
Congrats Dropbox - runesoerensen
https://blog.ycombinator.com/congratsdropbox/
======
dhouston
Thank 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 :)

~~~
BrandonM
It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old
undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they
wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the
way users and engineers see software"!

I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years;
it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of
tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a
reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of
point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).

Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were
able to execute. Kudos on that!

Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward!

~~~
graeme
Well put.

Also, one thing I think people ignore is that BrandonM's comment was notable
_because it was voted to the top_.

Which means that the people reading and voting on the thread, at the time,
thought it was the best reply. But no one will ever point a finger at them,
because they're anonymous. They also have less chance for self-reflection -
who remembers an upvote?

~~~
jpao79
I also think people might overlook BrandonM's follow-up reply to dhouston's
reply on April 6th - "All of your feedback was well-thought-out and
appreciated; I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some
of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!"

~~~
graeme
Yup. It's really only the first part of the comment which had tunnel vision.

(Which does of course raise the question: were people upvoting for that part,
or despite it? We'll never know)

------
mattmaroon
By 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
Oh shit.

~~~
jseip
There should be a video of this with Jessica, Drew, Arash, and preferably
BrandonM. :)

~~~
BrandonM
You can count me in! :)

------
jl
Incidentally, 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)

~~~
drstewart
With the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to <insert something
incredibly time consuming, annoying, and non-trivial> instead!"

~~~
throwaway84742
Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even
today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere
near as good.

~~~
curun1r
I think there's another point to be learned from both the Dropbox comment and
CmdrTaco's original infamous iPod take. And that's the importance of a really
well-designed product that's simple and easy to use. Both Dropbox and the iPod
weren't the first to try to solve the problems they were addressing, but they
were the most elegant, intuitive solution. Both implementations effectively
got out of the way of their users and exposed the underlying function with a
little impedance as possible. It's always important to remember that the goal
isn't for users to use your product. The goal is for users to get the value
your product delivers. That sounds obvious, but a lot of product development
teams forget that. Both Dropbox and the original iPod seem to embody that
distinction.

As for your "nothing I can deploy on my own server" comment, checkout
syncthing or Resilio. Both take a bit more doing than a simple Dropbox
install, but I've found syncthing to be pretty bulletproof once it's
configured and I've heard a lot of people prefer Resilio.

~~~
dingaling
There was nothing intuitive about the iPod click-wheel interface; in casual
use of other people's iPods I never did determine how to use it before it was
superseded by touchscreens.

~~~
mlevental
I don't believe you. firstly rotate the wheel to adjust a level (i.e. level of
menu selection highlight) is literally how volume knobs have always worked.
secondly clickwheel was in the iPod for 5 years? 8 years? in all the time you
never figured out how to use it?

------
dgreensp
That’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
My 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."

~~~
itwy
Did it sync? She delivered a joke without the punchline.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I assume it did :)

------
jonbarker
Dropbox 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.

------
runesoerensen
Pictures of the actual checks :)
[https://twitter.com/sama/status/977215073386053632](https://twitter.com/sama/status/977215073386053632)

~~~
boto3
ok, I'll be the one to ask. How much is this check worth now?

~~~
sincerely
Probably 3,000$ and 12,000$ respectively?

~~~
pacofvf
2007 Dollars != 2018 Dollars.

~~~
Izkata
Assuming 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)

------
aresant
I 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
Is there any talk about how late stage employees have done? I suppose they’ll
be in the waiting game as their lockup progresses.

~~~
hkmurakami
Stock 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.

------
staunch
Drew 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.

~~~
varjag
You invest your money, you get to decide, it's that simple.

~~~
kevinskii
I don't think anyone suggested otherwise.

------
yani
I 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.

------
rmason
What'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
I 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.

------
snake117
I'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
I'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.

------
dmitrygr
Connections 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.

------
evanb
dhouston, 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)

~~~
whamlastxmas
Spideroak is what you're looking for, I use it and I'm happy with it.

~~~
lh7777
I'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.

------
rossdavidh
I 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.

