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Dropbox acquires Loom (YC W12)
- swanson 13y agoIn case you're playing the Acquisition Post Drinking Game: "It’s been a long road and we feel that we have come a long way in solving this problem. We are elated to announce the next step in this journey" "It’s been an immensely exciting journey and we are humbled by the support we received along the way." http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- 0161 13y ago"We couldn't be happier." "We look forward to this transition as the next step." "As of today, we are no longer enrolling new users. " "Existing users can continue to use our service until ..." "We want to do whatever it takes to make any transition as smooth as possible." "We have worked hard on our product and feel that our vision aligns perfectly with ..."
- funkyy 13y ago"We didnt expected that being a startup is so hard. We worked for 2-3 years 10 hours a day 6 days a week and it brought us to barely breaking even. We just cant do this anymore, living in uncertainty is killing us. We have failed to pursue our dream but we hope that we can just shut down this part of our lives, move onwards to working for large company that will care for us and hopefully our skills, pain and experiences will help us to achieve something that we couldn't do alone - create revolutionary product or feature, but under bigger brand."
- sitkack 13y agoIf this startup hadn't panned out, I don't know what I was going to do. Thinking about having a staged breakdown so I could live off my parents money while still raging in Mission and eating burritos and Thai. Longer term goal, channel that startup burnout into something more meaning-full like opening some profitable franchise, like yogurt or cookies and doing rails gigs on the side. god I feel sorry for the poor saps still in the grind.
- tsunamifury 13y agoThis is a painful truth for those of us not being bought out.
- tarr11 13y agoAlso see http://www.reddit.com/r/shutdown/ http://www.reddit.com/r/shutdown/
- EC1 13y agoHonestly, what else are you going to write?
- wwwwwwwwww 13y ago"We finally convinced some sucker to buy our worthless revenue-less startup for a trillion dollars. See you in vegas!"
- bambam12897 13y ago"We are sooooo filthy rich now. So long suckers!" I'd be more honest =)
- rattray 13y agoExcept they're probably not... Not all the acquisitions of this sort are "you're filthy rich now", especially after dilution, taxes, and plain old time.
- jebblue 13y agoThis is very true, the new Silicon Valley show Episode 1 is free on YouTube (son clued me in) but that isn't how acquisitions always work out, the word dilution rings loudly.
- sidcool 13y agoThey worked hard for that, didn't they?
- bambam12897 13y agoDefinitely! I'm just being realistic - These press releases are basically the tea ceremony everyone is expected to perform. If you just made several mil I honestly doubt you're thinking about making the "transition as smooth as possible". You're thinking "should I buy a Lambo or a Ferrari?" They probably got a memo from Dropbox saying "now that we own your ass, here is a press release that you'll publish asap"
- sreitshamer 13y ago"We gotta play 'em one day at a time." "I'm just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club." "I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out."
- sunilkumarc 13y agoSo totally how much of space are we gonna get now ?
- antoni 13y ago"If you switch to Carousel, you will have the exact same amount of free space you had in Loom. Any referral bonus you received on Loom will be preserved into your new Dropbox account as well." See: https://loom.com/migrate https://loom.com/migrate
- aashaykumar92 13y agoSeems like a strategic acquisition to help Carousel grow.
- Dorian-Marie 13y agoFor those who don't know: https://www.carousel.com/ https://www.carousel.com/
- meowface 13y agoIs there such a thing as a "non-strategic" acquisition?
- rafeed 13y agoI think this is the first time in recent history that a company actually took care of its users after acquisition. Most of the time after the deadline to export your content, it's a big "fuck you" to the customer. At least Loom is making it easy to transfer content to Dropbox and is providing users with the same space on Dropbox as well free for a year. I can respect that.
- smackfu 13y agoInteresting that Loom was less expensive than Dropbox, even with the value add photo stuff.
- mikejarema 13y agoFor those interested in comparing, here are the respective pricing pages for each: https://loom.com/plans https://loom.com/plans https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade (consumer plans)
- debt 13y agoAwesome. Loom should consider changing that landing video image though on their homepage. It just...something seems...not right. Or maybe make that iPad more prominent. I don't know.
- leejoramo 13y agoWhat about Snapjoy? This is not the first photo related sight that Dropbox has picked up. So far I have not been impressed with Dropbox's photo efforts. Why should we think this will be different?
- bitsweet 13y agocongrats to the entire Loom team
- yukichan 13y agoIt's Dropbox startupageddon today or something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604809 Also: http://recode.net/2014/04/17/as-it-becomes-an-app-platform-dropbox-gobbles-up-more-than-one-app-startup-per-month/ http://recode.net/2014/04/17/as-it-becomes-an-app-platform-d...
- cschmidt 13y agoI think the photo management space is like blog platforms. They die so rapidly, I don't want to invest the considerable time to try out a new startup. Dropbox bought out Snapjoy and now Loom. Everpix is gone. I guess Picturelife is still around.
- Roedou 13y agoI'd just finished getting set up on Everpix & syncing everything I have when they announced it was going to close down. It's a shame - it was the most impressive option I'd seen so far. It's definitely makes me think twice about which service I use next.
