We expanded rapidly, adding staff from 50 to over a thousand in just a few months, which made it challenging to maintain a cohesive company culture.

After realizing we needed to expand our sales team, we went from 12 to 100 salespeople in less than a year to better serve our growing customer base.

As we grew, I learned the importance of hiring, developing a standard algorithm to assess candidates against the average to ensure we brought in top talent. We focused on continuous improvement in our hiring process, asking if each candidate was better than the average, which helped us grow our team and improve our startup.

Initially, we hired too slowly, which contributed to our rapid growth from $0 to $100 million ARR in just a year and a half.

By addressing diversity early in our growth, we hope to create a competitive edge and improve our representation significantly with just a few hires.

To accelerate progress at Dropbox, I realized the fastest way was to grow the team size, as we started with only 30 engineers who were spread too thin across various platforms.

In the early stages, we worked with our first ten hires for a week to assess their fit and capabilities before making a commitment.

Hiring is a challenging problem in Silicon Valley, but we not only reached our ambitious hiring goal but also focused on bringing in people who could help us improve our definition of quality and fit culturally into the company.

When Drew, the CEO, asked what I wanted to work on first, I chose recruiting, surprising myself since I had never done it before. I aimed to grow the company from 90 to 270 people in less than 7 months.