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!
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!