21 ms·
Congrats Dropbox
- rossdavidh 9y agoI like Dropbox and YCombinator, but this line near the end was odd: "Today is a big milestone for YC. When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we’d funded would one day go public." Really? What were they doing funding it, then? I hadn't realized that wasn't the original idea at YCombinator.
- ryanSrich 9y agoI could be wrong, but wouldn't VCs prefer some type of large acquisition, a la WhatsApp, as opposed to an IPO?
- hluska 9y agoWhy would there be a difference? They're both liquidity events.
- ryanSrich 9y agoBoth parties have a lot more flexibility with M&A (this includes vested partners) — meaning private deals have far better conditions if the deal isn't a saving grace. IPOs can have lengthy lock up periods and are generally much worse for leadership than acquisition (disclosure of personal information like compensation).
- sjg007 9y ago180 day lock up probably for employees mostly.. maybe founders are included in that.
- mrep 9y agoIPO's tend to be bigger paydays even if they are more risky so I would assume they prefer IPO's.
- CyrusL 9y agoThe original idea was to make a summer camp alternative for students so that they didn't have to be interns at big tech companies. I think YC was first called "Summer Founders Program." Funding a company that IPOs is pretty wild when you think about it in that context.
- saltandvinegar 9y agoAgreed, that line seems like ludicrous false modesty. If anything, I think they should be shocked about how long IPO#1 took.
- fnbr 9y agoI think they mean that Paul Graham et. al launched YC as a small, cheap experiment, and never imagined they would have success like this.
- quadrature 9y agoI think you're simultaneously reading too much and too little into it. I think when they first started it they didn't even know if the premise would catch on. But also a lot of startups fail or get acquired and acquisitions are also a favourable outcome for YC.
- aaavl2821 9y agoYC was started as a way for PG and Jessica to learn about angel investing. They originally gave teams like $20k for the summer and positioned it as alternative to a summer internship. They told students that if they decided at the end of the summer to quit the startup and go back to school, that was ok. They expected the cost of this education on angel investing would be some failed investments in startups. Most people back then apparently thought they were crazy for writing checks to undergrads and having them start companies -- this was in 2005, before zuckerberg, right after the dot com crash, when the world was a different place. I'm sure the YC founders thought in the back of their minds that their startups would succeed, but they probably were hesitant to say that out loud. It's easy to take the YC model for granted today, but back then what they were doing was sort of crazy. Their insight was that these young founders were diamonds in the rough, and their brilliance was fighting for these founders when no one else would http://old.ycombinator.com/start.html http://old.ycombinator.com/start.html http://paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html http://paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html http://old.ycombinator.com/old/sfp.html http://old.ycombinator.com/old/sfp.html Edit: readability, more links
- jl 9y agoWe thought they'd be successful, but it's very rare for a company to be this successful.
- fastball 9y agoYou don't need to have an IPO to be a successful venture??
- heyoni 9y agoA lot of them sellout.
- totalZero 9y agoSome ventures get acquired. That can be a path to success, too. Bacardi does revenues of 5 billion plus and they're private. I'd say that's a successful business.
- noir_lord 9y agoSamsung is privately held as well. ~$300bn revenue.
- umeshunni 9y agoSamsung isn't privately held. It's listed in the Seoul market as KRX:005930
- gspetr 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-governmental_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-go... See reference at the bottom: "Samsung is not to be confused with its publicly traded subsidiary Samsung Electronics"
- umeshunni 9y agoThanks. I also found this: "the Samsung Group comprised 59 unlisted companies and 19 listed companies"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jedberg 9y agoDon't forget that YC was started mostly with money that came from PG and Trevor and RTM selling Viaweb to Yahoo. Most exits then and today were sales to bigger companies. The expectation was that most of the companies would fail and maybe one or two would sell to a big company for a life-changing amount of money for the founders and nice return for YC.
- adventured 9y agoUp 47% at the moment. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx
- felixgallo 9y agolooks like they mispriced. Most of those gains are accruing to underwriters and speculators rather than the company. Same thing happened to eToys.
