
How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions - scriptstar
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44766487
======
_bxg1
When Google Drive and iCloud and One Drive all cropped up, copying the same
service with the addition of deeper integration into different devices and
software, I was worried Dropbox would be unable to compete. But they've hung
in there, and I remain a happy customer.

~~~
anoncoward111
Out of curiousity, what does Dropbox do for you that they don't? Have you
stayed because of price, service, features, laziness to switch? :)

I personally don't have many storage needs so I just email myself important
files, back up some things to USB, and sometimes will add things to Google
Drive

~~~
_bxg1
Google Drive is like "I _guess_ you can use the desktop client instead of the
web one". One Drive is like "I _guess_ you can use a Mac". iCloud is like "I
_guess_ you can have non-Apple devices". Dropbox just syncs your files from
and to anything you have, equally well. I'm pretty sure none of the others
even have a Linux client at all, but Dropbox does.

~~~
tbrock
Except smart sync only works on mac and windows. Linux is a second class
citizen.

I’d sign up for Dropbox if they had feature parity on Linux.

Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for
moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

~~~
_bxg1
I'm not sure what you mean by "smart sync", but selective sync does work on
Linux last I checked (a few months ago)

~~~
tbrock
[https://www.dropbox.com/smartsync](https://www.dropbox.com/smartsync)

No, it’s not the same thing and no, it does not work on Linux.

------
tinyhouse
I like Dropbox but I think they now focus more on enterprise and forgot
individual users which led them to where they are today.

First is the price. If you need more space than the free option provides, the
cheapest upgrade is $100/year. The competition is about $25/year. The $100
doesn't even contain basic features like full text search when searching your
Dropbox folder in the browser. You need to pay more for that. I'm sure most
companies don't mind paying the extra cost for a better service, but
individual users are much more likely to go with the significantly cheaper
option even if that means inferior product.

I totally understand that for the big tech companies it's easier to lower
prices and even lose money to gain market share. Dropbox will need to find a
way to fight back.

~~~
kbyatnal
Individual users are definitely no longer their focus, and it makes sense why.

You could see their individual focus for a long time (ex. developing Mailbox
and Carousel) and in an ideal (and theoretical) world, it sounds wonderful to
have a consumer-SaaS company focused on delivering amazing software to the
masses and making money directly from it. But at the end of the day, you can't
ignore the real world and the messy side of business.

I (and I'm sure a big chunk of the HN population) would love to support a
company like this, but there just aren't enough of us. Drew & team probably
found out how difficult getting people to pay for stuff (especially
productivity software) really is.

This enterprise shift is necessary for Dropbox's survival.

~~~
FullyFunctional
Annecdata, but I would gladly pay iff they were a zero-knowledge company (they
should never see cleartext), but they aren't and I must assume that will limit
enterprise adoption as well.

I have _literally_ looked for an alternative for more than a decade, but
nobody can touch Dropbox on a really wide range of metrics and the trend
amount competitors seems to move away from the hyper-simple file system
abstraction.

I think I have tried most commercial options and practically all open source
alternatives. I had high hopes for Syncthing, but I found high load and
erratic syncing (was testing with 320 GB). Also no iOS client and no partial
sync :(

------
henryaj
The fact that they were strangers is super surprising, especially given how YC
seems to discourage that kind of "founder dating", suggesting instead you
found companies only with people you trust deeply.

~~~
adpirz
OTOH, the fact that dhouston was able to convince a current MIT student and
otherwise total stranger to drop out and follow him on this journey in just a
few hours' conversation is telling of both his and the product's prowess.

~~~
dxhdr
That narrative doesn't quite align with the article stating that "for various
reasons none of his friends were able to join the business." In retrospect all
of Houston's friends made a huge mistake! Maybe Ferdowsi was tired of MIT and
joined him on a lark? I am curious to hear the story from his perspective.

~~~
whymauri
Ferdowsi says joining was like scratching an itch here.[0] I've heard from
alumni he spent a lot of time coding in his room, like more than average
compared to your friendly neighborhood MIT student; I can imagine the prospect
of high-risk, high-reward coding for 18 hours/day was very appealing.

[0] [https://medium.com/the-story-of-grip/how-two-guys-that-
barel...](https://medium.com/the-story-of-grip/how-two-guys-that-barely-knew-
each-other-build-one-of-the-biggest-cloud-storage-companies-in-
the-c41c383a952e)

~~~
plinkplonk
from the article (medium, not BBC)

"The pair worked tirelessly for three months in a cramped office in Cambridge,
waking up everyday at noon and working till dawn the next day. “I think we
started like most of these tech companies begin. Just a couple of guys in
their boxers coding in a dark room,” Houston says. “We just kept our heads
down and built.”"

------
kwijibob
I love my Dropbox. Except one thing. They still don't support SmartSync on
their Linux client.

For all the people that commend Dropbox for supporting Linux, they now treat
the Linux client as inferior.

To add insult to injury, they promote the SmartSync feature inside the
preferences of the Linux client.

