
April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox" - epa
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
======
SwellJoe
I was among the naysayers. I first met Drew at pg's house just before Dropbox
did YC. I listened as he explained Dropbox, and I immediately thought of a
dozen reasons why it would be very difficult and probably fail (I'd recently
worked on something very similar for a month or so just to figure out whether
it was a direction I wanted to go with my own company, so had some familiarity
with the scale of the problem...I also knew the allure of the simple parts of
the problem).

I don't recall a whole lot about the conversation; I thought Drew was smart,
and he seemed to have a pretty good understanding of all the problems he was
going to have to solve. But, I still had my doubts, and walked away assuming
Dropbox would not be one of the success stories out of that upcoming YC batch.
We see who from that conversation is now a billionaire (or will be in the
coming years)...so, it seems I was wrong. Or, at least, overly pessimistic
about Drew's understanding of the problems and his ability to resolve them.

I refer to this pretty frequently to try to remind myself not to be the
naysayer in the room: [http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-
right-90-...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-
time-and-why-id.html)

~~~
nostrademons
And I'm an example of how you can be right and still wrong because you let
"other plans" get in the way. I'm on that thread with my two cents: "I'm
impressed."

However, Drew took me out to lunch about 10 months later. They'd just signed
their Series A with Sequoia (although it wasn't public knowledge), and were
looking to hire their first couple employees. Aston had just been hired the
day before as employee #1; Drew was wondering if they could interest me in
being employee #2.

At the time, I had my own startup that I was trying to get off the ground with
a friend from college. I could tell Drew was wicked smart, and he was way more
prepared and ready to bring a product to market than we were. But my immediate
response was "I can't leave my cofounder, and I want to see where my startup
ends up going." He was very understanding, and said "Yeah, if I were in your
position - _when_ I was in your position [DropBox is Drew's second company] -
I wouldn't give it up either." I couldn't help thinking, as I walked away,
that maybe I'd just passed up the best opportunity I'd get in my life. They
filled their positions with a couple MIT grads later that day.

A couple years later, after I'd moved out to the Bay Area and was working for
Google, I saw Aston at Maker Faire, and mentioned that maybe I'd made a
mistake in passing on DropBox. He said, "Naw, you made the decision that was
right for you." And in hindsight, I think that's correct. I had 3 dreams
coming out of college: one was founding a startup, another was inventing a
programming language, and a third was learning how Google Search works. This
way, I got to try my hand at all 3 of them. And I'm not sure DropBox would've
succeeded the way they have if they'd hired me: they got some kickass early
programmers instead, and I had some growing up to do before I was really ready
to start something big.

~~~
anuragramdasan
Quite an interesting story. I guess I am a few years behind you, as in I just
graduated a year back and get offers from startups which i accept/turn down. I
often wonder how these startups would end up and where I would be relative to
them. But I guess what makes the most sense here is the part that says "you
made the decision that was right for you.". That kind of seems like the right
line of thought.

~~~
nostrademons
FWIW, during that time period (07/08), I talked with about 10 startups about
joining as a founder or early employee. DropBox is the only one still in
business today. So I think that the Paul Buchheit post that Joe linked is
pretty accurate: "How to be right 90% of the time: predict it'll fail." It's
just that you only need one success.

I've had other reasons for staying at Google as long as I have, though, and I
wouldn't necessarily consider it a failure.

~~~
anuragramdasan
Indeed. Success is a little more complex to measure than being employed at
DropBox or Google. And also varies from person to person.

------
toddmorey
I'm reminded of this Quora post on the popularity of Dropbox:

"Dropbox: Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar
functionality?

Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the
ideal solution for it would do:

There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.

"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management,
calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just
folders and files!"

No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder
that syncs."

[http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-
tha...](http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-
programs-with-similar-functionality)

~~~
rlu
To be fair, in retrospect everything seems obvious.

At the time I'm sure the Dropbox team had to make a bunch of hard decisions.
For example, without knowing the success they would later have, it doesn't
seem super obvious to have "one master sync folder" as opposed to being able
to sync various folders around your computer (a la not-so-successful Live Mesh
and perhaps other sync solutions)

~~~
yen223
So a good question would be, what other "obvious" thing are we not doing? And
why aren't we doing them?