- cschmidt 13y agoI've got a pretty big Aperture library, so it will take a long time to sync everything. Loom offered a Aperture import feature, so I was toying with trying them out. Now I don't know what to do.
- akumen 13y agoI just save everything to Amazon Glacier that's not the current year. Current year + library files are dumped into S3 ... rinse and repeat. For photos, I am using Adobe Lightroom and organize files into folders by year/month/day/subject during import. Edited GoPro videos go to YouTube etc and originals/edits straight to Glacier. This takes a bit of effort to set up but works great great.
- mikejarema 13y agoWould you be open to sharing numbers here? For example how much data you're storing on Glacier/S3, monthly data transfer and monthly costs to you?
- akumen 13y agoSure. I have roughly 600GB stored on Glacier and around 50 GB on S3 so far this year. I am yet to spend more than $10/month. Wait, you say, Google Drive is 9.99 for 1T! True, I say, but on AWS you only pay for what you use. So you will realize real saving once you push past your first 1T in cumulative storage.
- kingnight 13y agoThe other day when Carousel was announced, loom was mentioned in a hn thread as a competing service. It's offering was certainly compelling in many ways, and had me weighing switching. If I didn't have such a giant library, I probably would have on the spot. Now, in a way, I'm thankful I don't have to, and I hope they integrate the positives that loom had over Dropbox/Carousel. This is the first acquisition I've read about in a while that has me excited as a user.
- Roedou 13y agoDo you find Dropbox works for you with a giant library? I have ~1.5Tb of photos at this point, which seems too big for any of their accounts. How do you have it set up?
- kingnight 13y agoHa, is "giant" relative or what... I am currently at ~98% of my 215GB Dropbox account and am stressing about what to do. The next tier doesn't seem cost effective for me and I don't have much room for clearing house. One thought I have is converting a sizable portion of old Canon CR2 raw files to adobe DNG since I've noticed that reduces filesize by roughly 20% for the files that I have. This isn't really a long term solution though and I'm actually kind of unsure of what to do. I keep hoping that I can hold out long enough until Dropbox's gb/price get's halved again. Then I'd likely be set for some time. I really can't think of a cloud service for ~1.5TB of photos. Have you found anything that would suit your purposes? I also use crashplan for offsite archiving of my photo library, but I really, really, like having the entirety of my photo catalogue accessible everywhere. Excessive, sure, but definitely nice. With loom, I am hoping they integrate the jpg rendering of raw files into their photos views on web/mobile.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWhat is your access pattern on that 215GB? Is there any of it that you don't touch for at least a month? There has been a lot of work in the past on hierarchical storage managers for Enterprise types but perhaps there is a market for one for regular users. Something that moves your data constantly into S3 or Glacier and then if you haven't used it on DropBox for a month it deletes it there, only to bring it back if you look for it.
- jscheel 13y agoI was considering signing up for Loom a while ago. It was great value prop for a problem that pretty much everyone runs into eventually. However, there were a few red flags that made me think they were going to go the way of Everpix. Good to see they didn't completely shut down, but I'm also glad I didn't bother spending time with them.
- daanlo 13y agoSad too see a great product go, but happy to see it make its way into a product I also use :-)
- otikik 13y agoEvery time I read that name all I can think of is: "Welcome to the age of the Great Guilds" And then I open things with "ECED".
- 0161 13y agoSo I'm not the only one... :) Personal cultural reference for those who are confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game)
- antoni 13y agoThere is already an "Export to Carousel" option for logged users, which leads here: https://loom.com/migrate https://loom.com/migrate.
- luser 13y agoHappy for the guys who got acquired....BUT thinking as a consumer, this type of thing makes me very nervous about relying on teeny tiny SAAS businesses for anything long term.
- subpixel 13y agoCrap. I bought a year of Loom for precisely the reason that I do not want my photos taking up space on my drive. Now I have to explain to my extended family why all the confusion they put up with setting things up was for naught.
- mathattack 13y agoThis is a real risk, and why large companies don't like working with startups.
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoOf course, the opposite is companies like Google, who run services as experiments and discontinue them because they have better things to do. It's hard to reach that middle ground of stability.
- SixSigma 13y agoMy virtual server costs $200 per year and has 50gb of virtual disk space. I can run whatever I like. What does buying saas really give me that a whole server doesn't? Obviously one needs to be a Unix hacker to make it do anything but I've got that covered.
- smrtinsert 13y agoWhere? fixed cost?
- eertami 13y agoYou can get 500gb for <100 EUR/year on those cheap OVH dedicated servers.
- cmelbye 13y agoYou are not the target market for Loom. It makes no sense to ask why you'd pay for Loom over a VPS because they're not going after people who know what a VPS is. They're going after your mom, grandma, etc.
- nayefc 13y agoiCloud photos work much better than Loom. Loom is buggy. And it will suck more at Dropbox, just like what happened to Mailbox (seriously, what has Mailbox been doing for 6 months after iOS 7 has been released?!).