- iooi 9y agoThere's going to be a lot of bankers and their clients celebrating tonight. With 36M shares outstanding, dropbox left around 360M on the table for the bankers.
- c1utch1 9y agoNo most of those gains are still accruing with the management team, employees and early investors.
- ghfbjdhhv 9y agoIt will be interesting to see how Spotify’s direct listing does.
- stanfordkid 9y agopeople always say this during IPO... you need to take volume into account. What is the volume trading at 44% above the opening price? When you put $700mm of securities on the market you need to price them low enough so that investors hold.
- totalZero 9y ago18 million shares traded on the open at $29, and since then 23 million shares have traded between $28.80 and $31.60. Safe to say there's a healthy bid at $29.
- 9y ago
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y agolol, I was just 'asking HN' why the DropBox IPO was not #1 on HN. It wasn't even on the front page 5 minutes ago. Thankfully, I decided to check before posting. Congratulations all around, and we finally get to see whether DropBox is actually minting money or not. Good Luck!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- runesoerensen 9y agoPictures of the actual checks :) https://twitter.com/sama/status/977215073386053632 https://twitter.com/sama/status/977215073386053632
- boto3 9y agook, I'll be the one to ask. How much is this check worth now?
- sincerely 9y agoProbably 3,000$ and 12,000$ respectively?
- sleepychu 9y agoGP is asking, how much did this investment translate into.
- pacofvf 9y ago2007 Dollars != 2018 Dollars.
- Izkata 9y agoAssuming that's what was meant, and not what the other comments did: $3000 -> $3614.05 according to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
- defen 9y agoProbably around 0.06 * 10,000,000,000 Assuming no subsequent investments, dilution, selling of shares, etc.
- boto3 9y agoSo 600M is the upper bound. Drew Houston owns roughly 25% of the company now, and he probably owned ~75% at when YC invested, for a dilution rate of 3. I'd say YC investment probably has dilution rate of 10, for the real amount of 60M. Not bad, but not Whatsapp scale either.
- rrggrr 9y agoLet's celebrate AFTER we see what Dropbox does with the IPO proceeds. Here's a to-do list: 1. Resurrect drop.io product killed by FB. 2. Acquire HelloSign or build it internally. 3. Acquire and fix Scribd, and restore document publishing capabilities; or Zoho. 4. Acquire Zapier or one of their competitors (eg. Integromat). 5. Acquire Canva, ASCIIflow and PandaDocs. Thus leaving Box.net in your dust and await acquisition by Salesforce.
- quexy 9y ago.. and give us back Mailbox!
- amelius 9y agoThis is nice from a business-perspective. But, stepping back ... I'm sure that a lot of the folks here would agree that something as basic as file-sync should be a standard part of any OS, and follow a non-proprietary protocol. So whereas they have turned something that should have been a commodity into a profitable business, I'm not sure what we have achieved here.
- bbarn 9y agoIt pretty much is a standard part of the OS. iCloud, OneDrive, etc. It's the "non-proprietary" part you're not ever going to see. Someone has to pay for storage.
- ragesh 9y agoWhy would non-proprietary preclude paying for storage?
- bbarn 9y agoBecause each of those is trying to profit from it, not just pay for the storage. Thus, branding, and thus, they make them private and proprietary. Is it right? No.
- gfodor 9y agoDon't be so sure -- IPFS provides a possible path. We will see if it works.
- cvaidya1986 9y agoCongratulations! What a consistent drama free run. Also, resisted an acquisition offer from Steve Jobs!
- mkirklions 9y agoI have a new goal- Get so big I can give the middle finger to Apple. Although I've gotten less bitter since I found React-Native.
- cvaidya1986 9y agoOr simply create your own contribution to the world without anchoring relative to any other entity.
- smt88 9y agoHow was it drama-free? There was a #DeleteDropbox campaign after they hired Condoleezza Rice, widely considered to be a war criminal (especially outside US conservative circles) and definitely a proponent of domestic spying programs.
- totalZero 9y ago> widely I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside of California and college campuses.
- alecb 9y agoSpearheaded a war that resulted in the deaths of 1+ million Iraqis that was started unilaterally on the pretext of fabricated evidence.