------
swalsh
Read the comments there. Now come back. This is why you don't ask engineers
for business advice. I can't tell you how many times I've come up with an idea
I think is great, go to work, and talk to my buddies in firmware. The first
thing almost all the time out of their mouth is basically "why don't use
solution x, in addition to y, which will basically give you the same thing"
where x and y are great technologies, but kind of hack to accomplish what
you're doing. It kind of always kills my energy.

Giving advice is cheap, and deceptively easy to make sound wise. I've found
when you want to bounce an idea, you need someone smart, who will tell you
what you're missing... but also be open to new ideas. A lot of people lean on
either side of that line. Engineers for some reason tend to lean on the
pessimistic side.

~~~
cylinder
>> 1\. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite
trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and
then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP
account could be accessed through built-in software.

This type of response is so typical of an engineer and so out-of-touch. Not to
pick on it, but it's just absurd, and shows zero ability to put oneself in the
shoes of the layman. And yet these types of responses are all over the tech
community. This disconnect is the exact reason someone like Steve Jobs is able
to enter product categories very late but still blow away the competition.

~~~
bradbatt
Came here to post this. No, seriously, _exactly_ this. That was my favorite
quote out of the entire comments!

FTP with curlftpfs and SVN/CVS isn't "trivial" to 99.9% of the population!

It's the same reason that sites like SlashDot were filled with all sorts of
reasons why the iPad would never work. Why would you use that?!? You could do
the same thing with ______.

Yes, you could. But you won't.

------
bstar77
Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to
create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers
as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.

~~~
fit2rule
I think a far more insidious fact is that Dropbox fills in a gap left wide
open by incompetent OS developers. Its the 21st Century - the OS should be
providing such features inherently, without requiring a third party
involvement. Maybe HN'ers, at that time, were somehow conscious of this fact,
and thus declined to 'see the revolution' that was headed their way. Either
way, since there was no other option, Dropbox was "revolutionary" enough to
have gained a following.

~~~
ams6110
Dropbox support several OSes though, which is still better than any one OS
providing a similar capability natively. In general, the OS should just do
what it NEEDS to do, and let applications fill out the rest.

~~~
fit2rule
The fact that there are multiple OS's out there means there is a battle going
on. Dropbox serves a need that should be being defined by co-existing OS
participants. But we see this everywhere in the Application space, so your
point is valid, there is just an OS border, and an App border. I think what
I'm trying to say is that border moves around a bit, and I'm cranky about
that.

------
singular
Though they have been very successful, it's a pity that in my experience they
have turned into something of a big co in the way they deal with customers and
quite sneakily hide important technical limitations from hackers who might
want to use them.

After a year or two of happy premium-paying use, I noticed dropbox was using
100% of my CPU. Some googling suggested this was due to having too many files.
Ok, fair enough, perhaps there are technical limitations meaning indexing
>300k files is tough (very easy to get to that count if you're keeping open
source codebases on DB), so I move files out of dropbox and clear its cache.
After a week of constant 24/7 100% CPU usage and dropbox failing to update
anything, I contact customer support and get sent copy + pasted boilerplate
telling me to do what I've already done.

After more than one email to say 'I've done that, what next?' I get told it's
due to symlinks in my dropbox folder. I have several in node_modules folders,
and have never had a problem with them before, so I find this weird but remove
all symlinks from my dropbox folder. No change after several days.

I try deleting files on the web interface - it refuses to do so for a folder
with a large number of files in, and tells me to use the desktop interface
(great...)

Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm
working on them (thankfully with backups.)

At this point the customer support tells me how to delete my account if I'm
not happy and they simply stop replying to my (polite) emails.

Googling around it appears this issue has existed for at least a year and a
half, and yet there is very little mention of it (there's a bulletpoint hidden
away on their website) nor does the interface warn you about it at any point.
How hard would it be to at least add a notification like 'looks like you're
adding a lot of files, please don't add too many more or I might stop
working'.

I used to hold up dropbox as a great example of a YC company that was
technically innovative and something of a hacker's company, but this
experience has left me quite massively disappointed.

