How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

When Google Drive and iCloud and One Drive all cropped up, copying the same service with the addition of deeper integration into different devices and software, I was worried Dropbox would be unable to compete. But they've hung in there, and I remain a happy customer.

I like Dropbox but I think they now focus more on enterprise and forgot individual users which led them to where they are today.<p>First is the price. If you need more space than the free option provides, the cheapest upgrade is $100&#x2F;year. The competition is about $25&#x2F;year. The $100 doesn&#x27;t even contain basic features like full text search when searching your Dropbox folder in the browser. You need to pay more for that. I&#x27;m sure most companies don&#x27;t mind paying the extra cost for a better service, but individual users are much more likely to go with the significantly cheaper option even if that means inferior product.<p>I totally understand that for the big tech companies it&#x27;s easier to lower prices and even lose money to gain market share. Dropbox will need to find a way to fight back.

The fact that they were strangers is super surprising, especially given how YC seems to discourage that kind of &quot;founder dating&quot;, suggesting instead you found companies only with people you trust deeply.

I love my Dropbox. Except one thing. They still don&#x27;t support SmartSync on their Linux client.<p>For all the people that commend Dropbox for supporting Linux, they now treat the Linux client as inferior.<p>To add insult to injury, they promote the SmartSync feature inside the preferences of the Linux client.

Still available online :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;apply&#x2F;dropbox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;apply&#x2F;dropbox&#x2F;</a>

Slightly off topic, but I discovered the other day that shared folders count towards the disk quota for each account it&#x27;s shared to.<p>I had several GB of photos shared with me on Dropbox, and it blew right over my free limit, despite the fact that none of them were actually mine. The photos also count towards the quota of the account sharing with me.<p>That&#x27;s soured me quite a lot on Dropbox.

I used Dropbox from 2009 through last month or so. Switched over to Syncthing. I was a little bit worried about stability but soon after I sampled it I felt convinced that it was the right move. I was previously using Dropbox as a kind of makeshift backup as well as a sync tool, but now I have a desktop again and run automated backups on that using Backblaze, so I&#x27;m a little bit more in control over the data by doing my own syncing.

My current Dropbox set-up: three hard drives, two of which are SSDs, each of which have a different OS (Windows and Linux respectively) and one really big HDD with NTFS to share data between the two of them. Which also is the Dropbox folder. In practice I only reboot to Windows to defragment the NTFS drive drive, but sometimes it&#x27;s useful for develpoment.<p>Makes it quite easy to migrate to a new computer, or do a fresh install if I want to clean up the OS.<p>The only hassle is that Dropbox doesn&#x27;t let you link an already existing Dropbox folder in Linux. Which is fixed by renaming the folder, &quot;creating&quot; a new one, moving all hidden files to the renamed folder and renaming it back.<p>I&#x27;m considering moving to another service, but it&#x27;s just so convenient and the price is OK.

&gt; ...as he sat down in his seat, Mr Houston realised that he had forgotten the memory stick that contained all the files. &quot;I was so frustrated because I felt like this kept happening,&quot; he says. &quot;I never wanted to have the problem again, so having nothing else to do... I started writing some code [to find a solution], having no idea what it would become.&quot; What Mr Houston came up with was the idea for Dropbox - remote storage that users can access online wherever they may be. Within two weeks he had created the prototype, and come up with the name.<p>Funny. I (and I guess countless people before) would have come up with a remote login via dyndns to my home computer or using ftp to some server. The idea of dropbox seems so obvious in hindsight but we were all blind.

After watching the popular opionion about Dropbox for most of its early years, that it was a product (or worse just a feature) and not a sustainable independent company&#x2F;business, I&#x27;m always glad to see them continuing to grow and thrive. Hats off to Drew and the Dropbox team.

Did anyone ever figure out what came of bringing a Bush cabinet member on board? Contract for mining data for NSA&#x2F;FBI?

I once used a variety of services, but now use Dropbox (free version) exclusively. It does what I need and I prefer their privacy based model (in comparison to other set-it-and-forget-it solutions).

I wonder how those friends who turned him down feel. That would an interesting article to write. I am sure they are mostly super successful, but would still make an interesting article to read.

I think there is still space for open source on premise competitor. I don&#x27;t trust Dropbox or other services, but I&#x27;d love to run something like this myself for full control.

How many schools allow you to recontinue your education again if you drop out to start a company but it fails?<p>Seems like if I had this option I would have dropped out at least once.

OffTopic: How did this story get let through when I submitted the same story with the same url ten hours before? Should the second submission have been caught?

is anyone else surprised he was able to build a prototype in two weeks? what technology did it use?

I for one no longer trust Dropbox to behave on my computer after this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12463338" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12463338</a>

I noticed the word &quot;profit&quot; doesn&#x27;t appear anywhere in the article. Will Dropbox ever make money?

Still fathoms me that Dropbox is worth billions of $ for the same functionality as FTP.