Silicon Docks by Pamela Newenham

Author:Pamela Newenham [Pamela Newenham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909718838
Publisher: Liberties Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Where It All Began

Fitzwilliam Hall, just shy of being on the bank of Grand Canal in Dublin 2, was where Facebook first began to germinate in its early Dublin days. It was in this serviced office suite that the team grew from two to fifty before it had to be replanted to a more spacious docklands location. Twitter’s international headquarters also started off in this building in 2011, and so it was a natural fit for Dropbox, when that company was making its first move outside of the US in December 2012.

The cloud-storage provider had already reached over 100 million users in 200 countries – including ten users in Antarctica – and it was serving all of them from its sole office, in San Francisco. More than one-third of its users were based in Europe and CEO and co-founder Drew Houston was keen to be closer to these customers through an international hub.

U2 rockers Bono and The Edge are among Dropbox’s investors and the famous Irish frontman was confident the company would find the smart and innovative workforce it needed in Ireland. In his opinion, the IDA played a blinder in securing Dropbox’s commitment to Dublin.67

The support created in Dublin enabled Dropbox to have sales teams available at nearly all hours of the day as well as customer service in added languages. To emphasise the development of its multilingual support, the announcement appeared on the Dropbox blog in languages from Spanish and German to Japanese and Korean – and even as Gaeilge.

When Dropbox eventually outgrew its digs in Fitzwilliam Hall, instead of moving closer to Grand Canal Dock, the company edged further away – to Park Place on Hatch Street, in the heart of the south city centre. Development was also spreading across the Liffey, with HubSpot setting up on North Wall Quay and TripAdvisor following with an engineering hub in the Liffey Trust Centre on Sheriff Street.

HubSpot first announced its intentions to come to Dublin in September 2012 along with its mission to bring inbound marketing to Europe. Following phenomenal 200-percent annual growth in its international business segment, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm planned to hire 150 people at its first branch office. The timing coincided with the launch of HubSpot 3, which came with the ability to translate any landing page into any language and to localise SEO tools with data and keyword suggestions from the native country. HubSpot was ready to conquer an international market and intent on becoming a major employer in Dublin, growing to 250 people within three to four years and from 300 customers in Europe to several thousand over the same period.

Chief operations officer J. D. Sherman felt a Silicon Valley vibe about Dublin, which he comfortably referred to as the digital hub of Europe. CEO Brian Halligan admitted that tax incentives were a strong draw (the marketing mogul was honest enough not to add some spin to that), but he asserted that the talent available was also enticing.68

In March 2013, Halligan was keen to express that the Dublin office was much more than just a call centre offering customer support.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.