- dragonwriter 9y agoCondoleeza Rice did not spearhead the Iraq War by any reasonable standard. (If you can fairly credit anyone other than President Bush with that, its Vice President Cheney, who was actively pushing for aggressive war with Iraq and arranging for it both before 9/11 in the administration, and even advocating it publicly for many years before joining the administration.) I'm not saying that there might not be some basis for finding her culpable for some acts of the Administration that amount to war crimes, crimes against peace (launching a war of aggression is that, not a war crime), or crimes against humanity, but spearheading the Iraq War clearly isn't on the list, either from advocacy or authority standpoint. Knowingly helping to provide the false pretext for it might be, however.
- inostia 9y agoI think the caption "The Summer 2017 Y Combinator Batch – Jessica Sitting with Dropbox Cofounder, Arash" for the image should be 2007? Or am I wrong?
- sctb 9y agoThanks! Let's see if we can get it updated.
- ipqk 9y agoDon't forget that Condoleezza Rice, a driving instrument in the War on Iraq and the death of a million Iraqis, sits today on the board of Dropbox.
- jl 9y agoIncidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- jshap70 9y ago> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? lol
- mentos 9y agoI'd love to hear from Drew on what pieces of advice from that ShowHN discussion actually affected their thinking for better/worse.
- zerr 9y agoBut they aren't profitable (and never were), right?
- slg 9y agoI don't think that comment is necessarily unfair. Dropdox does charge for the service if a user wants over 2GB. I think the more questionable comment is that first point: >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. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. That is the epitome of not getting it.
- pashabitz 9y agoMan the comments on this. HN gold.
- Gargoyle 9y agoIt would be a fun experiment to put comments like this as quotes on the "Add Comment" page so you had to read them while typing your own comment. Might make people take a second or two extra to reconsider.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 3pt14159 9y agoEdit: Removing comment.
- claytonjy 9y agoThere's something really odd to me about describing a $100MM acquisition as "middling"; wouldn't that almost guarantee multi-million paydays for the founders? Yeah, way below Dropbox's valuation, but still significantly more money than I expect to ever be a party to.
- DSingularity 9y agoWhy did you remove it? Here is how I see it. 1) He wasn't straightforward -- i.e. he didn't outright say "we are already funding an idea similar/identical to yours " but I wouldn't call him a liar. 2) Who knows what his intentions are. Maybe he wanted to eliminate competition. Maybe he saw the dropbox team ahead/better-positioned and wanted to save these new applicants the time. But put yourself in his shoes. What would/could you do? The only other option was to accept them and merge them with dropbox team... but its not clear that this is a good idea or even an option acceptable to the dropbox team.
- 3pt14159 9y agoBecause someone who is otherwise very busy privately questioned the veracity of it. From a bayesian perspective I decided that it changed how certain I was of the stories I heard from the founders. I know I heard a story that was essentially as I originally wrote it, because it was repeated a number of times, I'm just not sure about how embellished it was. So given my new uncertainty I decided to remove it.
- mattmaroon 9y agoBy the way Jessica, you told me that year that if one of us went public you'd do a keg stand. Just let me know in advance when that's going to happen so I can book a flight :)
- jl 9y agoOh shit.
- naeemtee 9y agoThis is great.
- guiambros 9y agoPlease livestream it! Here's the man page... [1] [1] https://m.wikihow.com/Do-a-Keg-Stand https://m.wikihow.com/Do-a-Keg-Stand
- mattmaroon 9y agoI know you grew up and had kids since then but I'm holding you to it :)
- jseip 9y agoThere should be a video of this with Jessica, Drew, Arash, and preferably BrandonM. :)
- BrandonM 9y agoYou can count me in! :)
- andrewprock 9y agoHeh.
- greenimpala 9y agocheque
- DimitarIbra9 9y agothis company has no future. Amazon and Google can kill it easily when they want.
- giarc 9y agoThey both have competing products (Amazon Drive and Google Drive) and yet Dropbox lives on.
- JustAnotherPat 9y agoYep. Cashing out while they can, obviously.
- bsvalley 9y agonot the best time to go public :) the stock market is about to take a serious hit.
