Hello ZenPayroll!

After a couple of great years at Twitter, I decided to make a change that’s consistent with my journey so far of joining a smaller company at each step (Microsoft -> Groupon -> Twitter -> ZenPayroll). My time at Twitter was fun, and I was lucky to have worked with and learned from many great people. Twitter is a great company, with a very bright future. So why did I make a change?

A couple of reasons:

• I wanted to join a smaller team and work on a product that early adopters love to use.
• I wanted to explore a different domain, ideally solving problems for small businesses. My dad is small business owner, so I’m familiar with the problems he faced and I see how software can make his life much better.
• I wanted to go back to building things day to day.

Through my search, I talked to many people, as well as founders of companies in various stages. I was lucky to get several offers from very promising startups, and ended up deciding to join ZenPayroll.

Here’s why I chose ZenPayroll:

• People: I was impressed by the quality of the team Josh, Eddie and Tomer put together. The amount of effort that was put into interviewing candidates, especially at this early stage, is a sign that they are dedicated to building a great team.
• Product:Enterprise software is becoming more accessible to consumers, and this is just the beginning. There are many successful B2B startups leading the way in this space and there are amazing opportunities ahead. Early adopters I talked to were delighted with their ZenPayroll experience.
• Culture: Starting with the interview, it felt like I was joining a family. Everyone I talked to on the team was excited about their work. The team was operating with an ownership mentality and everyone was eager to help each other, even across disciplines. Founders are focused on the long term. Josh explains it best in his Stanford talk.

I am thrilled to be joining ZenPayroll and can't wait to see what we'll build together.

Running multiple Dropbox accounts on a Mac

There are many reasons you might want to have multiple Dropbox accounts running on the same computer: having separate work and personal Dropbox accounts, shared accounts with others, etc. 

For me, the main reason is separation of work and personal Dropbox accounts. Here's my setup:

• 2TB AirPort Time Capsule that I use for storage and backup
• 1TB Dropbox subscription on my personal Dropbox account (let's call this muratspersonal@gmail.com)
• Regular Dropbox subscription for my work Dropbox account (muratswork@gmail.com)
• 1Password app uses the work account to sync the keychain over Dropbox. This requires the Dropbox account to sync locally. 
• 13-inch MacBook Pro with 256 GB storage
• I want my personal Dropbox files to go to the AirPort Time Capsule
• I want my work Dropbox files to synced locally so I can use 1Password (for both work and personal account passwords)

This Dropbox help center article will tell you you'll need a business account (starts at $15/month) to do this smoothly (although also says it's possible but not ideal). 

Yes, a google search will point you to this lifehacker.com page which is the basis for the solution I will explain in this post. 

The solution explained in the lifehacker page basically has you write an automator script that runs the following command when you login on your computer:

HOME=$HOME/Dropbox-personal /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS/Dropbox &

When I tried the solution posted on the lifehacker page, it worked well while my computer was turned on for that session but I started running into issues when I restarted my laptop.

The problem is, the AirPort Time Capsule might have been spinned down and the contents of your Dropbox folder may not be available. To work around this, I added two more steps before running the Dropbox launch script.

Get Specified Servers

On the Automator Library, search for the "Get Specified Servers" action

Add your AirPort Time Capsule from the Add dialog

Connect to Servers

This action is needed so a connection to the server is made in launch and the disk is ready to be accessed. You can add it the same way you added the previous action.

Run the Dropbox Command Script

Pick "Run Shell Script" action from the list of actions and add the script to run the second Dropbox instance from a different Dropbox folder.

Final Configuration

Your automator sequence should look something like this:

You can test the script by hitting the "Run" button. Name this automator script and save it to a convenient location on your Mac.

Running the automator script at login

Go to Users & Groups from System Preferences and add your automator script to the login items for your account.

And you should be ready to go! The only caveat with this approach is when you're on a network that doesn't have access to your AirPort Time Capsule, you'll get an error message from Dropbox saying it cannot find the dropbox folder. Just hit quit and it will work next time you restart your Mac on the network that has access to your Time Capsule.