~~~
300bps
With 300k files and symlinks, you are probably not considered a typical
Dropbox customer.

~~~
singular
As I said, very easy to achieve as a developer (I hadn't done anything crazy),
and the symlinks were working up to that point.

Even as a non-typical dropbox user (a developer, then), I think there should
have been some kind of a warning a, some ability to recover from the situation
b (I was left for nearly a month with a completely non-functional dropbox),
and not suddenly getting dropped without warning by support c.

If I'd known up front that a deployment of not that unusual amounts of code
(especially if you use git) would have led dropbox to irrecoverably fail for
me, I wouldn't have used them in the first instance.

I don't think even as a 'non-typical' user the very poor, typically big co,
experience I had was justified, esp. given that I am a member of the group of
people who first started using dropbox.

~~~
ThomPete
I have a menu bar on one of my product pages that I still haven't aligned
properly.

Priority is in the eye of the beholder.

------
Osiris
I loved this comment:

> 1\. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite
> trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and
> then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this
> FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

 _Trivially_ use three different systems to simulate some type of not quite
automatic syncing.

Why do Linux users often claim something is "trivial" and then go on to list
obscure commands and software packages that have to be tied together in just
the right way? To me that's "possible to do", not "trivial to do".

~~~
unavoidable
I suppose you have to come at it from the mindset of those actually using
Linux. That is, if it already exists and can be glued together using open
tools (as opposed to having to code it yourself), it is "trivial", since it
has already been done before.

~~~
telephonetemp
Intentionally or not, your comment seems to stereotype "those actually using
Linux" as unable to appreciate the value of the time and effort saved by a
prepackaged solution. While that certainly happens (and is more common in the
Linux community than in many others) it is not universal. The popularity of
Linux distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu among developers and IT people speaks
to that.

------
thecoffman
Straight from Drew himeself:

    
    
       data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another 
       option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing 
       in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like 
       what mozy does.)
    

It is sad to me that this never came to pass. I guess the desire to offer a
web interface overrode the idea of encrypting the files before they left your
computer. Not that you can't use your own encryption, but having it built in
would have been great.

~~~
Osiris
It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their
deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.

~~~
MichaelGG
Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could
"transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?

~~~
Shank
How exactly could you "transfer" files that way? You could just upload
something to Dropbox and share your logon credentials and any form of dedup or
DMCA won't help.

~~~
pmorici
See the StakOverflow question for more details but the basics of it is that in
order to optimize uploads the DB client calculates the hash of a file before
uploading it and if the hash along with other attributes about the file like
size etc... match then they assume it is the same. So you used to be able to
trick the service into letting you download a file you never actually had if
you knew the hash and other attributes.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-
dropbox-f...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-dropbox-file-
redundancy-check)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_\(software\))

------
hashtree
If there is any thread that might help comfort you about the pessimism
sometimes found on HN, this is it.

~~~
Perceptes
It's also amusing that the top comment on this thread is a big rant about one
specific customer service incident. Totally unrelated to the linked story, and
as usual, not seeing the forest for the trees.

~~~
singular
I strongly dislike the strain of negativity that seems to be typical of hn
these days, but...

I don't think it's totally unrelated, as I always very much admired dropbox as
a company and technically, and had the sense of them being something of a
hacker's company (an hn thread in which the founder is replying to technical
issues definitely gives one that impression), and I was very disappointed to
have that experience. I rant here because they refuse to listen to me, I have
tried to contact them a _lot_ privately but have been ignored.

I'm not the only one to have a similar experience - just a tree in the forest
of developers who are likely to experience similar if they try to put open
source projects in their dropbox.

~~~
scott_s
Perhaps your use-case is not one they consider important. (As others have
pointed out, 300,000 files is a lot for a synced drive.)

~~~
singular
I don't want to belabour my points, so I'm deciding not to continue too much
further in these discussions (I've come to find internet arguing is somewhat
pointless regardless of the rights + wrongs of the issue at debate), however
as I have repeatedly pointed out, it's very easy to hit a number like that if
you store code in dropbox, esp. open source projects.