- gravis7777 9y agodoubt it
- maxxxxx 9y agoIsn't that the best time to IPO? "Sell high..."
- bsvalley 9y agoFrom an employee perspective, sure. Pump and dump is what you'd be looking for. But technically speaking you want your stock to go up as a company. Isn't it the whole point?
- chrisan 9y agoSo you sold all of your positions and will be re-buying after the hit?
- mediaman 9y agoWouldn't that be the best time to go public? Before valuations drop? Usually you don't want to sell your stock to the public after it's crashed.
- bsvalley 9y agoSure, we call it pump and dump. Awesome for insiders but terrible for investors. I'm talking from an investor perspective. By going public today it might only benefit a few early birds such as founders, angels, founding team, etc. If the market crashes it's terrible for new investors, anyone who bought the IPO. If you IPO after a storm your stock can only go up from the bottom.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
- middle1 9y agoI'd suggest Drew now to delete his facebook account like just Elon Mask did.
- aresant 9y agoI remember seeing the release of DB on HN and immediately had a "holy shit" moment, I was literally carrying a portable shuttle computer back and forth to the office before DropBox - congrats to the entire team and thank you for a product I've used daily for 10+ years! And this is yet another good lesson for would be angel investors AND startup employees - DropBox to me was one of the most obvious product-market-fit startups with a great, competent founding team, A+ quality investors etc and it still took them 13 YEARS to go public and drive liquidity for founders, early employees, etc.
- breerly 9y agoIs there any talk about how late stage employees have done? I suppose they’ll be in the waiting game as their lockup progresses.
- hkmurakami 9y agoStock is up beyond the last valuation in 2014. Assuming the stock holds its value for he 6 month lockup, they'll get at least what they signed up for.
- gigatexal 9y agoCongrats to dropbox and YC as well. Side note: what does Dropbox use to build the UI for their desktop app? I think it's written in python no? so what UI do they use?
- nathan_f77 9y agoI was looking at Python GUI libraries a few days ago, and it looks like Dropbox uses PyQt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyQt#Notable_applications_that_use_PyQt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyQt#Notable_applications_that... (That information might be incorrect or out-of-date.)
- lwf 9y agoThe core UI is Qt 5.5.[1] When I started, it was still wxWidgets (shudder). We take a GTK dependency on Linux for some desktop integration in GNOME. There's a bit of webviews these days, although there are Qt fallbacks or handoffs to actual browsers for everything important, for both compatibility and accessibility. Screen readers and QTWebViews did not play nice together when we implemented it. (I work at Dropbox, although not on the client team, I had built some infrastructure that supported client webviews.) [1]: https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/system-requirements https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/system-requirements
- gigatexal 9y agoThank you! I should have thought about the system reqs to see hints as to how it was built
- philfrasty 9y agoOh come on Drew, after ringing that bell I want to see a cool "hi" by dhouston as the top comment.
- dhouston 9y agoThank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)
- FredrikMeyer 9y agoHere's a link to the actual presentation https://web.archive.org/web/20100817162301/http://dl-web.dropbox.com:80/u/2/screencast.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100817162301/http://dl-web.dro...
- degenerate 9y agoThat web interface is soooooo much easier to understand and use. Makes me sad how unnecessarily complex modern UI is, not just on dropbox, but across the whole web.
- rconti 9y agoHell, even the menu bar UI on OS X is still terrible; they 'broke' it maybe 5 years ago and it's been the same mess ever since. It used to tell you what % of your dropbox was used, it used to tell you syncing status, it used to tell you all kinds of things. Now it's some weird changelog that looks nothing like anything else in OS X (or Windows, for that matter) from a UX perspective. I mean, I guess I'm glad they didn't pull a Google and break it in new and exciting ways every 6 months, but really, it should have been changed back a week after they screwed it up. Big congrats to the Dropbox team, though -- I use their product personally because it Just Works. Interviewed there back in 2011 when the office was (next to?) the old Fry's in Palo Alto.
- abritinthebay 9y agoIt still does tell you those things (they've just moved around a bit). The % used is seen when you click on the settings. I think because, honestly, they're trying to abstract the idea that you need to do that (the average user just cares that it works not the %). Get where you're coming from tho - it's not the most clear or clean UI.
