Building high-performing teams

I actually pulled them aside and I said, 'Hey, we need to move a lot faster. This is where we need to get to by X. We're a growth team. We need to prove wins out early.' And they don't have to be right, but just getting something out there, starting to line the whole team on what those are and then defining how we're going to measure success.

I actually pulled them aside and I said, 'Hey, we need to move a lot faster. This is where we need to get to by X. We're a growth team. We need to prove wins out early.' And they don't have to be right, but just getting something out there, starting to line the whole team on what those are and then defining how we're going to measure success.

I think the first time we started growth, we could have been more user-centric and been a lot more hypothesis driven. We were following a lot of best practices that just didn't really apply to Dropbox.

My aha moment of the value of first principles thinking was when I was at Dropbox. We would hire a ton of really smart people that had never done sales and had them do sales. If you take people that are just super smart, they've never done it before, one advantage of that is they can innovate because I think they come in with, I don't know anything. Let me just figure this out.

The more expertise someone has, the more it actually can lead to a false precision and then thinking they know what they're going to do. I actually think the expertise is more important later.

In that conversation what's important is also saying, 'I believe you can do all these things and I'm doing this to support you.' Or, 'I'm sharing this feedback because I believe in you.' Also saying that I'm here as support, as you are building that out, let me know what I can do to support you.