And like I've also pointed out repeatedly, fine don't consider my use-case
important, but add a warning or at least don't drop supporting me because I'm
too much effort, or if you are, say that's what you're doing.

If I had known dropbox wasn't suitable for developers (it having originated
from yc with a technical discussion on that original thread suggests
otherwise) - I wouldn't have used it in the first place.

I had used it as a developer for a long long time before hitting issues, then
it become unrecoverable even after a _month_ of patiently trying to fix it,
and new work files were getting overwritten by old ones throughout. That's not
an acceptable failure mode, nor is then being ignored without warning by
support (at least say 'sorry you're too much effort'.)

------
asperous
I think that if pg can't even tell for sure what's going to be successful and
what's not, really how surprised can you be that the common HN commented
couldn't tell what's going to be big.

If you're a startup and you're pretty sure there's a market for your product,
people telling you their gut feeling really doesn't matter imo.

------
furyofantares
I wasn't on HN at the time but I do remember being an early user of Dropbox,
and I remember being totally blown away on first use.

So I looked into my email to see when I signed up, it was 14 months after this
post. I also found a gtalk chat log with the friend that recommended it, and
it looks like my memory is quite wrong, I was just as skeptical as much of the
linked HN thread:

>the thing about 2gb dropbox

>is i carry 6gb on my keychain

>and 8gb on my phone

>and i don't exactly trust them with important data

>also my iphone has shared folders that look just like any other computer on
my network

>the keychain is kind of a hassle though and i mostly don't use it, i should
probably throw it away

------
tzury
Here is my personal experience...

It is actually took place, later on when there was an announcement regarding
Dropbox raising from Sequoia .

This was the first time I heard of Dropbox.

Those days building a product which did similar to what dropbox were doing,
except that mine used any distributed version control it could find on a
computer (I had it supporting git, mercurial and bazzar) and push to servers
with SSH.

It was all automatic, built with python, and monitored FS for changes.
Supported any number of directories, etc.

So I felt I have this great prototype which I considered starting working on
this full-time, till that morning when I read the TC article and I realized it
simply been done, and by people who now have $6M in their pocket to make it
even more awesome.

Given the effort and dreams I built upon my own version, I remembered how I
could not use dropbox for quite some time.

------
hackinthebochs
Honestly, I still think the idea of dropbox is ludicrous. There are many ways
to share files, and sending them to a third party to host for you is the worst
one of them all. Aside from the few people that really need to multiply their
bandwith by many orders of magnitude, a simple file sharing server on their
own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine. Besides, dropbox was
just yet another iteration of online file hosting (I'm pretty sure rapidshare
and megaupload predated dropbox by years), so if file sharing was going to
blow up, it would have already, right?

And therein lies the true genius of dropbox. The technology itself had already
been done to death; the key was to convince a critical mass of people that
this was the solution to their problems. Or even better, convince them of a
problem they didn't realize they had. Yet again we see that many times success
comes down to the better marketer than truly game-changing technology.

(to be completely fair, their syncing mechanism was the best up until then,
plus their add-free freemium model was likely the missing key to success in
this space)

~~~
nostrademons
"a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own..."

I think that's the part you're missing. What fraction of the general
population can set up a file-sharing server? What fraction of the population
even _owns_ a server? What fraction of the population even _knows what a
server is_?

DropBox faced this objection over and over again from the investors they
pitched, and Drew's answer was variations on "But how many of them have made
it easy enough for your grandma to use?" _That_ was the killer innovation -
making filesharing so easy to use that you didn't need to set up anything,
just install DropBox and drag your files to a folder. And that's been the
killer innovation for many startups - Apple, Google, Amazon, Intuit, etc. all
let you do things that many other companies have let you do before, but they
made it so easy that even the average Joe can do it.

~~~
hackinthebochs
That's the thing though, how many "grandmas and grandpas" really need a file
sharing service for blobs of data? There already exists "better" solutions to
share common file types: flickr/picasa for images, youtube for video, email
for word documents, etc. The vast majority of people simply don't need an
arbitrary file hosting service. Somehow they've managed to convince people
they do.

