5 ms·

Vaguely reminds me of this Steve Jobs quote (whether or not one agrees with him) when he met the Dropbox team: "you have a feature, not a product".

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Dropbox laughing in that $10B market cap and $2B+ ARR. Jobs was right about the concept (insert meme about Apple ecosystem devs realizing their product was killed by an Apple feature release), but wrong in that specific instance.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Dropbox was losing money every year of its existence until 2021.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cowsup 3y ago
    By design. If I gave you $250,000,000 to grow a company, and then next year I saw you had $250,050,000 in the bank, then $250,102,000 next year, and so on, I'd be pretty annoyed that I backed you. You have so much money you could be spending on hiring, development, and marketing, and you're instead just slowly chugging along, padding the corporate bank account? What am I paying you for?! Give me my money back. VC-backed companies that spend more than they earn aren't duds. It's the nature of VC-backed corporations.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      They spent it all on storage and on their new spammy looking marketing emails that pester free users to upgrade I guess. I don't recall something really new on Dropbox since they were established.
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        I am paying Dropbox for storage and will pay them until I die. Rock solid sync and object durability, API access to my storage for my apps, no complaints whatsoever. I don't want new, I want storage I don't have to think about.
        xwdv 3y ago
        Until they die, relatively soon. 100 years from now Dropbox will be a distant memory, but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well.
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        > but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well. [1] [2] This might matter to you, but it does not matter to me. In the meantime, my life will have been better and my time saved between now and death (certainly less than 100 years from now). That's what the money is for. Time is non renewable. If you have more time and ideology than money, I admit your solution is a better fit for your life and use case(s). Self host if you want, I have better things to do personally vs cobbling together technology that I can buy polished for the cost of two coffees a month. There's a product lesson in this subthread. No business lasts forever, the benefit is the value delivered during its lifecycle. Provide value, and I will happily let you ding my credit card monthly or annually (please support annual plans B2C!) forever. "Build something people want" or something like that [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 ("My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive ") [3] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startup-advice#the-pocket-guide-of-essential-yc-advice https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startu... (sharing perspective as an educational exercise, nothing more, nothing less)
        xwdv 3y ago
        Self hosted and versioned FTP drives represent true power, like the stone buildings that stand for centuries. A dropbox subscription is the shitty McMansion that falls apart after 10 years.
  - aoeusnth1 3y ago
    The goal is not to make money for the most years in a row.
  - viridian 3y ago
    So was almost every unicorn startup. They purposefully aim for growth until its unsustainable, then switch over to exploiting their market position. We may not like it, but the business model is far from novel or unexpected.
jjoonathan 3y ago
It's a quality zinger, but ironically the product may have been a subset of the feature: I'd argue the product is the fact that Dropbox doesn't belong to a platform vendor and therefore can't be leveraged for anticompetitive purposes / lock-in.
makeitdouble 3y ago
This quote always struck me as a weird anti competitive flex, in the "we can crush you anytime" way. And Apple later released the whole iCloud suite that made Dropbox a second class citizen in the OS, even as to this day Dropbox works better than iCloud in many ways. We more and more hear the "services revenue" drum at every Apple earning call, so Jobs was not wrong either.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Dropbox laughing in that $10B market cap and $2B+ ARR. Jobs was right about the concept (insert meme about Apple ecosystem devs realizing their product was killed by an Apple feature release), but wrong in that specific instance.

throwaway290 3y ago
Dropbox was losing money every year of its existence until 2021.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cowsup 3y ago
  By design. If I gave you $250,000,000 to grow a company, and then next year I saw you had $250,050,000 in the bank, then $250,102,000 next year, and so on, I'd be pretty annoyed that I backed you. You have so much money you could be spending on hiring, development, and marketing, and you're instead just slowly chugging along, padding the corporate bank account? What am I paying you for?! Give me my money back. VC-backed companies that spend more than they earn aren't duds. It's the nature of VC-backed corporations.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    They spent it all on storage and on their new spammy looking marketing emails that pester free users to upgrade I guess. I don't recall something really new on Dropbox since they were established.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      I am paying Dropbox for storage and will pay them until I die. Rock solid sync and object durability, API access to my storage for my apps, no complaints whatsoever. I don't want new, I want storage I don't have to think about.
      - xwdv 3y ago
        Until they die, relatively soon. 100 years from now Dropbox will be a distant memory, but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well.
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        > but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well. [1] [2] This might matter to you, but it does not matter to me. In the meantime, my life will have been better and my time saved between now and death (certainly less than 100 years from now). That's what the money is for. Time is non renewable. If you have more time and ideology than money, I admit your solution is a better fit for your life and use case(s). Self host if you want, I have better things to do personally vs cobbling together technology that I can buy polished for the cost of two coffees a month. There's a product lesson in this subthread. No business lasts forever, the benefit is the value delivered during its lifecycle. Provide value, and I will happily let you ding my credit card monthly or annually (please support annual plans B2C!) forever. "Build something people want" or something like that [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 ("My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive ") [3] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startup-advice#the-pocket-guide-of-essential-yc-advice https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startu... (sharing perspective as an educational exercise, nothing more, nothing less)
        xwdv 3y ago
        Self hosted and versioned FTP drives represent true power, like the stone buildings that stand for centuries. A dropbox subscription is the shitty McMansion that falls apart after 10 years.
- aoeusnth1 3y ago
  The goal is not to make money for the most years in a row.
- viridian 3y ago
  So was almost every unicorn startup. They purposefully aim for growth until its unsustainable, then switch over to exploiting their market position. We may not like it, but the business model is far from novel or unexpected.

jjoonathan 3y ago

It's a quality zinger, but ironically the product may have been a subset of the feature: I'd argue the product is the fact that Dropbox doesn't belong to a platform vendor and therefore can't be leveraged for anticompetitive purposes / lock-in.

makeitdouble 3y ago

This quote always struck me as a weird anti competitive flex, in the "we can crush you anytime" way. And Apple later released the whole iCloud suite that made Dropbox a second class citizen in the OS, even as to this day Dropbox works better than iCloud in many ways. We more and more hear the "services revenue" drum at every Apple earning call, so Jobs was not wrong either.