015: Quentin Clark (CTO, Dropbox & MD @ General Catalyst) | Leadership & Building Iconic Companies

Quentin was CTO of Dropbox, a company that’s brought millions of consumers, teams, and business onto the cloud. As CTO, he was integral to taking the company public, leading the engineering, product, design, and growth teams throughout the process. Quentin also helped broaden the company’s portfolio with the HelloSign acquisition and the recent launch of their new team-oriented collaboration product, Dropbox Spaces.

Prior to Dropbox, Quentin spent nearly two decades with Microsoft, starting as a software engineer, then product manager, and eventually leading the entire family of data products — from Microsoft SQL Server, the BI products, no-SQL, and ML capabilities on-prem and in Azure. After Microsoft, Quentin joined SAP and helped to build the company’s growth strategy, first as their CTO, then leading strategy, corpdev, M&A and strategic partnerships. As a part of that role, he helped SAP spin-up an emerging business unit with a venture mindset for working directly with the startup community.

On This Episode:

• Learn how crucial a clear vision is to your career path.
• Discover the importance of becoming. self-aware of your own limitations.
• Hear the key philosophies to building high-performing teams.
• Get a few helpful interview questions to ask potential team members.
• Quentin shares how he chooses what founders he makes bets on.

Key Takeaways

To be a full-stack leader you must possess the following qualities:

1. 1. Vision
   2. Strategy
   3. Leadership
   4. Management
   5. Technical Accuity
   6. Business Accuity

Tweetable Quotes:

• It’s very easy to mask people dysfunction with short-term success.