
How to win as a first time founder - a Drew Houston Manifesto - gatsby
http://firstround.com/article/How-to-Win-as-a-First-Time-Founder-a-Drew-Houston-Manifesto
======
codex
While I think it is much more useful to learn from others' success than
others' failure (lessons from _your own_ failures are invaluable), let's not
forget selection bias. A lot of startup success is luck--or, in other words,
factors outside of the control of the founders or their advisors.

Many, if not most, founders aren't even aware of these factors, don't
appreciate them fully, or won't acknowledge them out of ego. In many cases the
advice should be "work hard, be smart, and buy the winning lottery ticket."

My advice is to attempt startups in the center of a confluence of macrotrends;
that will tilt the odds more in your favor.

~~~
pg
"My advice is to attempt startups in the center of a confluence of
macrotrends"

My advice is to solve a problem you yourself have.

~~~
codex
If 1,000 CS grads found startups attempting to solve a problem they each have,
are they guaranteed success? Or will there be five outliers which exit for
billions and then tell everyone all they need to do is to solve their own
problems?

Telling others to solve a problem they have seems more like an algorithm to
generate at least _some_ successes by guaranteeing diversity. This million
monkeys approach is a strength of capitalism, but I wonder if it's the method
which maximizes expected value for a would be founder. It seems more of a
method to guarantee a minimum return for a VC.

~~~
pg
Certainly not. Only a fraction of them will have the determination and
intelligence required to turn a problem into a startup. And some of those will
be unlucky. But more of the 1000 will succeed starting from that rule than any
other.

This is not one of those cases where founders and investors' interests are
opposed.

------
aresant
DropBox is one of the most useful products to come out in the last decade.

I still remember seeing the original 5 minute demo (1).

My jaw was on the floor, I instantly needed it.

And it's still the best, even at a premium price (marked in cost of GB of
storage).

The article has several interesting points, but the takeaway for me remains
"[Solve] a worthy problem."

(1)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE)

~~~
salient
If only they'd give users the option for 1-click encryption _before_
uploading/syncing. It could work especially well with Dropbox since it has
only native apps anyway. We already know they are "next" on NSA's list for
companies to target (at least in an official manner, they've probably targeted
them for a long time unofficially).

~~~
kingnight
I belive that might not have been initially viable since part of their service
is the mirroring of files that are already uploaded. If you and I both have
the same mp3 in our dropboxes, only one of us have to upload it initially,
then the second person to add it would only have it 'synced' in their dropbox
since the file checksum matches. If we both locally encrypted it with our own
keys then the resulting file on the server would be different. It'd require
more storage space and more bandwidth — more operating $. Maybe not though :-)

~~~
benologist
I think the key reason is it would be significantly slower for the end user
rather than the incremental increase in storage cost. Bandwidth remains the
same since Amazon doesn't charge for incoming and de-duping doesn't affect
outgoing.

------
sakopov
All luck aside, i wonder how much being an MIT graduate played a role in
successfully getting DropBox off the ground. I always get the thought that
walking out of a reputable school opens a lot of opportunities like this,
which is why i read articles like this with a grain of salt.

~~~
pg
There is an advantage, but perhaps not the one you think. The advantage is not
the brand, but that you know lots of smart people you can recruit to join you.
Which Drew did, starting with Arash.

~~~
the_watcher
The brand is only an advantage in public perception (which usually means
nothing in terms of company success at the startup stage), and maybe some
level of increased respect from investors (which, as you have pointed out,
really doesn't mean much, since they act as sheep. A great company is the way
to get investors).

Completely agree that the major value of great schools is better schools
attract smarter people, who often make better founders.

~~~
dakrisht
Agree with this. Brand is a big advantage in public perception and it's easier
for top-school grads to get coveted meetings/intros since they are part of the
"family." But at the end of the day, all that matters is the quality of the
work. And there are tons of people who never attended
MIT/Stanford/Harvard/etc. that are extremely successful at what they do and
have built.

Like you said, great schools attract smarter people (not all of them!) and
that makes for a more competitive environment, which in turn churns out more
driven/analytical kids.

I know a TON of idiots who went to Stanford and Berkeley. And I know a dozen
or so extremely successful entrepreneurs who never went to college.

~~~
the_watcher
You know a ton of idiots who went to Stanford and Cal (and aren't including
Cal athletes, had to, UCLA grad)?

------
inspectahdeck
To be fair, Houston had already dropped out of school from a year to start an
SAT prep company, so he's not entirely a first time founder. [0]

[0]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston](https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston)

~~~
brettcvz
I was going to mention the same thing, Drew wasn't quite a first time founder
when he started Dropbox, just as Mark Zuckerberg was not a first time founder
when he started Facebook

------
dakrisht
Kudos to Drew.

Dropbox is simply a great product and that's why it's such a great success.

I've tried so many different cloud-based storage services throughout the years
and nothing really comes close in terms of ease-of-use, accessibility,
sharing, speed, etc. Sure, DB has a few flaws here and there but nothing is
perfect.

I remember being bombarded with marketing emails from the AeroFS team two
weeks ago when I tried their products and while they were great in asking how
they "could help" me, their software was broken. It wasn't working properly,
crashing on colleagues' systems, etc. Worst part: emailing support four times
never got me a reply. And to me, that's just an awful product (aside from it
being super buggy). But I digress.

Great little read from Drew, someone who has created a simple product that we
all need and use daily.

------
benjaminwootton
Good article - there's a lot to take away from this.

However, if I ever read that Gladwell 10,000 hours quote again I think I'm
going to go postal!

------
acoyfellow
Incredibly informative article.. But the second I closed this, I saw the
article about how BitTorrent is growing at a faster rate than Dropbox did. [1]

It made me wonder how Drew/Dropbox is going to respond to such a competitor

[1] - [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/05/bittorrent-
doubles-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/05/bittorrent-doubles-sync-
userbase-2-million-month-says-dropbox-competitor-growing-twice-fast/)

~~~
patrickk
I bet quite a lot of that growth is down to the NSA news. I switched to
Dropbox sync because of it. The NSA is really hurting US based SaaS
businesses.

------
olavgg
That 5 minutes long presentation movie from 2007 really explains why Dropbox
is such a success. He just simply tell us about what his product does, what
problem it solves, and how he has a good solution to "the file syncing
problem". The presentation is so good that even my dad understands it.

------
adamzerner
This is much more about "how to win" than it is about "how to win _as a first
time founder_ ".

The only real "as a first time founder" material is his story about how he
scrambled to find a cofounder for YC.

------
anish_t
great and inspiring read! find ourselves in the same spot as when drew started
- when he walked in to YC unprepared. Well we blew our YC 2014 application, it
was so poorly written. So with a common starting point looking forward to
cracking the code to success by - solving a problem that we have ourselves,
and improving on things that are already around!

------
pencilcheck
There is also a hidden factor: white male in his early 20s attending ivy
league schools like Stanford and MIT

~~~
jchonphoenix
Stanford and MIT are both not Ivy League schools... But your point is noted.

