Dropbox

A New Year & A New Adventure

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

Some personal news to share today.  After a great tour of duty at Dropbox, I’ve decided to take the leap into something new.

Having a January birthday has always added a little weight to my New Year’s resolutions, and as it turns out, 2020 was a big one for me. 45 might not be the biggest milestone birthday, but combined with the weight of a new decade, it had me thinking deeply over the holidays. Fortunately, I was able to spend a good deal of time with friends & family, and by New Year’s Eve I felt comfortable with a simple, but important, decision.

2020 will be different. This will be the year that I go off on my own.

The hardest part of this process was telling my team at Dropbox. I feel so very fortunate to have had the opportunity to lead such an amazing group of professionals. And as proud as I am of what we accomplished in 2018 & 2019, I’m even more excited about what this team will deliver for their customers in 2020 & beyond. 

For me, I’ll be spending the next few months preparing for the long road ahead founding a company. As one of the growing number of “operator-angels,” I’ll continue to advise and support the talented teams at the companies where I’ve invested over the past 8 years. Primarily, though, I’ll be spending time on a couple of specific fintech ideas that I think have the potential to be great companies. 

I have spent over 20 years learning to build & design great products and great companies, but somehow never my own. As an angel investor, I’ve now helped fund and advise over fifty amazing founding teams, and have had a front row seat to their struggles and successes. It’s time to take the plunge.

And who knows? I hear 45 is the best time to start.

Be A Great Product Leader – Amplify 2019

/ Adam Nash

On October 8, 2019, I was asked to give my talk, “Be A Great Product Leader” to a huge audience at Amplify 2019, the product management conference organized by Amplitude.*

The talk is named after possibly my most famous blog post on the topic of product leadership from 2011, Be A Great Product Leader.

For those of you who have seen earlier renditions of this talk, this version was cut down to thirty minutes, and as a result has a subset of topics. All of the lessons in this talk started as blog posts:

  1. The Secret to Product Prioritization. Three Buckets
  2. Find the Heat. Don’t Be Afraid to Talk About Emotion.
  3. Einstein’s Razor. Make Things As Simple As Possible, But Not Simpler.
  4. Obsess About Your Non-Users. Growth Comes from Them.
  5. Solve the Product Maze Backwards. Think Back from the Future.
  6. Know Your Superpower. Product. Design. Engineering.

Over the past ten years, I’ve given versions of this talk at over twenty different companies and conferences, but there has never been shareable video of it. Fortunately, Amplitude captured the video and  posted full video of all of their talks, including mine.

Product leadership continues to be a hot topic in the industry, and I hope that these lessons will help inspire more people to become great product leaders.

 

* Special thank you to Melinda Byerley for making the introduction!

Joining Dropbox

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference.”

— Steve Jobs, Stanford University, June 2005

In 2012, I was seriously considering becoming a full time investor.

I’ve always loved startups and venture capital, and I had been fortunate enough after leaving LinkedIn to have a chance to work for Greylock Partners, one of the most successful firms in the industry.

In May of 2012, my daughter was born. While on parental leave, I remember receiving a note about a Greylock company that was looking to add to its executive team. I had visited that company just the month before, to help advise on strategies for organizing and executing on viral growth.

The role itself wasn’t the right fit, but for some reason that company stuck in my head. Did I really want to become a full time investor? Or did I want to go help build a company?

As it turns out, the company that I couldn’t get out of my head was Dropbox.

First moments after the birth of my daughter, May 2012.

Opportunity at Scale

Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to work at three companies that grew to reach over 100 million users. After spending the past six years focused on building new companies, I’m excited about jumping back into the challenges of designing and shipping features for the more than 500 million people who use Dropbox to get things done.

With the proliferation of devices and ubiquitous connectivity of the modern workplace, I think there is a unique opportunity, right now, to help teams unleash their creative energy and find more enlightened ways of working together.

Drew has done a great job of sharing the high level vision for Dropbox, and I’m excited to dive into a space that has so much product potential.  The era of walled gardens is over, and there has been an explosion of new applications and content types in the past few years. The challenge is to design an open ecosystem that helps bring all of those capabilities together in a way that doesn’t sacrifice simplicity in design.

Connecting the Dots

For now, I just want to say thank you John Lilly for reconnecting me to the Dropbox team, and thank you to Quentin, Drew, and the entire Dropbox team for this opportunity. It is truly amazing how life connects the dots.