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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

#171

Post by matsemann »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #138
matsemann wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but it's the silent conversion that irks me. My email is no longer self contained or archivable. When I find it again in the future, the files might be gone.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#172

Post by my2c »

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 think it is the market, not the leadership.

They never tried to expand the TAM. Storage/servers were not rented out while others HuggingFace/Github/Digital Ocean/Cloudflare etc. sold them to expand their TAM.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#173

Post by cyanydeez »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #12
jedberg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.

> Most people I know e-mail files to themselves It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)

with llms, you'd think we could use email as a passthrough proxy

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#174

Post by sieabahlpark »

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…

[dead]

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#175

Post by layer8 »

ajkjk wrote: post #165
layer8 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition. While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.

For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way. Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)

Yeah, I understand that Dropbox isn’t thinking how I think. My argument is that even if they lose these corporate contracts, it should still be a viable (if much smaller) business to serve those users that do care. In other words, it wouldn’t force Dropbox to entirely stop existing.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#176

Post by dhouston »

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…

Hi Josh -- Drew here -- our escalations team should be reaching out shortly. (Losing phone, 2FA keys, etc. can be tricky but they should be able to work with you and hopefully verify enough to get you unblocked.)

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#177

Post by maxbond »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #158
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.

I was selling a GPU on Facebook marketplace during covid. The description was that the card was good for gaming or “turning dinosaurs into clean money”. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. I sold a rifle legally on an online auction site. The buyer was offered to pay with PayPal they were given the option to use. The buyer took that option, making me break PayPal TOS. Banned permanently and no way to…

> Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why.

Prior to 2013 or after? Maybe they merged ban lists with PayPal (who owns them).

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#178

Post by largbae »

gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

Maybe this is sarcasm and I just didn't catch it, but I think Dropbox made a mark, and a good one at that.

The tool strangely still has a certain something that I reach for from time to time. Cross-platform(cross-era even, I just used it to move something off an ancient Windows 10 install), painless sync, painless auth, painless sharing(or not), painless updates, simple billing that isn't so high I have to factor it into my plans, and the app doesn't try to ramp my price based on how many devices I access my data from. It's just a good piece of software at a good price.

Commercially they did just fine as well according to the article: $6B in market cap, $2B/yr rev and $2B personally for Drew. Maybe not the top of YC leaderboard, but well above average.

I want more services like this one, and will keep paying for my modest storage amount until they tell me to go.

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#179

Post by dcposch »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #158
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.

I was selling a GPU on Facebook marketplace during covid. The description was that the card was good for gaming or “turning dinosaurs into clean money”. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. I sold a rifle legally on an online auction site. The buyer was offered to pay with PayPal they were given the option to use. The buyer took that option, making me break PayPal TOS. Banned permanently and no way to…

It's because Venmo is owned by PayPal

Re: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

#180

Post by pbalau »

gigatree wrote: post #3

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

Story time.

Around 2005, I was hired by a company that was building software for USB drives, to build a porn site.

Turns out, they wanted me to build a poc for an authentication solution: some USB drives would have a fingerprint reader and they wanted to build this auth system based on that.

So I built that, but "perplexingly", they didn't get any finance or enough prospect customers, so the project got shelved.

Then, I was handed another project they had on the back burner, a sort of firewall for devices, meant to prevent exfiltration of company documents on unapproved USB drives.

I built the single user version, eg you had to be admin to allow devices and the product sold quite well, even winning some prizes iirc.

We started getting requests to have a centralized admin interface and a way to allow/disallow copying some file types. I started working on the centralized admin and the company hired a very talented engineer to build the file filtering thing. This last thing was based on a windows API that allowed for virtual file systems. Things were ticking along nicely and the company even hired a business manager to try to come up with other products we can build with our existing tech.

One afternoon, over a bunch of cold beers, to link with the hell on earth that happens right now in London, me and this person came up with a cunning plan! What if you sell an 1GB USB drive with an extra 1GB of space?

The plan was simple: plug in the device, you get a drive that's the regular USB drive, but also another drive, backed by the virtual file system thing and a version of my http auth thing, and you would read/write from a server on the Internet.

Big boss liked the idea and I started researching how to get servers and the like, while a third engineer was tasked to build the desktop app needed.

It all came crashing down, days later, when this engineer declared that is not possible to have a windows app minimize to sys tray and the project got cancelled. I left the company not long after that .

This was the story on how a small German-Romanian company could have beat Dropbox.

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