~~~
fastball
You don't need to have an IPO to be a successful venture??

~~~
totalZero
Some 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
Samsung is privately held as well.

~$300bn revenue.

~~~
umeshunni
Samsung isn't privately held. It's listed in the Seoul market as KRX:005930

~~~
gspetr
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-
go...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-
governmental_companies_by_revenue)

See reference at the bottom:

"Samsung is not to be confused with its publicly traded subsidiary Samsung
Electronics"

~~~
umeshunni
Thanks. I also found this: "the Samsung Group comprised 59 unlisted companies
and 19 listed companies"

------
paws
Congrats 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
>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-...](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) lists
about a dozen investment banks involved in the underwriting

[1]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify-w...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-16/spotify-
will-pay-banks-to-cut-out-the-banks)

~~~
paws
Thank you

------
cvaidya1986
Congratulations! What a consistent drama free run. Also, resisted an
acquisition offer from Steve Jobs!

~~~
smt88
How 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
> widely

I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside of
California and college campuses.

~~~
sangnoir
> I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside
> of California and college campuses.

Contemporary events for another notion you wouldn't find "outside California
and college campuses" succeed in toppling Brendan Eich at Mozilla. The only
difference I could tell then was that the Dropbox board put its foot down in
support of Ms Rice and Mozilla's board folded.

~~~
nhurj
As far as I know they both had support from their respective boards. But Rice
was 'only' up for the position as board member. Eich was to be the highest
public and private facing position of the company. The controversy surrounding
him, unfairly or not, also affected people personally. Basically Rice only
needed the trust of the rest of the board, while Eich would have had to fight
to run or represent the company. Your own comment being an example of how the
Internet doesn't easily forget things.

------
nicolasbistolfi
Remember 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.

~~~
Fnoord
I 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)

------
neals
So in those 11 years, did YCombinater make any money on Dropbox? Or is
incubating more of a 'long term' investment?

~~~
abofh
"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.

------
adventured
Up 47% at the moment.

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx)

~~~
felixgallo
looks like they mispriced. Most of those gains are accruing to underwriters
and speculators rather than the company. Same thing happened to eToys.

~~~
stanfordkid
people 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
18 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.

~~~
stanfordkid
Right. But who were the buyers? Would the same buyers have bought 10 million
shares at $29? Or was it thousands of smaller sized investors paying a
premium? You need whales to keep the market stable and I don't think the
whales would have bought at $29 ... look at the volume over time post IPO, not
just day of. The big investors who came in cheap will buy back shares if the
price dips... right now they are profiting off the pop.

------
Yizahi
Am I correct that if there were stock options granted to the first employees
of Dropbox in 2007 then they expired in 2017?

~~~
rpearl
There 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.

------
gigatexal
Congrats 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?

~~~
lwf
The 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
Thank you! I should have thought about the system reqs to see hints as to how
it was built

------
ijafri
Overwhelmingly 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
I use all three - Google Drive, Dropbox and iCloud and I don't see a
meaningful difference between them.

------
verelo
I’m super curious, how much was the original investment YC made (i assume
50k?) and what is that share worth today as they IPO?

------
ChicagoDave
I 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.

------
MarketingJason
Honest 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
What 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
I guess I expected a mention since his work was a huge part of making Dropbox
successful.

------
genki_teacher
I 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!

------
staunch
Congratulations to dhouston for being a great example of a startup founder,
and for creating a very successful company.

------
jwtadvice
Surveillance partner for NSA PRISM program, with Condoleeza Rice on its board.

Stopped using DropBox due to ethical concerns years ago.

~~~
sanbor
Me 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.

------
tomerbd
sh __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
>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?

------
tt
BIG congratulations! What an amazing journey and I look forward to tracking
Dropbox and its impact!

------
edpichler
Dropbox is a software I really like to use. Very well polished.

------
spopejoy
Do they still have Condoleeza Rice on their board?