- paws 9y agoCongrats to the Dropbox team. Apologies if this is a naive question but I haven't had much success Googling. I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this. When did that happen?
- smeyer 9y ago>I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this. Dropbox had the support of lots of investment banks[0]. Even Spotify is hiring banks to advise it in its direct listing, even if the banks aren't underwriting [1]. If you want to read about the roles of investment banks and other financial institutions in IPOs and the existence and history of alternatives, you might want to read some of the news coverage surrounding Spotify's choice to use a direct listing. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/brief-dropbox-inc-files-for-ipo-of-up-to/brief-dropbox-inc-files-for-ipo-of-up-to-500-mln-idUSEMN3U4XPL https://www.reuters.com/article/brief-dropbox-inc-files-for-... lists about a dozen investment banks involved in the underwriting [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify-will-pay-banks-to-cut-out-the-banks https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify-w...
- paws 9y agoThank you
- matte_black 9y agoIs Dropbox a buy right now at ~$30? What do you think.
- TheGrassyKnoll 9y agoTrading at what 10 x sales ? That's a rich valuation. They've gotta show some impressive growth and get more to the bottom line or its coming back to earth.
- matte_black 9y agoIsn’t 10x sales pretty decent compared to the 100x, 200x we seem to see?
- harshgupta 9y agoThey had valued themselves at <10bn. That has doubled in 24 hours, thats definitely not positive, if not an ipo strategy
- dgreensp 9y agoThat’s me in the bottom right in the striped shirt! Congratulations Drew, I am in awe. I first met Drew at MIT, and first saw Dropbox when he was showing off what he was hacking on on his Windows laptop in a coffee shop in Cambridge at the start of the summer. My user id is 88, haha. The batch was tiny by today’s standards (what was it, 20 companies? less?). YC invested $5k plus $5k per founder, for food and rent and servers for three months, in exchange for 2-10% of your company. You could have office hours with Paul every week if you wanted. At the end of the summer, a bunch of us moved out west and lived in Crystal Tower in SF. When Drew raised $1m from Sequoia, I was shocked! YC founders at the beginning of the summer were generally two guys with an idea (if that), so raising VC out of the gate was rare. AppJet was another favorite of the batch, and we raised $90k from several angels to keep going. YC had already had its first acquisitions, like Zenter (presentation software acquired by Google). In those days, the entire YC community was smaller than one batch today. It is amazing to me to see start-ups I remember from back then still going, and even become household names. AirBnB (2008). Weebly (2006) is even older than Dropbox. Way to change the world, PG and Jessica. And of course Drew and Arash!
- simonebrunozzi 9y agoMy favorite part of Jessica's memory: "he suggested Drew delete his Demo Day presentation in the middle of giving it, and then recover it from Dropbox and keep going. Usually we don’t suggest gags like this during pitches, but this one made people pay attention."
- cwkoss 9y agoThis is very clever
- itwy 9y agoDid it sync? She delivered a joke without the punchline.
- simonebrunozzi 9y agoI assume it did :)
- jwtadvice 9y agoSurveillance partner for NSA PRISM program, with Condoleeza Rice on its board. Stopped using DropBox due to ethical concerns years ago.
- sanbor 9y agoMe too. The product was great but it was too much to take in. They didn't just learn anything from the Snowden revelations but instead put people from the government in the board. I'd rather prefer to keep using my pendrive, thank you.
- evanb 9y agodhouston, what ever happened to the option of "an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889
- braderhart 9y agoShh... ruining their orchestrated media circle jerk will only get you downvoted.
- _eht 9y agoI don't believe they ever set up a warrant canary.
- whamlastxmas 9y agoSpideroak is what you're looking for, I use it and I'm happy with it.
- lh7777 9y agoI'm still looking for such a solution that works well on mobile. Spideroak's iOS app is very rudimentary compared to Dropbox. Cryptomator is headed in the right direction (and open source!), but they have not yet implemented iOS 11 Files integration. Boxcryptor has, and it actually works OK, but desktop performance is poor.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago> what ever happened Rice happens.