~~~
yzmtf2008
It might not be as good as its windows and macOS counter part, but it’s much
better than other vendor’s Linux clients.

The sheer fragmentation of Linux space makes something as complicated as smart
sync not a very financially viable product to support.

------
joering2
Still available online :)

[https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox/](https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox/)

~~~
FullyFunctional
There is so much gold in that link, thank you!

A random pick: "The concept that I'm most excited about is that the core
technology in Dropbox -- continuous efficient sync with compression and binary
diffs"

* Andrew Tridgell of course created rsync (which is referenced elsewhere) and pioneered the binary delta model which has inspired so much progress. Dropbox's sync in clearly directly influenced by this. Outstanding achievement!

* "efficient sync with compression and binary diffs" is key here but astonishingly appears to be a secondary concern for many (most?) competitors which is why they su^H^Haren't as good.

------
toomanybeersies
Slightly off topic, but I discovered the other day that shared folders count
towards the disk quota for each account it's shared to.

I had several GB of photos shared with me on Dropbox, and it blew right over
my free limit, despite the fact that none of them were actually mine. The
photos also count towards the quota of the account sharing with me.

That's soured me quite a lot on Dropbox.

~~~
kornish
That's probably done to prevent people from creating many free accounts and
sharing folders with each other to simulate having more storage space.

~~~
bad_user
I have a big archive of family photos (130 GB and growing) that I’d like to
share with my wife in read-only mode.

She only needs Dropbox for a bunch of documents, so paying an extra €10 per
month is not something we can do.

Dropbox is a fairly expensive service. I’ve used it for years however I can no
longer defend my choice.

Extended versioning is gone. Expiring sharing links are gone from Plus, so I
have to pay €20 per month for it ... yes they grandfathered old accounts,
however I made the mistake of trying out Pro and their Support refused to
reinstate my old Plus account.

Want to search your documents? Pay €20 for Pro. Which wouldn’t be bad, except
that their search is terrible. And I could not get their support to admit that
they aren’t indexing all my documents.

Just to get an idea, they aren’t indexing all PDFs (that Google Drive is
indexing just fine) and they aren’t indexing text files with a .log extension
either. A comparison with Google Drive isn’t even funny as GDrive does text
recognition on images, indexing everything.

Speaking of Dropbox’s support, I’ve never been more frustrated in my life as
the only issue they’ve ever solved for me was a refund, which they had to
provide by law due to me being an EU citizen.

All in all, I ended up paying €20 per month for link sharing I had in Plus,
broken full text indexing and piss poor support.

Also they keep pushing collaboration features but I wonder for whom. I don’t
think they’ve thought this through. If Dropbox is no longer a good place to
keep my photos then it stops being a good service for sharing work items with
colleagues.

Do they hope for Dropbox to become a service imposed by management? Probably,
however in that space they are competing with the likes of GSuite and we
already have GSuite for email. And Extending that to the Business edition that
gives you Unlimited space is much cheaper than going with Dropbox.

I’ll grant that Dropbox’s desktop sync is the best in business. But I can deal
with the warts of the others.

~~~
voltagex_
I had sort of the same issues as you and ended up with OneDrive because other
family members needed Office.

In Australia you can often find 1 year x 5 accounts (1TB Onedrive space,
Office, Skype minutes) for ~$70.

------
marzipan
I used Dropbox from 2009 through last month or so. Switched over to Syncthing.
I was a little bit worried about stability but soon after I sampled it I felt
convinced that it was the right move. I was previously using Dropbox as a kind
of makeshift backup as well as a sync tool, but now I have a desktop again and
run automated backups on that using Backblaze, so I'm a little bit more in
control over the data by doing my own syncing.

~~~
rckclmbr
Somewhat related, ive been a very happy resilio sync user since it was
launched as bittorrent sync. I have similar backups -- it backs up to my 2
personal computers, and one of those is backing up to backblaze. My
(nontechnical) wife is happy with this for storing all her phone and camera
pictures.

------
vanderZwan
My current Dropbox set-up: three hard drives, two of which are SSDs, each of
which have a different OS (Windows and Linux respectively) and one really big
HDD with NTFS to share data between the two of them. Which also is the Dropbox
folder. In practice I only reboot to Windows to defragment the NTFS drive
drive, but sometimes it's useful for develpoment.

Makes it quite easy to migrate to a new computer, or do a fresh install if I
want to clean up the OS.

The only hassle is that Dropbox doesn't let you link an already existing
Dropbox folder in Linux. Which is fixed by renaming the folder, "creating" a
new one, moving all hidden files to the renamed folder and renaming it back.

I'm considering moving to another service, but it's just so convenient and the
price is OK.

------
ralfd
> ...as he sat down in his seat, Mr Houston realised that he had forgotten the
> memory stick that contained all the files. "I was so frustrated because I
> felt like this kept happening," he says. "I never wanted to have the problem
> again, so having nothing else to do... I started writing some code [to find
> a solution], having no idea what it would become." What Mr Houston came up
> with was the idea for Dropbox - remote storage that users can access online
> wherever they may be. Within two weeks he had created the prototype, and
> come up with the name.

Funny. I (and I guess countless people before) would have come up with a
remote login via dyndns to my home computer or using ftp to some server. The
idea of dropbox seems so obvious in hindsight but we were all blind.