On the other hand, if you give something away for free that seems to have
value, people will flock to it regardless of need. I'm curious if dropbox is
actually profitable. I know of many people who use dropbox that I wouldn't
have thought would even have heard of it. But not a single one of them pays
for it. Perhaps what we're attributing to success is simply a company being
sustained by the VC bubble. Even in the face of the "success" of dropbox I
don't see the service in its current incarnation being self-sustainable.

~~~
giulianob
Grandmas and grandpas is a bit extreme. Just about anyone I know uses Dropbox
nowadays because it's just simpler than the alternative. I even use it to
share files w/ my wife when we're in the same house. I have a SMB share that I
use for some things but when I have to send my wife some pictures I just put
them in our shared Dropbox. It's easier and she can access it later on her
phone too even. Convenience is a very important factor.

------
fananta
I think the top comments there show how sometimes the HN folks can get caught
up in the details.

I did a show HN today for a restaurant analytics concept and people commented
on the ugliness of the launch page and over pixels.

~~~
GuiA
People posting those sort of comments have nothing to give, except for their
opinion. Keep getting stuff done, don't let them get you down :)

~~~
hnha
They give valuable feedback, how is that bad?

~~~
unsigner
That's the point - not all feedback is valuable.

------
novum
Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox
is a file shared with the NSA.

I was a happy paying Dropbox customer since 2008 but downgraded my account to
the free tier a few months ago. I no longer consider Dropbox trustworthy for
anything except (1) trivial files and (2) files encrypted client-side before
they're put into Dropbox.

Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases that only recently did I
resolve:

\- 1Password Sync. Dropbox is no longer necessary here since 1Password
natively supports iCloud sync across Mac and iOS.

\- Arbitrary file-sharing between Mac and iOS. Dropbox is no longer necessary
here ever since I've been running BTSync[0], which has worked flawlessly in my
experience.

It might be time to cancel Dropbox entirely.

[0]
[http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html](http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html)

~~~
chrislipa
I hate to be that guy, too, but if you're that paranoid, you probably
shouldn't be using OS X or iOS, either.

~~~
_dark_matter_
I think he's saying that he's replacing his free-tier use with other
alternatives. In this case, he doesn't care that it's not safe from the NSA.

------
alokv28
Internet archive link to the demo/screencast:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html)

~~~
jason_wang
And here is his YC application:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html)

You have to watch his Dropbox video and read his YC application to really
appreciate how articulate, succinct and fluid Drew communicates.

~~~
Oculus
Really awesome read, thanks for the link!

------
pitchups
This is a perfect example of why you should ignore the naysayers and "experts"
on HN when you first pitch your idea or product. Also, a great example of why
the best startup ideas look initially like bad ideas
([http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html))

~~~
jiggy2011
Let's be fair though, there's a survivor bias here. It's probably more
dangerous to blunder on and simply tune out any criticism.

If you look at the top rated comment on that thread it is certainly a valid
criticism, namely that corporate computers are often locked down and won't
allow installation of third party software without getting sign off from IT.
In the case of dropbox that managed to sidestep this by mainly targeting
smaller businesses and individuals and also have the fall-back of letting
users access their files over the web.

------
brianbarker
"It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating."

~~~
dt3ft
This one was awesome :)

~~~
seunosewa
Is it income-generating though?

~~~
brianbarker
Income? yes. Profit? I'm pretty sure, but I'm not that invested in caring.

------
josteink
I remember being sceptical at the time (lots of people were). The consensus
here on HN seemed to be that Dropbox was trying to solve a problem Microsoft
had already tried to solve a million times (file-sync) and the fact that
Microsoft had never been able to sell it and get a decent user-base for their
service was proof that this wasn't something people actually wanted.

Funny how a _good enough_ implementation and good marketing managed to turn
that around.

I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not
buying into it.

~~~
mkr-hn
> _I don 't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember
> not buying into it._

It might be the fact that it's Windows-only. I use Windows exclusively and
wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating
systems.

