’s (unless you already have it, of course!). get UltraStudio installed on your system Once you are ready, using option on the menu bar and selecting . While creating the project, select the following components on the respective wizard pages (don’t worry, in a moment we’ll actually get to know what they actually are): create a new Ultra Project File → New → Project… Empty Ultra Project and on the Connectors page Timer Task Connector Dropbox Connector and processor on the Processors page JSON Processor Flow Control New Empty Ultra Project Wizard: Connector Selection If you were impatient and had already created a project, you could always add the above components later on via the menu option . Tools → Ultra Studio → Component Registry Now we can start by creating a new integration flow , by opening the side pane and right-clicking the directory. dropbox-sync-flow Project src/main/conf Creating a New Integration Flow Again, a few tips on using the graphical flow UI (in case you’re wondering where on earth it is) before you begin: Inside, an integration flow is a XML ( ) configuration, which UltraStudio can alternatively represent as a composable diagram for your convenience. Spring You can switch between the XML and graphical views using the two small tabs that would appear at the bottom of an integration flow file while it is opened in the IDE. (These tabs might be missing at certain times, e.g. when the IDE is performing or ; at such times, patience is a virtue!) indexing Maven dependency resolution The graphical view contains a side palette with all the components (connectors and processors) that have currently been added to your project (at creation or through the Component Registry). You can browse them by clicking on the collapsible labels on the palette, and add them to the flow by simply dragging-and-dropping them into the canvas. In order to mimic the message flow, components should be connected together using lines drawn between their ports (small dots of different colors that appear around the component’s icon). You will get the hang of it, when you have had a look at some of the , or at the image of the flow that would be developing (appearing later in this article). existing integration flows When a component requires configuration parameters, a configuration pane gets automatically opened as soon as you drop an element into the canvas (you can also open it by clicking on the component later on). If the labels or descriptions on the configuration pane are not clear enough, just switch to the tab and click on the “Read more” URL to visit the complete documentation of the element (on your favourite web browser). Also, make sure that you click the Save button (at the bottom or on the side pane) once you have made any changes. Documentation Start the flow with a . This is a connector used to trigger a periodic event (similar to a clock tick) for a time-driven message flow. Let’s configure it to trigger an event that would set the sync process in motion. For flexibility, we will use a instead of a simple periodic trigger. Timer Ingress Connector cron expression Scheduling tab: Polling CRON Expression 0/30 * * ? * * Dropbox Sync: Timer Ingress Connector Configuration Although Jane wanted to run the check only at 6 PM each day, we have set the polling time to every 30 seconds, for the sake of convenience; otherwise you’ll simply have to wait until 6 PM to see if things are working :) Next add a with a Connector operation element added to the side port. You can find the connector operations by clicking on the down arrow icon against the on the component palette, which will expand a list of available connector operations. Dropbox Egress Connector List Entities Dropbox Connector Dropbox Egress Connector A is an appendage that you can, well, append to a connector, which will perform some additional processing on the outgoing message in a connector-specific way. For example, for Dropbox we have a main connector, with a bunch of connector operations that represent different API operations that you can perform against your Dropbox account, such as managing files, searching, downloading, etc. connector operation Configure the with the shared Dropbox account credentials ( and ), and the connector operation with the . Dropbox Connector App ID Access Token Path /Feedback/Inbox , Basic tab: Dropbox Connector {client ID for your Dropbox app; visit to create a new app} Client ID https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps/create {access token for your Dropbox account, under the above app; follow to obtain an access token for personal use against your own app} Access Token https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2014/05/generate-an-access-token-for-your-own-account/ Dropbox Sync: Connector Configuration , Basic tab: List Entities Path /Feedback/Inbox Dropbox Sync Flow: Progress So Far The above contraption will return a , containing all files that are currently inside , as a wrapped payload: List Folder response /Feedback/Inbox JSON {"entries": [{".tag": "file","name": ,"id": "id:12345_67_890ABCDEFGHIJ",...}, {".tag": "file","name": ,"id": "id:JIHGF_ED_CBA9876543210",...}],...} "johndoe.docx" "janedoe.txt" Ah, now there’s the info that we have been looking for; sitting there in boldface. Now we need to somehow pull them out. Next add a processor to extract out the file paths list from the above JSON response, using a pattern: . This will store the resulting file name list in a scope variable named , for further processing. A scope variable is a kind of temporary storage where you can retain simple values for referring later in the flow. JSON Path Extractor JSON Path $.entries[*].name files Variable Name files _JSON Path_ $.entries[*].name Then add a to iterate over the previously mentioned scope variable, so that we can process each of the observed files separately. The next processing operations will each take place within a single iteration of the loop. ForEach Loop _Collection Variable Name_ files Collection Type COLLECTION _Iterating Variable Name_ file Now add a new Dropbox Connector (configured with your app and account credentials as before), along with a, connector operation, to download the file ( ) corresponding to the current iteration from Dropbox into the local directory. Download Entity file When you are drawing outgoing connections from , note that the topmost out port is for the loop termination (exit) path, and not for the next iteration! Tip: ForEach Loop , Basic tab: Dropbox Connector Client ID {client ID for your Dropbox app} _Access Token_ {access token for your Dropbox account, under the above app} , Basic tab: Download Entity _Path_ /Feedback/Inbox/@{variable.file} Destination /home/jane/dropbox-feedback/@{current.timestamp.yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm} Next add another Dropbox Connector (configured with your app and account credentials) with a connector operation, to move the original file to so that we would not process it again. We will set the property of the connector to 3, to make a best effort to move the file (in case we face any temporary errors, such as network failures, during the initial move). We will also enable on the connector operation to avoid any possible issues resulting from files with same name being placed at at different times (which could cause conflicts during movement). Move Entity /Feedback/Synced Retry Count Auto-Rename /Feedback/Inbox , Basic tab: Dropbox Connector Client ID {client ID for your Dropbox app} _Access Token_ {access token for your Dropbox account, under the above app} , Advanced tab: Dropbox Connector Retry Count 3 , Basic tab: Move Entity Path /Feedback/Inbox/@{variable.file} Destination /Feedback/Synced/@{variable.file} Now add a element to signify that the message flow has completed successfully. Successful Flow End Now we need to connect the processing elements together, to resemble the following final flow diagram: Dropbox Sync: Complete Flow Finally, now we are ready to test our brand new Dropbox sync flow! Before proceeding, ensure that your Dropbox account contains the and directories. /Feedback/Inbox /Feedback/Synced Create an by clicking on the menu, and selecting under the (+) button on the top left. UltraStudio run configuration Run → Edit Configurations… UltraESB-X Server Add New Configuration Now, with everything in place, select from the menu to launch your project! Run → Run configuration name If everything goes fine, after a series of blue-colored logs, you’ll see the following line at the end of the window: Run 2017-11-23T11:45:27,554 [127.0.1.1-janaka-ENVY] [main] [system-] [XEN45001I013] INFO XContainer AdroitLogic UltraStudio UltraESB-X server started successfully in 1 seconds and 650 milliseconds If you get any errors (red) or warnings (yellow) before this, you would have to click (red square) on the window to stop the project, and dig into the logs to get a clue as to what might have gone wrong. Stop Run Once you have things up and running, open your on your favourite web browser, and drop some files into the directory. Dropbox account /Feedback/Inbox After a few seconds (depending on the cron expression that you provided above), the files you dropped there will magically appear in a folder . After this, if you check the Dropbox account again, you will notice that the original files have been moved from to , as we expected. /home/jane/dropbox-feedback/ /Feedback/Inbox /Feedback/Synced Now, if you drop some more files into , they will appear under a different folder (named with the new timestamp) under . This would not be a problem for Jane, as in her case the flow will only be triggered once a day, resulting in a single directory for each day. /Feedback/Inbox /home/jane/dropbox-feedback See? That’s all! Now, all that is left is to call Jane and let her know that her Dropbox integration task is ready to go alive! Originally published at randomizd.blogspot.com on November 25, 2017.

