Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 156 posts

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#31

Post by askafriend »

echelon wrote: post #21
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this apply to Slack as well?

Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have garg…

> Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.

That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations.

For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#32

Post by quineoa »

askafriend wrote: post #31
echelon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have garg…

> Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built…

That sounds painful for an ops person. When I did ops work I much preferred to have as little abstraction as possible seeing how critical each action is.

I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#33

Post by 1123581321 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #16
pmart123 wrote: post #2

They really did seem to be firing on all cylinders early on. Prior to their IPO, I thought it was weird they were spending time to migrate off of AWS versus continuing to build around their core offering. As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering (lots of caching, etc.) if order to at least offer a superior experience to Google Drive, Microsoft, etc.

> As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering what I don't get is why they don't have a price plan in the 100-200GB range like google drive has for two or three bucks. I've set up like seven or eight of those for family members and relatives, it's a very good price point and size for the average user. The free plan of dropbox pretty much is super small and the next thing is 5TB.

The theory is it would cannibalize their $10/mo plan. They have a lot of users who don’t have tons of files but value paid features. Google and Apple’s storage services are plainer offerings.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#34

Post by paxys »

superfrank wrote: post #27
ativzzz wrote: post #25

Never understood Dropbox, because as a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. ... Not mine, but a HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.

The people who can do it are still their target audience, once they try it and realize how much of a pain it is to maintain.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#35

Post by txcwpalpha »

superfrank wrote: post #27
ativzzz wrote: post #25

Never understood Dropbox, because as a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. ... Not mine, but a HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.

In case you or others missed it, the parent commenter is quoting a comment that was posted on HN's original thread announcing Dropbox in 2007, where the poster questioned if Dropbox would ever generate income.

Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this comment is often laughed at because it was so terribly bad at predicting Dropbox's success.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#36

Post by hansvm »

JohnHammersley wrote: post #28
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> [pg] That does count for a lot with us. It's surprising how many of the groups who apply have a cofounder who's not willing to quit his or her job. It's a worrying sign when someone who knows the company a lot better than we do isn't willing to bet on it. But again, there are always exceptions. The conversation is about the dropbox founder quitting his job to wok on dropbox part-time. The problem I see with pg's l…

I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because most (if not all) startups require a huge level of commitment and focus from the founding team. If you aren't able (for whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign that you might struggle to be successful. I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much e…

Just wanted to drop by and say that Overleaf is an amazing product, and my only complaint is that I didn't learn about it sooner.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#37

Post by JohnHammersley »

hansvm wrote: post #36
JohnHammersley wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the reasons it's a useful indicator is because most (if not all) startups require a huge level of commitment and focus from the founding team. If you aren't able (for whatever reason) to commit to it, it's a sign that you might struggle to be successful. I'm not arguing that people who don't quit their jobs don't have amazing ideas; it's just that to make a startup work as a business requires so much e…

Just wanted to drop by and say that Overleaf is an amazing product, and my only complaint is that I didn't learn about it sooner.

Thanks hansvm, always good to see replies like this :) Glad you're finding it useful!

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#38

Post by echelon »

askafriend wrote: post #31
echelon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have garg…

> Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built…

That sounds about as natural as using Xbox Kinect gestures. Additionally, your SLA is now also tied to Slack's, which is a multiplicative downgrade.

Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise.

Or supported.

Edit: I want to clarify. I don't mean to be rude, and I wasn't in the room when y'all made these decisions. I just don't think Slack is the ship you want to tie yourselves to, especially not as your control plane.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#39

Post by OriginalPenguin »

pmart123 wrote: post #2

They really did seem to be firing on all cylinders early on. Prior to their IPO, I thought it was weird they were spending time to migrate off of AWS versus continuing to build around their core offering. As it stands now, they could still target consumers with a higher end offering (lots of caching, etc.) if order to at least offer a superior experience to Google Drive, Microsoft, etc.

Unless Amazon decided that they want to give DropBox a huge discounted rate for the PR, it would simply cost too much to have stayed on the Amazon cloud.

Re: Dropbox: Tech's Hottest Startup (2011)

#40

Post by fireattack »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #35
superfrank wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.

In case you or others missed it, the parent commenter is quoting a comment that was posted on HN's original thread announcing Dropbox in 2007, where the poster questioned if Dropbox would ever generate income. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this comment is often laughed at because it was so terribly bad at predicting Dropbox's success.

Should really use quote marks I guess.
Post reply on HN