While I think it is much more useful to learn from others' success than others' failure (lessons from <i>your own</i> failures are invaluable), let's not forget selection bias. A lot of startup success is luck--or, in other words, factors outside of the control of the founders or their advisors.<p>Many, if not most, founders aren't even aware of these factors, don't appreciate them fully, or won't acknowledge them out of ego. In many cases the advice should be "work hard, be smart, and buy the winning lottery ticket."<p>My advice is to attempt startups in the center of a confluence of macrotrends; that will tilt the odds more in your favor.
DropBox is one of the most useful products to come out in the last decade.<p>I still remember seeing the original 5 minute demo (1).<p>My jaw was on the floor, I instantly needed it.<p>And it's still the best, even at a premium price (marked in cost of GB of storage).<p>The article has several interesting points, but the takeaway for me remains "[Solve] a worthy problem."<p>(1) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE</a>
All luck aside, i wonder how much being an MIT graduate played a role in successfully getting DropBox off the ground. I always get the thought that walking out of a reputable school opens a lot of opportunities like this, which is why i read articles like this with a grain of salt.
To be fair, Houston had already dropped out of school from a year to start an SAT prep company, so he's not entirely a first time founder. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston</a>
Kudos to Drew.<p>Dropbox is simply a great product and that's why it's such a great success.<p>I've tried so many different cloud-based storage services throughout the years and nothing really comes close in terms of ease-of-use, accessibility, sharing, speed, etc. Sure, DB has a few flaws here and there but nothing is perfect.<p>I remember being bombarded with marketing emails from the AeroFS team two weeks ago when I tried their products and while they were great in asking how they "could help" me, their software was broken. It wasn't working properly, crashing on colleagues' systems, etc. Worst part: emailing support four times never got me a reply. And to me, that's just an awful product (aside from it being super buggy). But I digress.<p>Great little read from Drew, someone who has created a simple product that we all need and use daily.
Good article - there's a lot to take away from this.<p>However, if I ever read that Gladwell 10,000 hours quote again I think I'm going to go postal!
Incredibly informative article.. But the second I closed this, I saw the article about how BitTorrent is growing at a faster rate than Dropbox did. [1]<p>It made me wonder how Drew/Dropbox is going to respond to such a competitor<p>[1] - <a href="http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/05/bittorrent-doubles-sync-userbase-2-million-month-says-dropbox-competitor-growing-twice-fast/" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/05/bittorrent-doubles-...</a>
That 5 minutes long presentation movie from 2007 really explains why Dropbox is such a success. He just simply tell us about what his product does, what problem it solves, and how he has a good solution to "the file syncing problem". The presentation is so good that even my dad understands it.
This is much more about "how to win" than it is about "how to win <i>as a first time founder</i>".<p>The only real "as a first time founder" material is his story about how he scrambled to find a cofounder for YC.
great and inspiring read! find ourselves in the same spot as when drew started - when he walked in to YC unprepared. Well we blew our YC 2014 application, it was so poorly written. So with a common starting point looking forward to cracking the code to success by - solving a problem that we have ourselves, and improving on things that are already around!