Connecting the dots in style: Build your own Dropbox Sync in 10 minutes!

and tend to be paired in conversations — they offer similar products: cloud storage for a low price and fluid scalability of storage. Both have billion-dollar valuations as well; $2.43 billion market cap and $10 billion private valuation, respectively. Box Dropbox The only key difference between the two companies is the target market, which slightly bends the product for each company to best tailor its customer. Examining the differences in the products also teaches an important lesson in distribution mechanisms of technology companies, which Ben Horowitz touches upon in his blog post “Distribution.” Dropbox, from the onset of its landing page, is very clearly a consumer-first company: Early on, Dropbox’s marketing strategies were very outbound, and how poorly that turned out for the company in its experimentation phase.The cost-per-acquisition was in the ballpark of $233 to $388 whereas customers’ lifetime values were flat $99s. Instead, the company moved onto referrals, and Houston claims that this increased signups by 60% permanently. Today, the de facto distribution mechanism for consumer companies is virality and referrals, and Horowitz quotes these companies today when they say that they will “distribute [the] product like Dropbox did.” Evidently, that’s how Dropbox scaled to a billion in revenue without a proper sales force. Houston talked about Box, on the other hand, targets larger organizations — the universities, enterprises, Fortune 500s (97% of which Box sells to). The landing page contrasts Dropbox’s one-step sign up: The acquisition process is a lot less scalable relative to Dropbox since Box is working with larger clients, but it’s still noteworthy that Levie trumpets a bottom-up sales strategy over top-down sales strategy. He wants to win over the lower-level managers and employees of the company with an amazing product that slowly enforces adoption throughout the company. Though this is comparatively scalable when looking at other enterprise-targeting companies, Box’s customers still require personal integration to help in the adoption process, but it differentiates itself from Dropbox with a higher level of security that enterprises love. Because of the lower level of scalability built into Box’s market, it has to invest more into a proper sales force to reach the enterprise clients. It may be due to the lower level of scalability and difference in distribution mechanism with Box’s sales process that it has only 10% of the revenue of Dropbox. Nevertheless, the two companies are clear winners in their market segments because they’ve adopted the best sales channels for their respective markets. Dropbox’s scalable referrals would not have worked for a company like Box because referrals typically won’t work in inter-organization situations. Similarly, Box’s methods of an operating sales force won’t work in a consumer-first market because competitors can sell to customers much faster without a sales force.

