
Dropbox acquires Hackpad (YC W12) - yukichan
https://hackpad.com/Hackpad-is-teaming-up-with-Dropbox-m1Fne5A6Lzn
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amykhar
Just a little side note. I really wish people would give an overview of what
their service is or does in press releases like this. Quite often, I see
'Facebook bought x' or 'Dropbox bought y' and I click to see what it is, and
if I would want to use it. More often than not, there's no little blurb that
lets me know what their product even does.

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Angostura
Could anyone tell me what it is? Even the test drive link on their home page
offers no clues without signing up, and the blog isn't responding.

~~~
dbarlett
Sort of a hybrid of Google Docs and a wiki. Example from a recent hackathon:
[https://hackpad.com/Dataset-Wish-List-
MeMfcb91BLL](https://hackpad.com/Dataset-Wish-List-MeMfcb91BLL)

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rattray
I think this makes a lot of sense for Dropbox. Documents are moving online,
which means people won't need Dropbox for them.

I have a half-written blog post from months ago on why Dropbox should by Quip
for this reason - they should be trying to leapfrog Google Docs to stay
competitive.

Best of luck to the team!

~~~
subdane
Box made the Writely founder VP Eng for precisely this reason.

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unhush
My favorite parts of Hackpad were the features that weren't intended to have
mass-market appeal (ex: code syntax highlighting, markdown-inspired
keybindings, ability to easily create/delete accounts). These will likely be
gone in whatever notes product that Dropbox makes with the help of the
(wonderful) Hackpad team.

So for me, this acquisition seems like a loss. I realize that Hackpad has said
that they'll keep the site alive, but I expect it to be less functional if
everyone maintaining it is a full-time Dropbox employee now. Fingers crossed
that there will someday exist a good collaborative doc editor for hackers that
doesn't fall over when >10 people connect or require a Google account!

Full disclosure: I have written code and done security auditing for Hackpad. I
tried to get them to add vim mode. :)

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dublinben
Have you tried Etherpad? I'm pretty sure it supports both markdown and syntax
highlighting.

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unhush
I'm aware that there's modules you can add to do those things. Are there
public instances that have those installed? It's been a while since I used
Piratepad et al.

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ChuckMcM
One of those 'no brainer' moves, glad to see it got done. Love the irony of a
YC exit as an acquisition by a YC company :-) Congratulations, hackpad is an
awesome product and the combination with Dropbox has excellent potential.

~~~
yukichan
> Love the irony of a YC exit as an acquisition by a YC company :-)

Honest question, why is that irony?

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ChuckMcM
Fair question, perhaps recursion? I could imagine an unscrupulous person
creating the 'mega-startup-accellerator' and having as its first round a
startup they fund which is required to acquire half the startups of each
subsequent round. Thus creating the worlds most successful startup accelerator
where nearly half the companies are guaranteed to have an "exit".

In this case it is more like having the kids grow up and being successful than
anything nefarious. And YC gets to put 'acquired Apr '14' in the box of
outcomes.

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xianshou
Acquihires are pretty much the default hiring method these days, so "victory"
now requires keeping the product active after acquisition.

A toast, then, to Hackpad. Well done.

~~~
opendais
Is the human capital pool really that tight in the Valley?

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api
Given that a 2br apartment is $8000/month in some places, yeah.

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opendais
Am I the only one that immediately sees that as a sign of 'Maybe people should
setup satellite offices and stop recruiting in the Valley due to costs'?

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mimiflynn
Is remote work a viable option?

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bane
It's not remote if it's a satellite office. Hire 3-6 people, rent a space,
slap a sign on the door, it's now "Dropbox Pennsylvania" or whatever.

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prostoalex
Is there convincing evidence that such approach works?

There were articles that Google's employees in satellite offices were
alienated due to perceived lack of power over decisions, power struggles with
the mothership (Mountain View engineers would schedule meetings at a time
that's convenient to them, forcing their foreign office to be online at
ungodly hours), and project visibility.

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kunle
This is an exceptional deal. The hackpad team is awesome, the product makes
sense, and I remember thinking after Box bought Crocodoc, that Hackpad would
make sense as part of Dropbox, especially as it went enterprise and started
competing with Word, Google Docs etc.

Congrats to the Hackpad team and to Dropbox here. Solid deal.

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bitsweet
Hackpad is pretty awesome. Glad it will still be running after the
acquisition. Congrats Alex & Igor

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quadrangle
Ugh, Etherpad shoulda been copyleft. Hackpad is a travesty for being so non-
transparent that they're just a tweak of Etherpad.

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yeukhon
I've only seen HackPad and my impression is it was built upon Etherpad.
Someone confirm that? I don't want to sign up a new account just to find out.

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quadrangle
That was my point. Hackpad _is_ Etherpad and people should use Etherpad more
instead _and_ work to improve it so we have better free software.

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jdp23
Congrats Alex and Igore, Hackpad is really impressive. Great move by Dropbox.

What's the state of the opensource alternatives? Etherpad development seems to
have plateaued a while ago.

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0x006A
What features are missing in Etherpad for you?

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jdp23
The ones Hackpad added :)

And, raw Etherpad has a lot of usability problems as well. Plus it's
challenging to integrate it with an outside authentication mechanism.

I've looked at the code some and while on the one hand this could all be
added, it's a clunky base. Node's come a long way since etherpad lite started.

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unhush
Hackpad is an Etherpad fork, so you might conclude that someone has already
done the work of wrangling Etherpade code and making those patches. ;)

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jdp23
Very true! It's not like it defies the laws of physics ... but, it also shows
how much effort is needed to get to something with hackpad's usability on the
etherpad core: years worth of work from very smart devs.

