TechCrunch
Dropbox's Drew Houston And Sequoia's Bryan Schreier On How To Recruit (And Retain) Top Talent
Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston and Sequoia Capital partner Bryan Schreier joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for a special three-part series on how Houston and Schreier work together on recruiting, growing as a CEO, and building the company. The first part of this series is focused on recruiting and retaining talent.
For background, Houston founded file hosting giant Dropbox with Arash Ferdowsi at Y Combinator in 2007. Sequoia was one of the company’s first investors, and Schreier serves on the board of Dropbox. At last count, Dropbox was valued at $4 billion, and now has 100 million users.
It’s no secret in Silicon Valley that Dropbox has been able to attract some of the best engineering, sales and product talent in the technology world, through both acquisitions and key hires.
In the video above, Houston also explained how he and Schreier work together on recruiting a candidiate, and what happens when they disagree on a hiring decision. When it comes to retaining talent, Houston elaborated on how the company makes employee 256 feel like employee number 5.
Check out the video above for more, and stay tuned to for the second video in this series, which will focus on how Houston has evolved from a Hacker from MIT to the CEO of a multi billion dollar company.
Snapchat's First Monetization Move Will Be In-App Purchases
Fresh on the heels of the announcement that Snapchat received $60 million in funding led by International Ventures Partners, co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel has told TechCrunch that the first phase of the monetization strategy will involve in-app transactions.
According to Spiegel, the company is already playing with hidden features and doing experiments to see what works best.
“In-app transactions will come first,” said Spiegel. “We think we can build really cool stuff people want to pay for. The app is now a part of everyone’s day-to-day lives. That means that they will — I at least would — pay for a more unique experience.”
He didn’t go into much detail, but he did clarify that the team “has not considered” letting users pay to save snaps.
In other words, the in-app purchases may have to do with some sort of personalization. My best guess would be that users could perhaps pay for more customization tools within the app. This could include filters, like Instagram, stickers to place on snaps, or the ability to choose your font and font size within the app. It could even mean paying for the ability to send longer snaps, beyond the usual 10-second limit.
While Speigel says this would be Phase 1 of Snapchat’s monetization strategy, he’s also said that Snapchat is very interested in native advertising.
Snapchat already “advertises” (if you could call it that), to its own users. On Christmas, Thanksgiving, or other fun holidays, Snapchat sends users a mass Snap of an animated video. It usually features the Snapchat ghost.
Brands could do something similar, and actually can already as long as they’re adding users the same way as all of us do — by knowing their Snapchat handle or sending them a friend request.
That’s not effective for mass advertising, though, so Snapchat might need to let brands send unsolicited snaps to users in specific demographics. The brilliance here is that users aren’t required to open them, but in a way this format could run the risk of upsetting a very happy and engaged user base.
So instead, it’s taking a more conservative, opt-in approach to monetization. In-app purchases that offer further functionality, personalization, or whatever “experimental” ideas Snapchat has in mind would be much more friendly to users as Snapchat heads into money-making territory.
No comments:
Post a Comment