Box v. Dropbox: A Lesson in Distribution

A backdoor to a building in Portland, Oregon — James Duncan Davidson Earlier today, I saw about how . Not for nefarious purposes, mind you. Almost certainly not. Furthermore, , as some reports have said—and which would be . No, they’ve simply been installing things in a way that let’s them retain root privileges so that they don’t have to bug you again when they want to change things up later. a very concerning tweet from Steve Streza Dropbox has been doing funky stuff inside of OS X/macOS it doesn’t look like they are storing a copy of your password really, really bad In other words, they effectively backdoor your system so that they don’t have to ask again if they can add or change things later on. After all, every time they ask permission, not only do they annoy the user, they let them consider saying no, which is always bad for numbers in a driven by the almighty gods of daily, weekly, and monthly active usage. company Regardless of the user experience argument of keeping things simple so that the user doesn’t have to make more decisions, there are two big problems with the way that does this: Dropbox Dropbox didn’t ask for the ability to modify my system again in new and novel ways without asking me. It’s a violation of trust. for bad actors to exploit. There are enough of these as it is. It’s an additional attack vector Furthermore. . It’s pretty cool stuff—heck, I want it now!—except for the part where they’ll install a kext without asking or telling you. Regardless of whether or not you want a closed source kernel extension running in your system—and you very well might to get the benefits of an infinite cloud based filesystem—it’s shitty to put one in on the sly. Dropbox is moving functionality into a kernel extension as part of Project Infinite It’s like instead of giving your plumber a key for the week to work on your kitchen, you give them permanent access so that they can add some toilets and another kitchen later when they feel like it, even if you didn’t ask. So, how do they do it? . Phil Stokes shows part of how it’s done Is it legit or not? . Ben from Dropbox gives their rationale on Hacker News Should you drop Dropbox on their ass for this? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not the one to tell you whether the utility of Dropbox is worth the risk. Dropbox has been damn useful for a long time. Then again, there are alternatives. You’ll need to make up your own mind on this. Personally, I’m going to give life without Dropbox on my system a go. I’ll keep it for the cloud based file sharing, but will spend at least a few weeks without the nifty magic auto-sync bits. After that, I’ll re-evaluate. If you want to get rid of Dropbox, how do you do it? , but it no longer does the trick. Instead, you’ll get a lovely dialog box telling you that it can’t be deleted because some of its extensions are in use. : You have to unlink your Dropbox account first before you quit and uninstall Dropbox. So that means: Quitting and deleting it used to work and is well documented Dropbox’s help center provides the essential extra step Unlink your account in Dropbox preferences Quit Dropbox But wait! Before you go further, you’ll also want to get rid of the helpers. To do that, you’ll need to drop to the command line and— —execute the following: very carefully, that sudo part is messing around with fire sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools $ You careful with that sudo, right? Good. Now, you may or may not have the kernel extension installed. I didn’t, and here’s how I checked: were ls /Library/Extensions/Dropbox.kextls: /Library/Extensions/Dropbox.kext: No such file or directory $ If you do have the kext installed, you can nuke it—again, being careful with the sudo—like this: sudo rm -rf /Library/Extensions/Dropbox.kext $ Next, you’ll also want to clean up some stuff from your System Preferences: Remove the Dropbox login item from your user account Remove Dropbox from the Accessibility Privacy list Now, you’re ready to delete the Dropbox app and purge your trash. Then reboot and check. That do it. should Of course, this is probably not the only way to do it, but it’s the order I finally hit on to get Dropbox off my system. Your mileage may vary. Good luck and godspeed.

Stories, News & Mentions about DROPBOX

Dropbox’s Stories on HackerNoon

Dropbox's News & Mentions