~~~
inapis
When Dropbox was first demonstrated on HN, people made very similar comments.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

------
adventured
After watching the popular opionion about Dropbox for most of its early years,
that it was a product (or worse just a feature) and not a sustainable
independent company/business, I'm always glad to see them continuing to grow
and thrive. Hats off to Drew and the Dropbox team.

------
brian-armstrong
Did anyone ever figure out what came of bringing a Bush cabinet member on
board? Contract for mining data for NSA/FBI?

~~~
test1235
I'd forgotten all about this ...

I'm surprised she's still there:
[https://www.dropbox.com/about](https://www.dropbox.com/about)

and this page still exists: [http://www.drop-dropbox.com](http://www.drop-
dropbox.com)

I have to say, I've not heard any mention of her in relation to dropbox since
she was appointed tho'.

------
trfflhntr
I once used a variety of services, but now use Dropbox (free version)
exclusively. It does what I need and I prefer their privacy based model (in
comparison to other set-it-and-forget-it solutions).

------
samfisher83
I wonder how those friends who turned him down feel. That would an interesting
article to write. I am sure they are mostly super successful, but would still
make an interesting article to read.

------
merinowool
I think there is still space for open source on premise competitor. I don't
trust Dropbox or other services, but I'd love to run something like this
myself for full control.

------
matte_black
How many schools allow you to recontinue your education again if you drop out
to start a company but it fails?

Seems like if I had this option I would have dropped out at least once.

~~~
k__
Some remote universities, I guess.

I'm studying a MCompSci for 7 years now and it only costs me 11€ when I don't
do any courses in a semester.

I got all courses done, just need time for the thesis, hehe

~~~
sebastienrocks
Is your university remote? Can you provide a link by chance?

~~~
k__
sure

[https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/english/](https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/english/)

------
gadders
OffTopic: How did this story get let through when I submitted the same story
with the same url ten hours before? Should the second submission have been
caught?

------
misiti3780
is anyone else surprised he was able to build a prototype in two weeks? what
technology did it use?

------
sigjuice
I for one no longer trust Dropbox to behave on my computer after this
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338)

~~~
saagarjha
They now have a kernel extension as part of their app, supposedly to stop
people from dragging files out of shared folders.

~~~
sigjuice
That’s even worse.

------
ebikelaw
I noticed the word "profit" doesn't appear anywhere in the article. Will
Dropbox ever make money?

~~~
scarface74
Exactly. It kills me that the definition of a successful company is rarely -
being able to deliver a product profitably.

~~~
101km
They provided a spreadsheet on their investor relations page:
[https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/static-
files/105a910a-1026-4056-...](https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/static-
files/105a910a-1026-4056-912c-1b806b964843)

Losses last three years are: ~300m, ~200m, ~100m.

They are going to be profitable by 2020 and their margin is growing, so I
don't get this negativity.

~~~
scarface74
They can predict a lot of things. But in the B2B market, they are competing
with much larger companies that can offer the same amount of storage plus a
lot more - Google and Microsoft.

In the consumer market, they are competing with Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

Would you really want to compete against the three most valuable companies in
the US where as Steve Jobs said “you’re not a product you’re a feature”?

------
madengr
Still fathoms me that Dropbox is worth billions of $ for the same
functionality as FTP.

~~~
briandear
And that’s exactly why they’re billionaires and you probably aren’t. It isn’t
about functionality, it’s about ease of use. It’s the same argument used when
MS-DOS was being replaced by the GUI.

Explain FTP to your Aunt Edna. Get FTP working where everything on all devices
is in sync automatically. Comment on a file via FTP. Send a link to a file
they can consume on a mobile device — including playing audio or video without
downloading the file. Create access lists for folders.

Sure you could do it using FTP. Now do it cheaply at scale and make it work
everywhere and then convince your non tech friends to use it.

Why bother with GPS when we could all use a map and compass? Dropbox made file
syncing accessible to everyone cheaply and securely.

~~~
blub
Oh boy, someone believes in the startup myth.

A massive part of the success of such startups are connections, connections,
connections.

The product itself doesn't matter that much, considering all the pivoting. Nor
does making a profit, considering all the startups still burning VC money.

Yes, there is certainly an amount of skill necessary, but the scrappy startup
that suceeds against all odds is a fairytale. Luck, connections and moral
flexibility play an equally or more important part.

~~~
Angostura
Except of course, that heard about DRopbox when it first launched, tried the
free plan, thought 'this is a really cool product' and introduced it to all my
friends. Dropbox hasn't pivoted much, and I knew nothing about their
connections.

It was a scrappy start up with a good product.

