
A letter from Drew and Arash - andygcook
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojgr88g4h8z8ka9/FounderLetter.pdf?dl=0
======
Blahah
The only other comment right now recounts a negative experience that is surely
not common. I offer a balancing positive story of my recent experience.

Between 2012-2016 I was studying for my PhD. I kept all my files in Dropbox
(as well as some other places, but Dropbox was the one place I trusted with
everything at once). I was paying for a premium account at the time, and had
dozens of GB of stuff stored in my account. I stopped paying for it in 2016.

Yesterday I wanted to show someone a protein model image [0] I made during my
PhD. I logged into my old Dropbox account, and found all the content preserved
there. I haven't paid them for two years, but they archived all my stuff and
asked politely for me to reactivate the account in order to sync it again. But
I can retrieve individual files if I don't pay. That's an extremely gracious
and dependable service, compared to my experience of other companies.

Congratulations Dropbox on your IPO, and on creating a product used seamlessly
by hundreds of millions that really makes people's digital lives easier.

Having experienced such high-trust service, I'm going to start paying them
again.

0:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/1wb68r1otlqqa8u/rubisco_coloured_3d_model.png?dl=0)

~~~
balladeer
That's awesome. I love Dropbox too. I had created a file in the Dropbox folder
and deleted by mistake and my CrashPlan failed to backup it during that
period. Kinda my fault as I didn't keep the laptop open long enough for
CrashPlan to index and run backup between the file was added and before it was
deleted. Dropbox had a copy of it, among deleted files, when I needed it at
work after some time. That's when I started paying for it upgrading from free
account.

Now if only they would offer client side encryption[0] - at least optional.
Maybe with slower search or some missing features or an inferior experience to
those customers who want this.

It would just become even more awesome :)

[0] [https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/private-
key](https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/private-key)

------
zawerf
Sort of off topic: Linking to a dropbox file is a pretty terrible way of
publishing what should have been a blog post instead. How can you tell whether
this is legitimate or just some guy who set their display name to Arash?

The UX design (which they are usually praised for) is pretty subpar for this
page in general. The "..." button seems to be broken(on firefox on linux) and
there's a useless comment pane that isn't autohidden and has a grayed out
"enable comments" button for no reason. (EDIT: It seems this only happened
because I am on a 4k resolution monitor so I guess it's forgivable)

~~~
hashkb
What about Dropbox Paper?

~~~
zawerf
I don't use Paper, I was complaining about the UX of the page in this
submission specifically.

... But I tried looking up Paper just now and saw that their register page,
[https://www.dropbox.com/paper/register](https://www.dropbox.com/paper/register),
has broken UI too:

[https://i.imgur.com/ZyZxDSK.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZyZxDSK.png) (blue text
on blue background)

I really don't get why Dropbox gets praised for their attention to detail.

------
robotresearcher
That's a letter from a generic marketing drone. It would have been much more
interesting to hear from these people as human beings today. I guess they
can't be real people in public any more.

Sincerely, though: congrats on the IPO. I always liked the main product. The
Linux support is a differentiator I appreciate.

------
crawfordcomeaux
I think creating the right environment for work starts with the
internal/mental environment first. And this starts with developing a new
design theory.

Mindful design, as I define it, is a theory designed to preserve connection,
respect/grow attention, responsible use emotion as an input, and be anti-
addictive. It starts with human centered design (where innovation practices
currently are, to my knowledge). From there, we add mindfulness, nonviolent
communication, category theory, and computer science to hack our language so
we can better communicate with each other.

I'm tired and know I'm leaving things out here, but this is where I started
researching over a year ago. I'm now working on a programming language for
humans to program themselves through with the written/spoken word being the
only technology required for it to work. I'm looking for help from anyone
interested.

~~~
nikki93
I’m interested in this and may have thoughts / want to hear what you have to
say.

------
tardo99
I know I'm cruisin' for a bruisin' here karma-wise, but I just don't
understand what they are trying to do with their company mission.

From my perspective, Dropbox actually facilitates an old, broken way of
creating and sharing documents using desktop applications from the 1990s and
earlier. Google, by combining drive with docs, allows users to completely
escape desktop applications, which to me is really the next generation of
computing. To make this more concrete, if a company adopts Google Drive, they
can issue employees much cheaper computers (lowering capex) because they don't
have to be able to run heavyweight OS and application software like Windows
and MacOS. Dropbox isn't even an entrant into that space, and I don't really
see how they could compete.

When I look at a company and find out they're using Dropbox, I always think to
myself that they probably made that choice either because they've been using
it for a long time, or because they didn't want to go to the effort to change
their business processes to really embrace network computing. I imagine office
workers running Word instead of Chrome, and that bothers me. Either way, I see
Dropbox positioned as a stopgap to allow companies to _avoid_ plowing ahead
with new work paradigms while still enabling sharing of files without using
things like USB keys.

I don't work for either company, never have. But I remain confused about
Dropbox's mission. Short of being acquired by someone, I can't see the way
forward for them. But, they just raised a ton of cash, so I'm as excited as
anyone to see what they try.

EDIT: I want to briefly respond to the argument in this thread that it's a
_good_ thing that Dropbox doesn't tie an office suite to sharing files. I
simply disagree. I don't see how that is a real concrete negative to anyone
unless it's for political reasons ("I don't want Google to be too powerful").
I _do_ however see how it's a problem for the vast majority of office workers
who, using Dropbox, have to either keep using desktop applications or
(shudder) create documents in something like Google Docs and then reupload
them into Dropbox. So, at best Dropbox's independence strikes me as neutral,
but for most people it seems clearly negative.

~~~
pencilhappen
Dropbox's core product is trying to tack on P to CA systems. The CAP theorem
explains how well this will actually work out. It's good they raised a bunch
of cash, because they need to diversify their product base beyond that
confused core. Time will tell if they do or not. Currently, I do not view them
as a good long term investment.

