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I like Dropbox and YCombinator, but this line near the end was odd: "Today is a big milestone for YC. When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we’d funded would one day go public." Really? What were they doing funding it, then? I hadn't realized that wasn't the original idea at YCombinator.
And this is yet another good lesson for would be angel investors AND startup employees - DropBox to me was one of the most obvious product-market-fit startups with a great, competent founding team, A+ quality investors etc and it still took them 13 YEARS to go public and drive liquidity for founders, early employees, etc.
Side note: what does Dropbox use to build the UI for their desktop app? I think it's written in python no? so what UI do they use?
This is nice from a business-perspective. But, stepping back ... I'm sure that a lot of the folks here would agree that something as basic as file-sync should be a standard part of any OS, and follow a non-proprietary protocol. So whereas they have turned something that should have been a commodity into a profitable business, I'm not sure what we have achieved here.
If it were basic, then it would be standard as you say. Therefore it must be a lot more complicated.
I remember seeing the release of DB on HN and immediately had a "holy shit" moment, I was literally carrying a portable shuttle computer back and forth to the office before DropBox - congrats to the entire team and thank you for a product I've used daily for 10+ years! And this is yet another good lesson for would be angel investors AND startup employees - DropBox to me was one of the most obvious product-market-fit…
Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"
Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"
Edit: Removing comment.
Here is how I see it. 1) He wasn't straightforward -- i.e. he didn't outright say "we are already funding an idea similar/identical to yours " but I wouldn't call him a liar. 2) Who knows what his intentions are. Maybe he wanted to eliminate competition. Maybe he saw the dropbox team ahead/better-positioned and wanted to save these new applicants the time.
But put yourself in his shoes. What would/could you do? The only other option was to accept them and merge them with dropbox team... but its not clear that this is a good idea or even an option acceptable to the dropbox team.
Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"