~~~
Perseids
> I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have
> clients for other operating systems.

I don't understand your point. If you only use Windows what is holding you
back from using SkyDrive? (Except that it is US hosted and you must assume all
that data is public, but Dropbox is no different there.)

~~~
jiggy2011
Because you might want to share files with somebody who isn't using Windows or
you might want the ability to switch platforms yourself in the future without
worrying about having to migrate all of your stuff.

------
th3byrdm4n
I love this flashback, thanks for sharing. Between being a reminder that group
thinking isn't the best thinking, no matter the quality of the group - and
encouraging me to get out there - fail and be criticized. . . Great.

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
Group thinking is not bad, as long as we're defining group : (small) set of
people with lot of common characteristics, goals (if applicable). The opposite
of the "mass" which usually is a large set of people whom highest common
denominator is to be human.

The question is whether HN can be considered a group or a small mass =)

Plus you have to keep in mind the average pov will be biased in a different
way than let's say marketing101.net.

------
scrrr
There's people who try everything that is new and enjoy innovation, and
there's people who tend to be skeptical at first. The first kind is busy
trying out the software while the others are busy expressing their negativity
on a website.

And there's of course those who find it a big shame, that Dropbox and other
cloud services have become completely unusable thanks to the host country's
government.

------
netcan
The top two comments are critical (though not mean).

The first comment is pretty interesting.

 _' My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use
something else... it will just muddy your vision.'_

He's more or less correct. 'Like a USB' is a bad analogy. Dropbox only
replaces some of a USB's use cases and does lot of things that a USB doesn't.
OTOH, he's wrong because there is no other 3 word sentence that could have
done a better job. 'Like a USB' is probably the best starting point even if it
only gets across 25% of the message because 25% is better than nothing. 25%
(assuming it's the right 25%) might get the user to install it. Then they
might get to know the backup, file sharing/sending, versioning, or whatever
subset of functions they use.

------
fit2rule
I'm still not using Dropbox. I absolutely detest the idea that I'm relying on
a 3rd party for a feature that I consider should be built into every modern
Operating System. At the point when OS vendors relinquished to the Web 2.0
Cult their responsibilities for such features as easy filesharing, the world
lost something.

Absolutely, its great that people can share files this way. But absolutely,
its terrible that it requires fragments of an OS feature to be distributed
among multiple, external, unreliable entities.

~~~
ErsatzVerkehr
Why should OS vendors also supply cloud storage?

Who would provide this cloud storage for Linux distributions?

~~~
hackinthebochs
I think the point is that your computer connected to the internet is your
cloud storage. There's no reason why that functionality needs to be farmed off
to a third party.

~~~
vectorjohn
A cloud requires at least 2 computers to be online at the same time. This is
not the common case for people.

~~~
fit2rule
Only because the feature is not in the OS. Were it actually in the OS, people
would leave their computers on in order to share things. It makes sense.

------
nakodari
The comments here are a clear proof why founders should take feedback from
different sub-set of users. For example, HN audience is build up of
programmers, their feedback alone is not what founders should focus on.
Dropbox is used by almost everyone I know because of the convenience it
provides and the problem it solves. Most of the what commenters here are
saying is not something layman users care about; they don't have any technical
skills or time to learn to build their own custom sync-systems.

------
kartikkumar
I wonder how many people that initially thought/said that they wouldn't
need/want/use Dropbox are actually using it now. Would be particularly
interesting to know what reasons convinced people who didn't believe it would
work to end up using it themselves. Particularly, would be cool to know if it
was due to lack of understanding of the product, lack of a clear enough pitch,
or something else that established the wrong expectations.

~~~
frabcus
When first shown it by a friend, I didn't want to use it because I was
ideologically only using open source stuff, and servers I have control over. I
carried on using Unison and some dodgy shell scripts.

Some years later, I got a free 60Gb Dropbox account with a new Samsung phone.
It seemed a good way to sync my music and photos, and to let me access text
files on the phone.