~~~
tardo99
Thanks for the reply. It's a shame you're the only person who saw what I wrote
before the yes-man crew came along and downvoted me.

------
untangle
> Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest
> challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us.

"Imagine all the people sharing all the world...I hope some day you'll join
us. And the world will be as one."

\- John Lennon

Drew, you picked worthy source material.

------
aregsarkissian
As I read this it sounded a lot like what basecamp and 37 signals have been
saying and doing for a while.

------
middleclick
> Imagine if every minute at work were well spent—if we could focus and spend
> our time on the things that matter. Imagine how much more inspired we’d be.
> Imagine how much better equipped we’d be to tackle humanity’s biggest
> challenges.This is the world we want to live in. We hope you’ll join us.

Geez. You are a file hosting service. Stop pretending like you fixed the
world's hunger or something.

~~~
hkmurakami
They're setting out a grander vision for what they can be, _what they need to
be_ in the future in a world that demands constant growth.

And in tech, if you don't keep moving forward, you get killed.

~~~
Nullabillity
Dropbox has been standing still/regressing slowly for about 9 years, and they
seem to have been doing... fine.

~~~
JetSpiegel
The site turned from a sober recreation of Explorer to an unholy Material
design JS mess.

The features are all there (that I notice), but the performance has horrible.
If Dropbox is about user friendliness, they can render the HTML on their
server.

------
zakk
What does this mean, besides the corporate garbage?

------
narvind
Fan mail induced high.

------
sp527
Legitimate question: how is Dropbox not effectively dead in the water? Between
GDrive use driven by close integration with Gmail/GSuite and iCloud having
major user capture, I don't understand where Dropbox is necessary or wanted
anymore. If someone sent me a link to a Dropbox file instead of uploading to
GDrive, I would find that weird and might even call them out on it. This
applies to most people I know across a variety of demographics. Is there some
secret massive trove of Dropbox users I'm simply not aware of?

Speculation: momentum of people who were early on the cloud adoption curve who
are implicitly/behaviorally entrenched by accrued data volume. That doesn't
sound to me like the foundation of a solid business with growth potential
(see: IBM). Those kinds of users are ultimately going to be fairly price
sensitive given the substitutability of the product and therefore not
marginally monetizable. They may already also perceive themselves as paying an
'inconvenience penalty' vs GDrive/iCloud.

Honestly, this looks like exactly what it might very well be: rich Silicon
Valley investors dump a squeezed, has-been company into the frothy public
market to tap into 'dumb' liquidity.

I should clarify I don't have anything against Dropbox itself. I do have a
problem with pushing a dud into the public market at an irresponsible
valuation to effectively defraud uninformed people and desperate institutional
investors with low accountability who are facing a drought of good return
opportunities (e.g. mutual fund and pension fund managers). You can hem and
haw around it all you want ("oh they'll build new features", etc), but the
growth expectation baked into their valuation is more or less predicated on
extrapolating a pattern of success they are unlikely to be able to replicate.
Cloud storage is commoditized and they're competing against monster platforms
that are better positioned than them to capture new business and siphon their
existing users (applies even in enterprise, arguably they lose against Box but
certainly against Microsoft and now even Google). So they're being paid to try
to tap into new verticals as very late contenders (e.g. Dropbox Paper)?
There's no there there. It's wrong. In my opinion, it's fraud and only
slightly less awful than the behavior surrounding the dotcom bust.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _how is Dropbox not effectively dead in the water? Between GDrive use driven
> by close integration with Gmail /GSuite and iCloud having major user
> capture, I don't understand where Dropbox is necessary or wanted anymore._

\- It came first.

\- It does one thing and does it well.

\- It does it across all platforms.

\- It isn't tied to other product offering. That's _a feature_ , not a bug. It
means Dropbox isn't pushing other bullshit on you, unlike GSuite/Office356,
where file syncing is a second-class citizen meant to encourage you to use
relevant company's cloud office suite.

\- Therefore, it's free to offer integrations between usually competing
companies. It integrates with GMail just as well as it does with regular Word
documents. But integrations are still a side story, they don't interfere with
the core competency - being a folder that syncs.

Seriously, I'm not sure why would people use OneDrive or Google Drive, when
there's Dropbox.

~~~
berbec
I use Dropbox and gsuite drive. Dropbox is for easy to access file sync and
gsuite is for backing up 30TB. All hail rclone.org

------
coding123
Probably wasn't a great idea to shit on Groupon, Linked in and Slack...

------
noemit
Dropbox just deleted 4GB of design files I needed for work. Their customer
support is bewildered at why it can't be restored. Build a good product before
you try to inspire me with stupid garbage. You're not a thought leader. Fire
your spiritual guru. I'm so tired of tech founders thinking they are somehow
philosophically relevant because they got lucky & made money.

~~~
allannienhuis
Sorry you lost your files; that really sucks. However, just because something
has flaws that can affect some people, doesn't mean their product is garbage
and the founders know nothing of value.

I don't work for dropbox, but they're clearly doing something right or they
would not have been able to keep so many customers happy enough to keep giving
them their money.

That said, just because they were successful their opinions should not
necessarily be treated as gospel or the path to riches for others.
Survivorship bias is something to keep in mind:
[https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287440](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287440)

