Sweating the Details

Sanghvi describes her year at Cove as her most educational. After Dropbox acquired Cove, she and Aditya joined to help the company and its product grow.

At first, Sanghvi wanted Dropbox to release more often, as she had experienced at Facebook. She also questioned time spent fixing rare bugs, including one affecting fewer than 0.1% of users. She changed her view when she considered the importance of users’ stored photos, theses, and other work.

Sanghvi says Facebook’s emphasis on rapid growth did not suit Dropbox, where reliability was central to the product. She compares a failure in Dropbox’s blue desktop icon to a computer seeming broken. The final 10% of polish took about half of engineering time, so Dropbox moved more slowly than Facebook.

Dropbox had 30 engineers spread across web, desktop, mobile, and different operating systems. When CEO Drew asked what she wanted to tackle first, Sanghvi chose recruiting. She set a goal of growing the company from 90 to 270 people in under seven months, hiring for learning, quality, and cultural integration.

Sanghvi says her work at Dropbox ranged from communications and marketing to product. She argues that titles matter less than what people build and the impact of that work.