Surveillance partner for NSA PRISM program, with Condoleeza Rice on its board.
Stopped using DropBox due to ethical concerns years ago.
Congrats Dropbox
111–120 of 285 posts
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#112Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)
What a classic and inspiring YC story :) Big congrats!
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"
I genuinely laugh every time at that comment every time this gets reposted, as if 99.99% of people wouldn't run away if they read 'curlftpfs' and 'mounted filesystem'
Even funnier, using cvs (LOL) or even svn over effing unsecure FTP was already wrong at the time.
(Oh and of course it was the most voted comment, the 2nd one had more legitimate concerns)
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#114Re: Congrats Dropbox
#115dhouston, what ever happened to the option of "an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer."
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#116Congrats to the Dropbox team. Apologies if this is a naive question but I haven't had much success Googling. I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this. When did that happen?
>I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this.
Dropbox had the support of lots of investment banks[0]. Even Spotify is hiring banks to advise it in its direct listing, even if the banks aren't underwriting [1]. If you want to read about the roles of investment banks and other financial institutions in IPOs and the existence and history of alternatives, you might want to read some of the news coverage surrounding Spotify's choice to use a direct listing.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/brief-dropbox-inc-files-for-... lists about a dozen investment banks involved in the underwriting
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify-w...
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#117Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)
Congratulations to the entire team.
I think it's interesting to go back to that thread, look at what the author (BrandonM) has done since then and learn some important lessons about being able to step outside of your own head to see the bigger picture.
Looks like he's still working for another company and has an unfinished blog (http://shebang.brandonmintern.com) but he seems like a really smart guy. The takeaway I got from the thread is "Don't be afraid to try something and finish it".
You guys had a lot of courage and perseverance to take an idea that people trivialized, have a working implementation, build a company around it and then IPO.
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a link to the actual presentation https://web.archive.org/web/20100817162301/http://dl-web.dro...
That web interface is soooooo much easier to understand and use. Makes me sad how unnecessarily complex modern UI is, not just on dropbox, but across the whole web.
Hell, even the menu bar UI on OS X is still terrible; they 'broke' it maybe 5 years ago and it's been the same mess ever since. It used to tell you what % of your dropbox was used, it used to tell you syncing status, it used to tell you all kinds of things. Now it's some weird changelog that looks nothing like anything else in OS X (or Windows, for that matter) from a UX perspective.
I mean, I guess I'm glad they didn't pull a Google and break it in new and exciting ways every 6 months, but really, it should have been changed back a week after they screwed it up.
Big congrats to the Dropbox team, though -- I use their product personally because it Just Works. Interviewed there back in 2011 when the office was (next to?) the old Fry's in Palo Alto.
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#119Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)
As they say, don't listen to the naysayers... and you did not! Congrats.
Re: Congrats Dropbox
#120dhouston, what ever happened to the option of "an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889
Shh... ruining their orchestrated media circle jerk will only get you downvoted.