

How Dropbox Became The Startup Steve Jobs Wished To Own – with Drew Houston - pospischil
http://mixergy.com/drew-houston-dropbox-interview/

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jwr
I find it in poor taste to use Steve Jobs' name as a promotional tool. I see
this done more and more and I don't think it's right.

They could have said "the startup that Apple wanted to buy", but that wouldn't
have caught everyone's attention, right?

~~~
AndrewWarner
Steve Jobs is one of my heroes.

He famously called a lot things 'shit' and many people 'shitheads.'

And yet he saw something special in Dropbox. I wanted to find out how Drew did
it.

~~~
zdw
Given their security record, Dropbox probably deserved (and still deserves,
especially because of the unchangeable unique client ID issue) to be described
in those terms.

~~~
sskates
I think your expectations aren't properly calibrated, Dropbox's track record
is stellar relative to the rest of the industry.

~~~
akl
I'm not sure they deserve to be called 'shitheads' either - I _do_ like the
service - but I'm still disappointed in how poorly they've handled their
security issues, particularly the one back in June.

I think I'd have a different opinion if they'd bothered to reply to any of my
multiple emails to them at the time.

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richardburton
I love Mixergy but sometimes I do not agree with some of the assumptions the
questions are laced with. When Andrew Warner asks: "Where did you get the
confidence ... to get into the storage space?" the _assumption_ is that it
required any confidence at all. It misdirects. Drew answered perfectly though:
"I just wrote some code"

~~~
AndrewWarner
Could you help me understand when and how I do that? I don't want my questions
to imply something that's not there.

I'll tell you why I asked him about confidence. It came after he told me that
multiple experienced advisors told him that he was in the storage business and
that a storage startup wouldn't work.

When I look at the email I get from my viewers, I see that many face similar
situations and they worry about the viability of their startups. Rejections
like that shatter their confidence. So I asked why it didn't have the same
impact on Drew.

I thought his answer was a good explanation of how he dealt with the issue.

~~~
richardburton
Hi Andrew. I hope I do not come across as a troll - I am a massive fan!

So let me rephrase. Confidence is the lifeblood of a startup founder. If they
do not back themselves, who will? Sometimes over-confidence and even self-
delusion can be very dangerous. I once tried to start a music label that gave
away all the music for free and made money putting on live shows. I was
deluding myself and drunk on my own confidence. The flip-side is what you
describe: where people never recover from a knock to their confidence. This is
much harder when the opportunity is _actually really great_. I think it is
great to explore the confidence of entrepreneurs.

What my pedantic and pernickety side took issue with was the phrasing of the
question and the context in which it was asked. Drew had just said he hacked
together some code and you launched into a question about the confidence it
must have required. I my mind was stuck on the notion that firing up a text-
editor required confidence - a ridiculous notion I know but that is where my
mind lept. I get the same awkward feeling when people begin any sentence with
the word 'surely' because the presupposition is that _surely_ they are right.

At that stage of the interview I would have been curious to know when, why and
how the storage side-project made the transition from personal use to active
user-base. You covered that really, _really_ well later on. Which is why I
love Mixergy.

~~~
AndrewWarner
I'm never hurt by feedback like that. I'm grateful for it.

Maybe I'm working the confidence question in too much. I'll watch out for
that.

I want to get really good at doing useful interviews. I need feedback like
yours.

~~~
kn0thing
You're doing it right!

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Alcedes
I think Steve Jobs will be right again, Dropbox is a feature, a great feature
to be sure, but still just a feature. iCloud works fine without it and
eventually as Apple typically does, once more features are added, the need for
Dropbox will lessen.

~~~
beaumartinez
iCloud is OS X and iOS only. Dropbox is OS X, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android AND
BlackBerry.

~~~
boyter
I'm still not sure how much of an advantage that is to the average user. To
people on HN it's a huge plus, but to real world users...

Regardless DB should be able to carve out space where cross platform is
important, but I can see their market size shrinking when Apple and Microsoft
really start pushing their cloud storage solutions. Unless of course they get
to a Facebook like level of critical mass.

~~~
fpgeek
Even you aren't cross platform personally (e.g. you don't have a Mac and a PC
at work or an Android phone or ...) Dropbox lets you share files and folders
with other Dropbox users. Unless you're confident that you'll never want to
share with someone on a different platform (which only sounds realistic if you
never want to share at all), that's important even if your personal
environment is homogenous.

I'd guess that most Dropbox users share something (though I haven't seen
statistics on that) so they are probably less threatened by vendor-specific
solutions than you might think. I suspect Dropbox is more threatened by
services like Amazon Cloud Drive (especially since Amazon is an infrastructure
provider for them) than they are by anything Apple or Microsoft has planned.

~~~
justincormack
I don't use dropbox for sharing at all, and suspect I am not alone. Generally
use Google docs fir that. Dropbox just for replication to my devices.

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pbreit
I certainly don't know the whole story but the acquisition rumors seem very
un-Apple-like. The hardest things about DropBox are acquiring users and paying
for servers, two things Apple would not need to worry about (I know the
technology is difficult, too, but am assuming Apple could figure it out).

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Schwolop
I liked Andrew's point right at the end of the interview - Drew had no vital
marketing imperative to come in and give an interview in that depth, he was
just giving back to the community. Great to see.

~~~
hboon
I'm sure it has some plus in terms of hiring. Not that I'm implying he's doing
it for that.

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nodesocket
Anybody have a link to the original video Drew posted here on HN? Was is the
video on the DropBox homepage up until recently?

~~~
yonran
I believe this was the original discussion:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863> (2007-04-04) and the fixed video
link is <https://www.dropbox.com/screencast>

Edit: and here's the digg link but I can't figure out how to get anything
useful out of it.
[http://digg.com/news/story/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_M...](http://digg.com/news/story/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT_Startup)
(2008-03-11)

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manojlds
"Startup Steve Jobs Wished To Own" - is that a compliment?

~~~
jritch
I would believe so

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miles_matthias
tl;dl anyone?

