Dropbox Versus The World • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#31

Post by vonklaus » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

kzhahou wrote: post #11

Cookingboy wrote: post #2

Love this following paragraph: "Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company. It’s a philosophy that appeals to many Dropbox employees. On a chilly night in San Francisco’s Financial District, Ilya Fushman, head of business and mobile products, and Agarwal join Houston and me for dinner at the Battery, an exclusive restaurant and private club. Desp…

> Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company But that surely doesn't extend to equity, where the founder holds an order of magnitude or two more than his VP of Engineering, who holds an order of magnitude more than his rank-and-file employee "peers" who built and continue to build the company towards success.

That's how most companies work. The risk diminishes as the company becomes more established and recruiting becomes easier. Houston wrote the prototype himself and became accepted to Y-Combinator on that platform. Before attending he met Ferdowsi and they went through Y-Combinator and iterated on the design and built a great product, they made the viral Digg video and released to a waitlist of +75,000. Before another employee was hired YC was in the cap table and 7 participants had funded in the seed stage (included sequoia).

I am not sure if the group dynamic functions as peers, in that decisions and features and such are developed by discussion and there is mutual respect. However, I think Houston and Ferdowsi are more responsible for DB success than others and thus have a bigger slice of the Cap table.

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#32

Post by api » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 5:22 AM UTC

rconti wrote: post #9

notsrg wrote: post #5

"Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’ I really hope no one is storing their financial records and health information on Dropbox...

Of course they are. When I was buying a house, it was a nonstop game of scanning and shuffling financial data everywhere. Office scanner, office email, office computer, cloud storage provider, personal email... and because of cloud storage provider, all other linked machines in my house, .. not to mention the email accounts of the bankers... You can try to get away from it, if you like. But then you're just wasting y…

Special case of a general principle: user experience trumps everything. it trumps freedom, security, privacy, openness, cost, flexibility, ...

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#33

Post by sytelus » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 5:51 AM UTC

arikrak wrote: post #7

I only started the article, but it's too over-the-top to continue. I wonder how you get media to write about your startup like that? > Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173 billion), and Tencent ($160 billion). > Unlike his amply finan…

It's indeed a huge surprise that Dropbox is alive and well in 2015 when every major titan has similar offering for free. However I didn't knew Drew Houston was still that interested in Dropbox and my impression is that there is nothing new happening at Dropbox for years from development perspective. For example, basic things like showing long file names in tablets like iPad is completely broken for years and no one is fixing it. It appears to me Drew Houston is realizing that IPO is the only option for exit and starting a huge PR effort. Be prepared for lots of articles like this in coming months.

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#34

Post by adventured » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 6:08 AM UTC

The retort for Houston is:

You mean in the same way that IBM dominated personal computing (besting that little start-up Microsoft), and Microsoft dominated search (besting that little start-up, Google), and Google dominated social (besting that little start-up, Facebook)?

Turns out, no matter how big or successful you are, you can't dominate everything. That is something Dropbox has going for it in battling Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#35

Post by eigenvector » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 6:10 AM UTC

notsrg wrote: post #5

"Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’ I really hope no one is storing their financial records and health information on Dropbox...

Encrypt it, then store it where ever you like.

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#36

Post by adventured » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 6:24 AM UTC

jsnk wrote: post #10

pronoiac wrote: post #3

> Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service--and perhaps the only startup--ever to compete simultaneously against Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tencent. If you're wondering who Tencent is, you're not alone: http://www.thestreet.com/story/13095109/1/how-tencent-up-140... They sold games on feature phones, then smartphones, then made WeChat, which is IM, I think, and massive in China. They als…

Tencent also is the majority interest of Riot Games. Riot Games is the creator of League of Legends which is probably the biggest selling game right now.

Candy Crush likely still owns the distinction of the biggest game when it comes to on-going revenue generation. King Digital did $2.2 billion in sales last year ($586m last quarter), almost entirely on Candy Crush. Estimates put League of Legends at the $1 billion ballpark for 2014 (up from $624m in 2013).

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#37

Post by roel_v » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 8:00 AM UTC

notsrg wrote: post #5

"Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’ I really hope no one is storing their financial records and health information on Dropbox...

"I really hope no one is storing their financial records and health information on Dropbox..."

In 2015, the only sensible approach to security is to consider every machine you touch to be compromised, all the time. And yet I still store financial information on Dropbox - pay slips, bank records, mortgage documents, wills. Why would I care? I don't put download links to them on every email I send out of course, but if they would 'leak', it wouldn't make a material difference to my life. While the ease with which I can access and keep track of them does.

Same with medical information - what do I care that anyone knows how strong my prescription glasses are? Or if I'd got some serious disease tomorrow, what sort of treatment I get? I'd have to disclose if I wanted to get life insurance anyway.

I no longer see a rational reason for trying for absolute secrecy on things like this. The cat's out of the bag.

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#38

Post by kzhahou » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 8:25 AM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #31

kzhahou wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Houston is also working hard to ensure that Dropbox feels like a collection of peers, at all levels of the company But that surely doesn't extend to equity, where the founder holds an order of magnitude or two more than his VP of Engineering, who holds an order of magnitude more than his rank-and-file employee "peers" who built and continue to build the company towards success.

That's how most companies work. The risk diminishes as the company becomes more established and recruiting becomes easier. Houston wrote the prototype himself and became accepted to Y-Combinator on that platform. Before attending he met Ferdowsi and they went through Y-Combinator and iterated on the design and built a great product, they made the viral Digg video and released to a waitlist of +75,000. Before another…

It's typical for the founder to hold 2-5 times as much equity as all employees combined. We can argue risk all day long. I claim this is a severe imbalance, and one day silicon valley workers will wake up to it and demand more for their services.

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#39

Post by _razvan » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 8:27 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #16

> From the start, Dropbox was almost magically simple: Install Dropbox’s folder on your desktop, and by simply dragging files into it you could suddenly access them from anywhere. That was simple in 2007, but this kind of synching model (also used by Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive) doesn't feel simple anymore to me. Most applications still save files in other locations by default. Having to save them in your Dro…

> Having to save them in your Dropbox, or having to move them to your Dropbox afterward, turns out to be a massive friction.

This also bothered me so I looked for a solution. As much as I love Dropbox, I still have data stuck on external drives and NAS boxes. I looked at some Dropbox competitors but you always get that half-baked feeling with them. I sticked with Dropbox in the end (especially after they introduced the 1TB plans) but I still wanted to get the files from my external drive in there.

I tried symlinks which felt neat at first, only to later discover their nasty shortcomings: imagine the horror of files getting deleted when my external drive was disconnected. Symlinks also don't get the updates so in order to sync changes I always had to close and restart Dropbox. Back to square one.

In the end, all I wanted was a simple way to have files synced from my external drive and NAS, without having to worry about it or doing voodoo to get it working. That's why I created Boxifier (http://www.boxifier.com). I wanted a super easy, set-and-forget, "it just works" solution.

I think Dropbox doesn't get enough credit for solving the sync problem for the masses in a way that feels so simple. That simple that it's easy to forget that it is a hard problem in the first place.

Re: Dropbox Versus The World

#40

Post by dandare » Tue, Mar 31, 2015, 9:04 AM UTC

I only wish competitors (Drive in my case) would copy their sleek OS integration and the public folder functionality. Sadly since Condoleezza Dropbox is not an option for me.