I'd meanwhile got fed up with my hand made scripts, and tried a few other
commercial backup solutions, and got fed up with them all. So Dropbox seemed
not a bad part to a backup strategy to use from my desktop as well.

I think this year's privacy news on the Internet has shown my original view
was correct. And Drew has shown that a mature, usable, cross-platform syncing
client is nevertheless something I use!

~~~
kartikkumar
And therein lies a fascinating fact about Dropbox. Drew made the tradeoff
between convenience and security/ownership one that convenience won out,
particularly for a lot of people that from the outset were not expecting it. I
think Dropbox's adoption in the smartphone world has been one of the most
ingenious partnerships. I had pretty much the same experience in that I really
only started looking at Dropbox as a serious solution to me when my Samsung
phone shipped with a free account (+ I got a whole lotta free space through my
university finishing high in the space race).

I'm not a daily linux user myself, so what particularly interests me is what
Dropbox's adoption rate is like in the linux world. This seems to me to be the
toughest nut to crack, since most linux users are power users in the sense
that they're savvy enough to setup their own Unison/rsync etc. system.

My conclusion after thinking about Dropbox more is that it's a testament to
the fact that to the majority of people convenience wins out over most other
things (so long as the execution is bang on).

~~~
guiniveretoo
As a linux user (though I wouldn't consider myself a power user) I shopped
around for a long time to find a cross-platform cloud backup solution.

After poking at a lot of the other options out there, Dropbox ended up being
The One. The ease of use, lack of (unnecessary) IU (I'm looking at you,
SpiderOak), and general un-buggyness after some time of trying out the free
account sold me on it.

Since I started paying for Dropbox, I have become concerned about privacy and
have encrypted my more sensitive data with Encfs. There have been some other
companies started in the last year or so that I'm considering (Copy looks
nice, and I want to see what appears based on
[http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/)).

Roll-your-own backup systems are cool and all, but I've got shit to do that's
not file management.

------
e12e
Maybe the most remarkable thing is how short the comment thread is -- but I
suspect that is more an artefact of how much smaller the hn community was back
then, than anything else.

Interesting how dropbox managed to succeed in an area with so many
competitors.

Finally, I still think it's complete crap _for me_. But I also see how it's a
great packaging and reselling of s3 -- and I'm certainly not surprised it took
of (Not saying I necessarily would've bet on dropbox in 2007 -- but the sorry
state of webdav in in windows left the market open for anything that offered
user-friendly, secure cloud storage, and dropbox ticked (the most commercially
important) two of those boxes.

edit: Ok, complete crap is too strong -- but it's a product I have extremely
limited use for. While it is easy to migrate away from in the sense that it
just stores files, it's not Free software (important for me for anything I use
to store my files) and it has no privacy and questionable security (although
dropbox+encfs patches up some of that). Still surprising that people didn't
seem to see the commercial value -- I absolutely see that (much as I see how
people would pay for google apps even if I never would).

------
vlad
Thank you for posting this. Having launched my own landing page yesterday (as
Drew did in 2007), I thought that I should explain the positive feedback I
left for Drew on Hacker News in 2007.

Launch posts were full of naysayers, even back in 2007 when Hacker News was
called Startup News. I had done my own startup for 3.5 years at the time, so I
wanted to give members of Hacker News useful, insightful, and positive
feedback about their project.

The link was a landing page with a video about "throwing away your USB drive."

In my Hacker News comment, I proposed a list of ways to replace "throw away
your USB drive" with a non-technical metaphor that people of all ages could
understand (a personal secretary who automatically makes duplicates of
anything you create for safekeeping, stored the way you want and accessible
from anywhere.)

I've observed that newer Dropbox videos started to incorporate my feedback
more and more. It's really been awesome to see Drew and the rest of the guys
kick butt!

------
phreeza
Interesting that someone calls this a good competitor to "GDrive", even though
google drive was unveiled several years later.