------
SirLJ
Closed lower...

~~~
grzm
It 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-
share...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dropbox-ipo/dropbox-shares-close-
up-35-percent-in-biggest-tech-debut-since-snap-idUSKBN1GZ1NG)

~~~
SirLJ
Open for mortals was $29.00

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX?p=DBX](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX?p=DBX)

------
googlemike
Well done!

------
3pt14159
Edit: Removing comment.

~~~
claytonjy
There'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.

~~~
3pt14159
I said less than $100m. I don't know how much the acquisition was for, but I
know it's less than that.

------
philfrasty
Oh come on Drew, after ringing that bell I want to see a cool "hi" by dhouston
as the top comment.

------
inostia
I 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
Thanks! Let's see if we can get it updated.

------
11thEarlOfMar
lol, 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!

------
matte_black
Is Dropbox a buy right now at ~$30? What do you think.

~~~
TheGrassyKnoll
Trading 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
Isn’t 10x sales pretty decent compared to the 100x, 200x we seem to see?

~~~
harshgupta
They had valued themselves at <10bn. That has doubled in 24 hours, thats
definitely not positive, if not an ipo strategy

------
greenimpala
cheque

------
middle1
I'd suggest Drew now to delete his facebook account like just Elon Mask did.

------
bsvalley
not the best time to go public :) the stock market is about to take a serious
hit.

~~~
mediaman
Wouldn'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
Sure, 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
That's not what pump and dump means.

------
stjohnswarts
Eh 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.

------
DimitarIbra9
this company has no future. Amazon and Google can kill it easily when they
want.

~~~
giarc
They both have competing products (Amazon Drive and Google Drive) and yet
Dropbox lives on.

------
amelius
This 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.

~~~
geofft
Drew and Arash went to MIT, where their everyday computing environment was
UNIX systems with home directories on AFS. For those who haven't used it, AFS
is a networked filesystem sort of like NFS, except with a better
authentication model and the ability to support failover on the server side.

AFS, NFS, Coda, 9P, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, FTP, Windows roaming profiles, AFP, etc.
were all around and (to varying levels) built into OSes well before Dropbox.
Dropbox was a fundamentally different model: files stay on your local machine
and get synchronized, instead of living on the network. The entire idea that
live synchronization is the correct approach is almost entirely due to
Dropbox's success; any OS designer before 2007 would have said "Yes, we have
something as basic as a networked filesystem."

If you're objecting to the fact that it takes a commercial venture to explore
and develop these sorts of ideas, I too dislike that we're in that place. But
it's _true_. We haven't achieved a way to develop standard computer
infrastructure without capitalism, yes; but we've certainly achieved
meaningful technology that did not previously exist that's actually working
for people.

(And, also, almost all of those protocols I mentioned were developed by
profitable businesses like Sun or Transarc or Apple or whomever, and only made
non-proprietary at great effort. The ones that started off with public specs,
like WebDAV and FTP, were the worst.)

~~~
Fnoord
"Dropbox was a fundamentally different model"

You mention a bunch of filesystems (some of which with much better scalability
than Dropbox), but omit Rsync. Rsync works with any of these filesystems.

The most successful data distribution systems which predate these are from the
'90s and before Usenet (esp volume with the binaries) and scene (or FXP).
However, the former is mostly public data and the latter is inherently
insecure.

Dropbox was nothing special. It was just the first popular one who had a GUI
on top of Rsync, and who sold data storage within a package. Its essentially a
lucky shot.

WebDAV works great for client-server, but it has a disadvantage: locking works
terrible. OwnCloud/NextCloud uses WebDAV, btw.

~~~
jesseendahl
Dropbox is a lot more than a GUI on top of rsync. Even purely from an
engineering standpoint (ignoring product & design) that's incorrect.

You might enjoy this talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc)

------
crispinb
Surprise surprise. Far-right billionaire factory congratulates employer of war
criminals. War makes great business.

------
rrggrr
Let'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
.. and give us back Mailbox!

