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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

cnbc.com

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Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#201

Post by iririririr »

phyzome wrote: post #152
bhouston wrote: post #124

Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck. Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation. I think it is the market, not the leadership. It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple…

Why is it bad that a company continues to provide services for customers and income for employees?

they commited the worst crime of all time! not using Ai to backup your files!

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#202

Post by nashadelic »

bhouston wrote: post #124

Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck. Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation. I think it is the market, not the leadership. It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple…

Dropbox has deep integration ecosystems, runs your company's data, I think its a no-brainer for it to become the agentic memory for your company if done right with it syncing data across all company services.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#203

Post by aanet »

Kudos to @DHouston and co. for starting and keeping the company going.

Somehow, in my mind, Dropbox is always associated with the classic HN comment [1] about "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, ..." ;-) ;-)

Trivial indeed /s

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#204

Post by zipy124 »

jsmith99 wrote: post #62
packetlost wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox. It's also much cheaper.

OneDrive still regularly fails when downloading large files... Unusable.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#205

Post by bachmeier »

bhouston wrote: post #124

Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck. Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation. I think it is the market, not the leadership. It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple…

> It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).

A huge unforced error though is that the starting price for individual plans is $20/year versus $10/month for Dropbox and Box. At a certain point you have to recognize that the rules of the game have changed. Once a customer has their foot in the door with a cheaper plan that also offers better integration, why would they move to Dropbox or Box?

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#206

Post by light_triad »

nashadelic wrote: post #199
light_triad wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was both the market and the leadership. Dropbox failed to find a second act: they struggled to find PMF with their acquisitions and new products: Dropbox Passwords, Dropbox Paper, Carousel etc. As Steve Jobs warned Drew Houston, Dropbox was "a feature, not a product"

Dropbox is a $6B product, just no second act

It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#207

Post by phlakaton »

bhouston wrote: post #124

Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck. Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation. I think it is the market, not the leadership. It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple…

A business that can bring in a steady $2.5B a year doesn't seem like a bad business to me, so long as they can turn that into a profit. I think there ought to be a recognized place in the ecosystem for this sort of thing, and for me their independence from the gigacorps is a major feature.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#210

Post by yesitcan »

dhouston wrote: post #186
swyx wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.

Fair criticism. The tricky part though with any scaled service is that for every legitimate case like this, there are many more bad actors trying to hijack accounts through exactly this mechanism -- so account recovery has to be conservative by default, which means legitimate cases sometimes get caught in the friction. Not an excuse, but it's a hard problem at scale and not just e.g. a cost-cutting thing or not givin…

Is this guy really replying with AI?
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