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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

#131

Post by swyx »

joshmn wrote: post #128

If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy): I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is…

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.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#132

Post by Ekaros »

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…

How about a strange outdated idea. Stay where you are and start paying dividends? Well, somehow that is now unacceptable idea.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#133

Post by convenwis »

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…

I don't necessarily think that these companies have much room for market cap growth but it is definitely interesting that right at this moment the value of local has gone way up due to Claude Code (plus Cowork and competitors). I suspect that will change in the next several months but I know people who are actively switching from Google Docs to Office because of these tools.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#134

Post by tinyhouse »

Drew is clearly a very competent engineer who built an amazing product and company. He was the right person to build it from zero all the way to an IPO, but wasn't the right person to keep scaling it. Dropbox's product vision in the last 10 years was lacking to say the least. Their latest innovative product "Dash" is another flop, like Dropbox Password, Paper, and many others.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#136

Post by layer8 »

jabedude wrote: post #73

Why are the HN comments about how Dropbox's business is not doing well? I don't think there's any indication that Drew is stepping down because of that?

A change in long-standing leadership often signifies a change in strategy, whether warranted or not. It’s more likely to deteriorate than to improve the offering, especially given that Dropbox is largely a “finished” product.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#137

Post by mystifyingpoi »

aeyes wrote: post #65
njt wrote: post #33

I recently placed some PDF files for some nontechnical people on Dropbox. To avoid confusing them with the long complicated Dropbox URL, I even created a shortened link for them to use (think https://event.myorg.test ). Almost none of them had Dropbox accounts. I found out later from someone that 90% of them couldn’t access the files. The link didn’t require a login but they made it look to the unsophisticated observ…

But you don't need a Dropbox account to view any file for which you created a shareable link. If you add raw=1 to the URL then it will directly show in the browser without the Dropbox viewer. Or did you share a folder?

You don't need account, that's for sure, but multiple times I've seen a big upsell popup that suggests that account is required, while the tiny gray button "skip to files" is on the very bottom. I hate such patterns.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#138

Post by TiredOfLife »

matsemann wrote: post #83
dghlsakjg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally: click the paper clip logo in Gmail, tap files, pick your file. You can also just go into the files app, tap and hold, tap copy, go to Gmail tap and hold in your draft email, tap paste. There’s other paths that work too, like hitting the “send to” logo in files and then selecting Gmail. It’s really the exact same patterns I might use on a computer for the most part.

Google will often convert it to a gdrive thing instead. So you're not sending the file, just a link to the file uploaded somewhere. I'm not sure what heuristic it uses, but sometimes when mailing photos like half of them are included in the mail and half automagically uploaded to gdrive instead.

email providers have limits for size. Modern files are huge.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#139

Post by layer8 »

toephu2 wrote: post #93

As Steve Jobs famously told Drew Houston..."you have a feature, not a product." Jobs was ultimately right in the end.

I wouldn’t have a Dropbox subscription if it was merely a feature attached to some product. I have it because it’s an independent service.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#140

Post by giancarlostoro »

ADent wrote: post #67
giancarlostoro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a darn shame, if the major OS providers didn't roll their own cloud storage, Dropbox could have been the default go-to across the board, and any other competitors that would have risen.

They were seemingly everywhere and lots of apps and services offered Dropbox as an option. 200 million users in 2013. Then they crippled the free plan and Apple and MS started pushing their services hard. And Dropbox seemed less ubiquitous after that.

I remember even Ubuntu had their own storage offering, which had they kept it going, I might have subscribed to to this day. Shame, would have been an easy way for Ubuntu to fund itself.
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