Also interesting is the link to Aaron Swartz's blog, where he describes the
need for something similar.
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup)

~~~
blowski
IIRC, at the time there were a bunch of third-party solutions offering
'GDrive' by storing files in Gmail with custom labels through IMAP.

------
JanLaussmann
I was reading Drew Houston's YC application:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html)
and notices something strange: There is Google Drive's favicon on
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com) <link
rel="shortcut icon"
href="[http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico">](http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico">)

Edit: Screenshot
[https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/edit)

------
levlandau
Sharp criticism from know-it-alls is often a sign that an idea is good. It's
amazing to me how, even though this is common knowledge, good ideas continue
to polarize. I'd hate for you guys to convince everyone to be so nice that we
skew this long-trusted signal :)

~~~
lmm
Have you any examples of bad ideas that received less sharp criticism? I think
it's more that HN looks at every idea critically.

------
sidcool
There were so many naysayers. I didn't know HN existed then.

------
poolpool
So many people today are still harping on the security aspect (Not ~ _free_ ~
software, you don't own the servers).

How does that matter at all when selling to a large consumer base? How many
customers of dropbox know what those words mean?

Like so many commercial offerings you could built it from source and get some
hacky scripts going on your own but 99% of the world isn't going to do that.

~~~
benjamincburns
Regarding specifically the "free software" statement, It's a holy war. One
where I'm on the side of the religious zealots, for once. The special extra
fanatical wingeing about big software like DropBox not being free comes from
seeing the founders as smart people who have a base ripe for promoting your
(my) view (that free software is just plain _better_ for the world), and if
they just saw it _our_ way, maybe things would start to change. So we
complain. Well, _I_ try not to outright complain, because I know that's a
shitty way to get what you want and that my views are ultimately tangential to
their cause, but you get the idea...

~~~
poolpool
Thats fine and I understand the advantages to open source.

But if you're in the business of selling software (especially to end users and
not b2b) like many people here claim to be, that isn't a valid concern or
argument against a business model.

------
tzury
Also there is a whole thread regarding its YC Application
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503)
\- which sadly, the link itself is no longer available (404).

I assume many would be happy to read it though.

~~~
dcarmo
Here:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdr...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html)

------
Aldo_MX
The secret to success: Trust in yourself, nobody else is going to trust in
you.

~~~
a3voices
Another secret to success: have good parenting, DNA, education, friends, and
an interest in creating things of value (as opposed to the other million
things you can do with your time)

~~~
nyan_sandwich
Those things are harder to control, so generally less worth thinking about.

~~~
a3voices
That's a pretty good point.

------
soneca
FWIW, Dropbox actually DID replace my USB drive (99% of the times at least).

~~~
bluedino
Dropbox doesn't replace USB drives for me. I still use them for sneakernet.
Installing the newest version of Ubuntu or OS X. Copying a 2GB file to another
computer because downloading it again, even over local wifi, would take too
long.

What Dropbox replaced for me is the 'My Documents' folder. It allows me to
access my files on my work PC, my laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, or anyone else's
computer that has an internet connection.

~~~
BlackDeath3
There certainly are USB use cases which Dropbox flat-out doesn't account for.

At one point during the setup of my new gaming PC, I somehow hosed things to
the point where I _couldn 't install Windows_ (motherboard BIOS update,
maybe?). I was getting driver detection failures during the install process,
my peripherals (keyboard + mouse) wouldn't work, no NIC functionality, my CD
drive was unusable. I ran out to Walmart at 1AM to buy a 16GB USB drive/16GB
SD card, tethered my phone (my only functional computer at the time) to my PC,
downloaded the required ISO to my phone's new SD card, moved the ISO to a USB
via a live instance of Ubuntu running off of another USB, and installed
Windows via USB (and things magically worked from there).

Dropbox is fantastic, but USBs aren't dead.

------
devx
Why would you want to keep your data "in the cloud", if the government uses
the argument that as long as your data is on a 3rd party's servers, then it's
not yours?

------
Herald_MJ
The comments given on HN back then were so much more constructive! I think I
started reading HN about a year after this.

------
Fundlab
This is really inspiring, for the most part; dont let HN comments stump your
aspirations.

------
dcarmo
"What tools will you use to build your product? Python (top to bottom.)"

Yes.

------
eridal
the fact that the their top-post is negative make the history soo cool!!