- yani 9y agoI just wanted to point out that it took 13 years to reach IPO. Hard work, dedication, but most importantly time. Lots of founders nowadays forget that "Rome wasn't built in a day." Congratulations to team Dropbox and team YCombinator.
- neals 9y agoSo in those 11 years, did YCombinater make any money on Dropbox? Or is incubating more of a 'long term' investment?
- abofh 9y ago"When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we’d funded would one day go public." That statement suggests YC was looking more for buyouts than IPO's, which isn't necessarily wrong, but it wasn't a quote I'd have anticipated.
- jonbarker 9y agoDropbox is on my list of reasons why I no longer naysay anything run by technical founders with some product sense. I remember hearing they were just essentially re-selling AWS storage back in the day (before they started building their own data centers). I thought 'why would anyone want to buy marked up AWS storage'. Then a few years later I learned to stop doubting great product focused entrepreneurs ever.
- rmason 9y agoWhat's with the Boston VC's? The minute I saw the original Dropbox video here on HN it looked like a can't miss product. I told all my friends about it. Heck not only did Sequoia invest, but Steve Jobs tried early to buy the entire company. There are some companies where it's easy to see why they were missed. I never saw the point of AirBnB, never would use the service myself. But DropBox had almost universal appeal.
- yani 9y agoI agree totaly with your comment. I also miss the point with airbnb and dont use it but I know a lot of people who do.
- staunch 9y agoDrew Houston was rejected by YC when they interviewed him for his previous idea. When they attempted to judge him as a founder, prior to any success, they completely failed to identify one of the best candidates they had ever seen. After another attempt at getting YC's attention, Drew Houston even got shooed out of YC's offices and went home feeling rejected and having "sour grapes" about the situation. He only got into YC because he created a demo video that HN loved. And that HN post easily could have been buried by a bigger story or whatever. A quantum of luck was involved. This should have permanently disproven the entire concept of judging a founder's potential in interviews. Unfortunately, people love the feeling of being a judge. Deciding the fate of other people, however incompetently, is an irresistible joy for many. Paul Graham talked (in his speech at Stanford) about his own inability to correctly judge founders after a decade of trying. Calling it guesswork. Too bad that he retired and it went unfixed at YC, but something crowdfunding-ICOs may be the ultimate fix anyway. Thanks to decentralization, we can (hopefully) look forward to an accelerating number of companies as good as Dropbox.
- staunch 9y agoCongratulations to dhouston for being a great example of a startup founder, and for creating a very successful company.
- crispinb 9y agoSurprise surprise. Far-right billionaire factory congratulates employer of war criminals. War makes great business.
- ChicagoDave 9y agoI was one of the evaluation team members at a large management consulting firm during their review of file sharing services. I got a look at all of them about 3 years ago and it was easy to see that Dropbox's engineers were leading in the space. The company I was at did not select Dropbox, but they had my vote.
- dmitrygr 9y agoConnections connections connections - that is what it is all about We’d met Drew the year before. [...] Adam Smith’s big brother in MIT’s Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He came to the afterparty at our house [...] I remember him being likeable, earnest, and very energetic.
- ykv_name 9y agoWhat's Dropbox?
- snake117 9y agoI've said it before and I'll say it again: Dropbox is the first app I'll install on any new device. It works on all relevant platforms and is getting more and more integrated with other platforms (Google Docs, Office) all while remaining platform agnostic. Once I reach my free limit (roughly 7 GB) I will gladly pay for their service. Congrats to Drew, Arash, and the Dropbox team!
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI'm already paying for it. Partly because I can't be bothered to clean up the clutter I keep on it, which would easily get me back down to free tier - but partly because I got so much value from using Dropbox that it's only fair to give back.
- FuckOffNeemo 9y agoExactly. I only now remember off hand the passwords for less than a dozen apps. Dropbox being one of them, my private email/domain, Google account and a handful of others. That's the biggest endorsement I can provide for any successful product that I use, day in and day out.
- tt 9y agoBIG congratulations! What an amazing journey and I look forward to tracking Dropbox and its impact!