- donholly 13y agoThey've been working on Carousel :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- badusername 13y agoShutdown an entire service, and roll over to the guys that say you will work on a service that was your competitor till today. Seems like people don't care much about their sweat and tears these days.
- dragonwriter 13y agoPeople invest sweat and tears for something -- quite often material security/wealth -- I don't see how fully committing to the new source of security/wealth is undervaluing what they invested previously. Heck, wasting that previous investment by not doing so would seem more like not caring about it.
- Dirlewanger 13y agoWhen you realize that everything (and I mean everything...maybe not always directly, but in some way it is one of the prime motivators) in this world revolves around money, you stop being surprised at these things.
- kylec 13y agoThis is really disappointing. I have been a paying Loom member since shortly after the service was released, it's too bad it wasn't enough to keep it an independent company. After DivvyShot, Everpix, Snapjoy, and now Loom, I don't think I can trust another photo management startup again.
- phillmv 13y agoI wonder if we'll start seeing startup fatigue. Then again, a company just failing must be vastly more common. I've noticed that these days I avoid all free services and, when the information is available to me, will pick the lifestyle over the vc backed company.
- bjeanes 13y agoReally loving being on Picturelife. Last one (that I like) standing — at least for now.
- salberts 13y ago100%. Photos are here to stay while most startups are not. As much as I hate saying it,being a start-up founder myself, I'd go for Google, Yahoo, Amazon or a more backup-oriented startup.
- pearjuice 13y agoExposure.co looks pretty good. However, looking at the history of the projects ran by the creators you might be in for a bumpy surprise... At least the service its prices are sustainable. Or premium.
- anon808 13y agoexposure.co is an elepath product, elepath is run by Jake Lodwick who wrote http://pando.com/2013/04/02/an-acquisition-is-always-a-failure/ http://pando.com/2013/04/02/an-acquisition-is-always-a-failu... not saying jake won't take the money and run if offered it, or shut down exposure, but given that it looks like he's fairly comfortable after collegehumor and his investment in tumblr, chances are lower that he's looking to offload exposure/elepath. but who knows.
- lttlrck 13y agoUpon exporting to Carousel: "This app is in development mode and cannot accept more users. Contact the app developer and ask them to use the Dropbox API App Console to apply for production status."
- inklesspen 13y agoWell, this is awfully disappointing. I'm in the process of migrating my stuff off of Dropbox due to the Dr. Rice issue (only problem is a lot of apps use it as their sole syncing service); I have no desire to move gigabytes of photos into Dropbox's control.
- innonate 13y agoFYI Dropbox is one of the places you can import/sync from https://picturelife.com/settings/networks https://picturelife.com/settings/networks (need to login first)
- salberts 13y agoIt's great to see how photo storage solutions get faster, prettier and cheaper. Now it's time to make them smarter. Most people I know feel swamped with photos as there are no decent tools to clear this photo-mess.
- creativityhurts 13y agoFor what is worth, they're better off with Dropbox than with Facebook :) Loom had a lot of success since Everpix got shut down, now it's interesting to see which startup will fill their place.
- seanmccann 13y ago"couldn’t be happier" — don't people want to build companies anymore?
- anon808 13y agoI see that dropbox (a YC portfolio co) bought 2 other YC portfolio cos. I know it's a stretch, but does YC actively pitch smaller portfolio companies to their more successful portfolio companies? Keep the cash in the family.
- namenotrequired 13y agoIt might simply show the usefulness of the YC alum network, which I've heard nothing but praise for.
- uptown 13y agoFor anyone looking for a host-your-own photo solution, I highly recommend taking a look at Koken. I've been using it for awhile, and it's phenomenal. http://koken.me/ http://koken.me/
- gkya 13y agoI reckon this "big companies hoovering up smaller ones" phenomenon will eventually cause the startup economy to die. None of the services are reliable; they come up, start their services with a "no warranties, use at your own risk and we go away at our own disposal" policy; then some big company like Google, Facebook or the newfangled giant Dropbox buy them out and mix them into themselves. The service is gone. The users have to recover. The only acquisitions I can recall, which did not disrupt users recently was that of Instagram's and Vine's (also WhatsApp, but that's too recent to be sure, isn't it?). But the wonted story is that money is poured onto the owners, and the services get killed. Now, I am not an entrepreneur, and am not that knowledgeable about business topics, but I can see that people become less likely to invest in startups each day, every time news of these kinds hit the headlines. Sad, that is.
- deciplex 13y agoFor those who missed it, this is a company that also acquired Condoleeza Rice on its board recently. Yes, Dropbox, aka 'next' according to a few NSA slides that have been making the rounds, is now taking advice from Condoleeza 'Warrantless Wiretapping' Rice. Run away. Sprint.
- inklesspen 13y agoSince paying Dropbox is not an acceptable solution for me, I've asked Loom to refund the money I paid them (perhaps foolishly, I signed up for the $50-per-year plan and paid up front). So far, they've refused: "Thanks for writing and we appreciate your position. Unfortunately, I am very sorry but I cannot offer you a refund at this time." This is very disappointing.