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First YC company to go public ! Congrats It's always fun to look at the comments at the time the MVP was posted here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?

• 40acres 9y ago
  I feel like this has got to be one of the most infamous / inspiration posts in HN history. Just to be able to look at the MVP of a billion dollar company and watch it get scrutinized, doubted and critiqued at that early stage.. it's an amazing look for anyone w/ thoughts of launching a startup.
  • ajkjk 9y ago
    On the other hand, some of those criticisms were, like, obviously foolish, even at the time. Like: "The only problem is that you have to install something."? Regular users don't care and they didn't care then. Linux users can build this quite trivially? Yeah, but your average person can't, so who cares? "Not income generating"? It's storage. People pay for storage all the time.
    • Frank2312 9y ago
      Agreed on all your points except the last one. Not sure if it was just in my part of the world, but when Dropbox started, people only paid for local storage. And that was mostly technical people outside of small USB drives.
    • phil248 9y ago
      I enjoyed the Linux comment too. It's as if they were only concerned with the other 97% of the market! Those fools.
  • blibble 9y ago
    it's still making a loss though...
• eclipxe 9y ago
  "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
• allenz 9y ago
  I apologize for calling this person out, but I found this funny: > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem "quite trivially"
  • make3 9y ago
    and get a static ip or a dyndns account, and forward the port on your router. And then make sure your machine is never down. It's really a time waster for the average dev ofc
    • wott 9y ago
      "getting a FTP account" ≠ "self-hosting a FTP server"
      • make3 9y ago
        fair
  • allenz 9y ago
    To be honest this was my first reaction to Dropbox as well: just set up a VPN. Looking back, it's clear that I underestimated the advantages of Dropbox and the size of the market. Drew was prescient in identifying an elegant solution to this universal problem.
  • ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    Ahaha that is classic! triggered This doesn't solve a real world problem in Asperger world!
    • sctb 9y ago
      We've banned this account.
  • goialoq 9y ago
    > For a Linux user aka approximately no one, and certainly not anyone with a smartphone (technically Linux but you can't set up all these services easily).