After a year of working on Cove, I learned the most because it was acquired by Dropbox, which provided a bigger stage for us to build at scale and make a significant impact.

My first reaction at Dropbox was the need to move and launch faster, as I couldn't understand why we only released the desktop client every couple of months, unlike the daily releases at Facebook.

I realized that values like 'move fast and break things' didn't apply to Dropbox as they did at Facebook, where the focus was on connecting people rather than building reliable software.

At Dropbox, we needed to foster what was unique to our culture, which was 'sweating the details' to ensure that users wouldn't lose important files, like wedding pictures or PhD theses. Quality was crucial at Dropbox, leading us to move slower than Facebook because the last 10% of polish took about 50% of our engineering time.

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.

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.

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.

At Dropbox, my role title didn't matter; what was important was doing whatever it took to succeed. In 10 years, people will remember you for what you built and its impact, not your title.