Key Takeaways

• First employees should always be looking at ways to maximize non-equity, non-cash compensation - your primary motivation should be learning, growth, networks, building something great. Similarly, founders must make sure first employees are joining for the right reasons - there is nothing worse than having a first employee who secretly wants to be a founder. It causes a lot of trouble + suboptimal results.
• There is tremendous value in having diversity (of all forms) in your team. Aston focused on this very hard during the early days at DropBox. The lesson he learned was that culture needs to be built very intentionally by putting strong processes in place right from the start.
• To bring a strong early employee onboard, selling the vision is important but it is equally important to show how the person will help create that vision i.e. what will they be uniquely responsible for, what are their opportunities to grow within and outside the organization. 'Nerd-sniping' is a great way to test for curiosity, hunger, problem-solving and helps get best candidates onboard. It involves casually mentioning a problem / bug you are facing to a candidate and seeing if they work off-hours to help solve the problem. These are the best candidates.
• Founder-idea fit is critical. While trying to come up with startup ideas, founders must think of who they are and what drives them. People are typically driven by some combination of competition, power and fame. And the ideas they choose to work on must align with this driver e.g. Travis was very successful with Uber because he is an extremely competitive person in a very competitive industry. Elon is extremely successful at building purpose-driven companies because he is driven by power.
• While Finding a co-founder / evaluating a co-founding team, look for folks who complement each other both professionally and personally. An investor needs to believe the founding team can conquer anything thrown at it (since some co-founder in the team has the skills go deal with that problem).

Notes

Framework for considering starting up on your own vs joining a startup as an early employee: Always maximize for learning - Aston realized that he wanted to learn more about how a company is scaled (as compared to finding an idea / team) and figured joining DropBox as the first employee would be a great, relatively risk-free way (with great optionality built-in) to learn that. He figured that this experience would be very valuable even if he wanted to start his own company some day. First employees should always be looking at ways to maximize non-equity, non-cash compensation - your primary motivation should be learning, growth, networks, building something great. Similarly, founders must make sure first employees are joining for the right reasons - there is nothing worse than having a first employee who secretly wants to be a founder. It causes a lot of trouble + suboptimal results.

Framework for building culture at DropBox: Believes extremely strongly in the value of diversity in all forms - tried to hire for a lot of racial and background diversity within the early team. However, did not have any women for the first 50 employees. Realized that this was largely because of lack of processes + intentionality. Recommends putting in place very strong processes that everyone is aligned with to hire for diversity and strengthen company culture.

How to hire strong early employees: selling the vision is important but equally important to show how the person helps create that vision i.e. what will they own, what will they be uniquely responsible for, what are their opportunities to grow within and outside the organization. Always share your business metrics if they are good (this is helpful to get cynical folks onboard). 'Nerd-sniping' is a great way to test for curiosity, hunger, problem-solving and helps get best candidates onboard. It involves casually mentioning a problem / bug you are facing to a candidate and seeing if they work off-hours to help solve the problem. Also, always be nice + supportive to candidates who reject you. They may remember you at some point and decide to join you (happened to him a few times).

Framework for startup ideas: founders should always try to come up with ideas based on who they are and what they truly want. Most people do not know what who they are / what they want and end up thinking of the idea first and working backwards to see if it fits with who they are. There are basically 3 broad buckets of people, based on what drives them.

1. Competition - these people want to be the best and that means keeping score by competing with others. Travis of Uber is a great example of this - the ride-sharing business is brutally competitive and only someone who thrives on competition can survive / win.
2. Power - these people crave influence and typically have a strong vision of the world they want to live in. They typically build very mission-oriented companies. Elon Musk is a great example of this.
3. Fame - these people care a lot about how others view them and are driven by what others think of them. Aston falls in this category, he cares a lot about inter-personal relationships and wants to be known for being thoughtful and for bringing joy to the people he interacts with. DropBox allowed him to bring out this aspect of his personality (he built a great product that is very simple and that brought joy to it's users).

Finding a co-founder / evaluating a co-founding team - look for folks who complement each other both professionally and personally. Gives the example of the co-founders of Justin.tv (Justin, Emmett, Kyle, Michael). While Justin.tv didn't really achieve massive success, each of those co-founders brought very complementary skill-sets and were super strong founders in their own right. Each of them went on to do amazing things independently. So we are always looking for such teams where we believe that no matter what problem this team faces, they will find a way to solve it.