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April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

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Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#131

Post by nostrademons »

anuragramdasan wrote: post #106
nostrademons wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm an example of how you can be right and still wrong because you let "other plans" get in the way. I'm on that thread with my two cents: "I'm impressed." However, Drew took me out to lunch about 10 months later. They'd just signed their Series A with Sequoia (although it wasn't public knowledge), and were looking to hire their first couple employees. Aston had just been hired the day before as employee #1; Drew…

Quite an interesting story. I guess I am a few years behind you, as in I just graduated a year back and get offers from startups which i accept/turn down. I often wonder how these startups would end up and where I would be relative to them. But I guess what makes the most sense here is the part that says "you made the decision that was right for you.". That kind of seems like the right line of thought.

FWIW, during that time period (07/08), I talked with about 10 startups about joining as a founder or early employee. DropBox is the only one still in business today. So I think that the Paul Buchheit post that Joe linked is pretty accurate: "How to be right 90% of the time: predict it'll fail." It's just that you only need one success.

I've had other reasons for staying at Google as long as I have, though, and I wouldn't necessarily consider it a failure.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#132

Post by MichaelGG »

Osiris wrote: post #129
thecoffman wrote: post #116

Straight from Drew himeself: data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like what mozy does.) It is sad to me that this never came to pass. I guess the desire to offer a web interface overrode the idea of encrypting the files before they left…

It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.

Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could "transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#133

Post by rlu »

toddmorey wrote: post #102

I'm reminded of this Quora post on the popularity of Dropbox: "Dropbox: Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality? Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do: There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync. They built that. Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea. "But," you may ask, "so much…

To be fair, in retrospect everything seems obvious.

At the time I'm sure the Dropbox team had to make a bunch of hard decisions. For example, without knowing the success they would later have, it doesn't seem super obvious to have "one master sync folder" as opposed to being able to sync various folders around your computer (a la not-so-successful Live Mesh and perhaps other sync solutions)

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#134

Post by mhurron »

sskates wrote: post #49
dnautics wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it may not be of much comfort to you, but sometimes naysayers are important. Even if they are wrong about the overall trajectory, they may in the process of naysaying point out specific weaknesses that the visionaries might have missed, and, thus, ultimately allow for the success of the product.

Careful! A lot of would be Drew Houston's end up discouraged by naysayers. As a founder, it took me a while to know who to listen to. One of the toughest things about doing a startup is people telling you you're wrong all the time. One of the things YC (and pg in particular) gets right is that they're very encouraging of potential for success.

> it took me a while to know who to listen to

Perhaps this was your problem. Who is not important, what they are saying is.

You're being told you're wrong? Why? Do they have a point or does their argument break down to simply 'because' or 'because no one has done it that way before'?

If they have a point, at the very least, they probably just pointed out a problem you need to over come in the future and you can thank them for expanding your understanding of the situation.

The 'because' people though, just ignore them.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#136

Post by hackinthebochs »

throwaway15 wrote: post #126
hackinthebochs wrote: post #39

Honestly, I still think the idea of dropbox is ludicrous. There are many ways to share files, and sending them to a third party to host for you is the worst one of them all. Aside from the few people that really need to multiply their bandwith by many orders of magnitude, a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine. Besides, dropbox was just yet another iteration of on…

"a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine" For your own sake, I hope you get more real-world experience before making investment decisions or building technology to sell. To you, somehow the existence of a massively profitable, multi-billion dollar company must be evidence of people's irrationality and not an unmet need.

Are they "massively profitable" though? I haven't really heard anything regarding their financials. They're well funded, but that doesn't really mean anything these days.

There's certainly a need, don't get me wrong. It's just that for most people (paid) dropbox is the wrong solution. And at some point the right solution will present itself and suddenly dropbox will see its market disappear.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#137

Post by Shank »

MichaelGG wrote: post #132
Osiris wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.

Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could "transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?

How exactly could you "transfer" files that way? You could just upload something to Dropbox and share your logon credentials and any form of dedup or DMCA won't help.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#138

Post by dmak »

ghshephard wrote: post #111
singular wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, that's fine, so what is there to stop dropbox from popping up a warning when this limit is exceeded? Or for there to be some means of deleting things from the server side without having to manually click through to delete N files at once (where N Having the system break irrevocably at any stage is totally unacceptable when you're dealing with people's data. Presumably you'd have a problem if gmail stopped working…

In some ways, it reminds me of Apple's attitude towards their Pro Users - these users make up less than 1% of their customer base, and their revenue stream (and effort/attention) is focussed on the other 99%. So, because 99% of the users will never run into this problem, they're going to put minimal/no attention to resolving it, while focussing all their attention towards the 99%. The 1% hopefully realize this and mi…

80/20 rule. You have to do the least work that would bring the most value to the busienss. It doesn't make sense that they allocate that time to fix an issue for the 1% instead of 99%. I think this is just a logical business decision.

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#139

Post by avree »

MichaelGG wrote: post #132
Osiris wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.

Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could "transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?

No, they never nixed them. Everyone has to deal with DMCA issues—Dropbox does a pretty proactive job of it (http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/What-are-some-methods-to-evade-...)

Re: April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

#140

Post by novum »

Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox is a file shared with the NSA.

I was a happy paying Dropbox customer since 2008 but downgraded my account to the free tier a few months ago. I no longer consider Dropbox trustworthy for anything except (1) trivial files and (2) files encrypted client-side before they're put into Dropbox.

Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases that only recently did I resolve:

- 1Password Sync. Dropbox is no longer necessary here since 1Password natively supports iCloud sync across Mac and iOS.

- Arbitrary file-sharing between Mac and iOS. Dropbox is no longer necessary here ever since I've been running BTSync[0], which has worked flawlessly in my experience.

It might be time to cancel Dropbox entirely.

[0] http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html

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