- nicolasbistolfi 9y agoRemember when people used two floppy disks to save files so if one floppy break you have a backup one? I remember the first day I heard about Dropbox and I was amazed by it, it made perfect sense. Since then I'm a client and as an entrepreneur, it's a company I always looked up to.
- corobo 9y agoI definitely remember "oh no, I think the floppy is corrupted" as a popular excuse when it was essay hand in day at college
- Fnoord 9y agoI remember the first day I used Rsync (developed by famous reverse engineer Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame [1]) and the first day I used WebDAV and later on WebDAVFS. Nowadays, I use TransIP STACK (1 TB free) and Google Drive (15 GB) plus public key cryptography. Dropbox might've been the first in the field, but it has no selling point above STACK for me since it doesn't implement public key cryptography just like the other providers. Google's sell point is that compressed photos are free storage (although -obviously- unencrypted). Which suggests, to me, that they're accessing the data or perhaps saving a few GBs with say ZFS dedup (ultimately not a trade-off in the interest of the user). Because otherwise, the lag would be client-side only (after all, the clients employ the cryptography). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell
- googlemike 9y agoWell done!
- verelo 9y agoI’m super curious, how much was the original investment YC made (i assume 50k?) and what is that share worth today as they IPO?
- Yizahi 9y agoAm I correct that if there were stock options granted to the first employees of Dropbox in 2007 then they expired in 2017?
- rpearl 9y agoThere were several opportunities for liquidity for people with options prior to this point (not to mention extremely early employees should have had an extremely low strike price and should have been able to afford exercising prior to this point with relatively little risk) I was at Dropbox from 2012 to 2016 and (while I'll lose out, relatively speaking, on taxes due to having a lot in RSUs, and I've mentioned on HN before being frustrated with the illiquidity of RSUs) people in my employee "cohort" should be fine as well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stjohnswarts 9y agoEh they should have stayed private. Private companies have more control over their future. Public companies move to a quarter by quarter cycle and innovation goes at a snail's pace as marketing and bean counters take over.
- ijafri 9y agoOverwhelmingly excited for Dropbox IPO, it’s truly both inspiring and has huge utility.. phuck GoogleDrive and lolwut iCloud Drive. Dropbox also proved regardless of how small you may be, if you do it right in a way humans will like it., you can always stay ahead of the competition.. I meant Google Drive was a pretty rad competition but they didn’t even get the sync icon right .. too ugly for my taste.
- scarface74 9y agoI use all three - Google Drive, Dropbox and iCloud and I don't see a meaningful difference between them.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- SirLJ 9y agoClosed lower...
- grzm 9y agoIt closed at $28.42, more than 35% above the offer price of $21. In comparison, the S&P tech index was down nearly 3%. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dropbox-ipo/dropbox-shares-close-up-35-percent-in-biggest-tech-debut-since-snap-idUSKBN1GZ1NG https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dropbox-ipo/dropbox-share...
- SirLJ 9y agoOpen for mortals was $29.00 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX?p=DBX https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX?p=DBX
- MarketingJason 9y agoHonest question: What about Sean Ellis? Maybe I am mis-remembering, but wasn't he the person behind the "invite for more storage" growth marketing effort that really helped propel Dropbox to mainstream use?
- gk1 9y agoWhat exactly is your question? He, like other early employees, is probably sitting on a nice bundle of common stock that he will be able to sell X months after the IPO.
- MarketingJason 9y agoI guess I expected a mention since his work was a huge part of making Dropbox successful.
- spopejoy 9y agoDo they still have Condoleeza Rice on their board?
- genki_teacher 9y agoI made my account around Fall 2007 as a high school student. It completely changed how I did things and I'm still a happy user all these years later (and still have access to my poorly-written high school papers!). Congrats!
- tomerbd 9y agosh I had the same idea around this time and implemented something similar (different but similar), and I was that crowd was coming in and needed such a thing. I was too young to think that this is an opportunity and just dropped it, continued with my day job etc.
- Dolores12 9y ago>When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we’d funded would one day go public. What does that mean?
- edpichler 9y agoDropbox is a software I really like to use. Very well polished.