If collaborative editing were the main focus of what I was working on, I'd say
"yay, market opportunity!" But as it is, I just want to be able to plug in
(and contribute to) a good open-source option. Which may wind up being
Etherpad, but I'd like to do better ...

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unhush
maybe the hackpad creators will open-source and/or release upstream patches to
etherpad! _cough_

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brianr
We love Hackpad at Rollbar. Congrats guys, keep up the good work!

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Shank
Please don't shut it down, like Readmill. I use Hackpad daily, and I'd hate to
see it go by the way of Readmill and shoved down the toilet.

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stillsut
DropBox looks like the company that walks on four legs, then two, then three.
First, it was just a smart choice to replace emailing yourself files. Pretty
soon, it will be an IBM, where some sales guy will convince your boss that the
DropBox Q1000 is what your business needs for synergy and you'll end up having
to use it.

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UVB-76
This is how it was always going to go.

Dropbox's core business is unsustainable, and they can't compete long-term
with rivals like Google and Apple.

They're flailing in all directions at the moment; pushing for the
enterprise/government market with the appointment of Condoleezza Rice, now
burning a load of money acquiring businesses offering tangential services, in
the hope they can diversify their business model.

It won't work. Acquisitions like this never go to plan, and they are almost
always a waste of money.

~~~
bane
I still don't get why DB hasn't come up with a business model to let people
just self-host content out of their accounts. They basically offer an instant
web-server experience for non-tech folks, but they cap bandwidth for
downloads.

\- How awesome would it be if I could dump a bunch of mp3 files and an html
page or index file or something, get a URL from the service and suddenly my
band has a website. Then if I go to www.dropbox.com under some "music"
category see my band listed there next to a bunch of other bands. Voila,
instant promotion. Now the entire independent music industry has a promotion
venue. Setup some kind of friendly payment processor and now bands can sell
their music direct. (and oh yeah, you get automagic copyright protection since
they can scan all other user's accounts for illegal copies of your music).

\- How about letting my Dad dump some word documents in a folder called
Chapter 01.docx Chapter 02.docx etc. get a URL and people can come check out
his book's site with automatic conversion to various ebook formats (and a
payment processor to handle the transactions)?

\- Or in my "podcasts" directory dump an mp3 of my latest podcast and have it
automatically publish out to iTunes and various other podcast search engines?

\- Completely annihilate flickr and other services by letting me dump a bunch
of photos into a folder, get an admin URL so I can type up descriptions and
other metadata (and geolocate stuff on a map) and a publish URL to give out to
people. Let me do that with with both a personal folder and a "pro" folder.
Let people go to my publish URL and buy photos from me (auto watermarked by
DB) or partner with a photo print service so people can buy prints at various
sizes.

the list goes on and on and on and I'd bet people would pay a little money to
be able to do some of this. It seems so obvious and the little bit that DB
supports (like photo albums) is so lackluster its almost not worth using. It
would get people to start filling their spaces up with stuff further upselling
them on the need to buy more space. With a little finagling they could even
wrap a social network on top of all this content and back door into Facebook's
space.

I just don't get it.

~~~
thruflo
Their other acquisition today - Loom - is on the annihilate Flickr path.

I must say I do like your auto monetization angle though. If carousel is
anything to go by, their 'we build UX ontop of your content' execution is so
far a bit meh.

Trouble is, as Twitter showed, there's no long term joy in building a
competitor to a service using its API.

~~~
bane
Well they had/have a huge opportunity to start an entire series of cottage
industries like this but have completely failed to grab onto the idea. It
seems like a pretty obvious extension of the "put a bunch of files in the
cloud and sync" notion to me. After all, what's an app server but a bunch of
program files stuck on a server drive?

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matthuggins
Is the landing page terribly jittery for anyone else? I can barely tell what's
going on and scrolling takes a bit to respond.

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unhush
It is often like that in Firefox.

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dduvnjak
Well this is not very promissing:
[http://i.imgur.com/1vCvZzI.png](http://i.imgur.com/1vCvZzI.png)

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orik
Hackpad and Loom? Dropbox is on a bit of a feeding frenzy.

~~~
mbesto
They are prepping for an IPO.

(note - for anyone not familiar, a common strategy just before an IPO is to
cash out on a large chunk of capital so as to sweeten the deal for the much
larger public capital raise)

~~~
prostoalex
Mmm, how does having less capital on hand benefit the company that's
approaching public markets for financing?

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elliott34
hahahaha ctl-f for "journey"

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matthewcford
Sounds like redirection for the Condoleezza Rice fallout.

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matthewcford
do downvoters have anything to add? I think it's a valid comment given the
timing of these acquisitions.

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Numberwang
Hackpad seems down at the moment. Wouldn't trust them with my documents.

~~~
colmvp
Snarky comment aside, we've used them for many months and have had a fantastic
experience on it. Great for collaboration is significantly better than Google
docs/e-mails.

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npizzolato
Can you explain why it's better then Google Docs? I've never heard of Hackpad
before, but from their front page, it seems like it fills exactly the same
space as Google Docs (collaborative, real-time editing), with little
information about why they're better.

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unhush
They don't do a great job of advertising why they're better, but semi-sensible
keybindings (similar to Github markdown) and code syntax highlighting sold it
for me. Also doesn't require a Google account to use.

Also auto-embeds photos/videos/soundcloud when you paste in links and has
prettier UI. Not sure if Google does the former.

