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Congrats Dropbox

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Congrats Dropbox

#171

Post by aaavl2821 »

felixgallo wrote: post #4
adventured wrote: post #3

Up 47% at the moment. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx

looks like they mispriced. Most of those gains are accruing to underwriters and speculators rather than the company. Same thing happened to eToys.

that's actually a pretty well executed IPO, and most banks shoot for a decent double-digit percentage gain on day 1.

its in the company's interest to have IPO investors (their first public mkt investors) rewarded, as it keeps them from selling too much, and it attracts other investors to the stock. dropbox is still unprofitable, so it will probably need to raise more equity in the future, and it helps to reward your early investors

it also makes the investment banks happy -- their clients made money on the deal. if dropbox's banks are happy, that helps dropbox, bc as mentioned above, it will need their services again

the happier public market investors are, the higher the stock price will go. most employees cant sell stock for at least a few months, and if outside public investors are happy, then by the time employees can sell, the stock will be worth much more

if you price too high and all the proceeds accrue to the company rather than investors, you get a debacle like facebooks IPO, where the stocked dropped and didnt recover for over a year

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#172

Post by dmitrygr »

Connections connections connections - that is what it is all about

   We’d met Drew the year before. [...]
   Adam Smith’s big brother in MIT’s
   Phi Delta Theta fraternity. 
   He came to the afterparty at our house
   [...] I remember him being likeable,
   earnest, and very energetic.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#174

Post by snake117 »

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Dropbox is the first app I'll install on any new device. It works on all relevant platforms and is getting more and more integrated with other platforms (Google Docs, Office) all while remaining platform agnostic. Once I reach my free limit (roughly 7 GB) I will gladly pay for their service.

Congrats to Drew, Arash, and the Dropbox team!

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#175

Post by dumbfounder »

BrandonM wrote: post #156
dhouston wrote: post #90

Thank 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 :)

It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"! I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel…

Drew and Brandon, together again!

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#176

Post by gigatexal »

lwf wrote: post #163
gigatexal wrote: post #74

Congrats to dropbox and YC as well. 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?

The core UI is Qt 5.5.[1] When I started, it was still wxWidgets (shudder). We take a GTK dependency on Linux for some desktop integration in GNOME. There's a bit of webviews these days, although there are Qt fallbacks or handoffs to actual browsers for everything important, for both compatibility and accessibility. Screen readers and QTWebViews did not play nice together when we implemented it. (I work at Dropbox, a…

Thank you! I should have thought about the system reqs to see hints as to how it was built

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#177

Post by rollcat »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #77
drstewart wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to instead!"

Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

> Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.

Well... https://syncthing.net/

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#179

Post by nhurj »

sangnoir wrote: post #139
totalZero wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> widely I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside of California and college campuses.

> I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside of California and college campuses. Contemporary events for another notion you wouldn't find "outside California and college campuses" succeed in toppling Brendan Eich at Mozilla. The only difference I could tell then was that the Dropbox board put its foot down in support of Ms Rice and Mozilla's board folded.

As far as I know they both had support from their respective boards. But Rice was 'only' up for the position as board member. Eich was to be the highest public and private facing position of the company. The controversy surrounding him, unfairly or not, also affected people personally. Basically Rice only needed the trust of the rest of the board, while Eich would have had to fight to run or represent the company. Your own comment being an example of how the Internet doesn't easily forget things.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#180

Post by nicolasbistolfi »

Remember when people used two floppy disks to save files so if one floppy break you have a backup one?

I remember the first day I heard about Dropbox and I was amazed by it, it made perfect sense. Since then I'm a client and as an entrepreneur, it's a company I always looked up to.

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