It's funny how often that comment—which I made as a 22-year-old undergrad—resurfaces. Someone even reached out to me 2 weeks ago because they wanted to use it in an article as an example of "the disconnect between the way users and engineers see software"!
I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).
Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!
Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward!
Also, one thing I think people ignore is that BrandonM's comment was notable because it was voted to the top.
Which means that the people reading and voting on the thread, at the time, thought it was the best reply. But no one will ever point a finger at them, because they're anonymous. They also have less chance for self-reflection - who remembers an upvote?
I see you getting some flak here but for what it's worth, I read it as a very grounded discussion and feedback. I appreciate the fact that you conceded the points that seemed reasonable post Drew's comment.
3rd point (viral): The dropbox solution was great, of users getting more dropbox when they brought in another user. By rewarding with more dropbox (instead of money), only people who genuinely value dropbox would spread it. These aligned interests can't be gamed.
I thought dropbox was a great idea from the very beginning... but I've been repeatedly amazed at the scale of the opportunity. People working cross-mobile/desktop must be a big part of it.
Your comment was one of a handful that lead to me registering for an account on HN instead of just lurking, I love that this got closure in my mind. Thank you for responding to this
Your original HN comment perfectly captures the quintessential HN user at the time. I feel like every “Show HN” thread has those types of responses of like trivially explaining away all the hard work with just a few “simple” hacks.
I think the typical HN user has morphed a bit at this point(re: crypto) but it’s great to be able to reference the totally aloof engineer that existed at that time.
I think you were still very right in your intentions. I despise Dropbox, personally, and wish it would die. This is what Operating Systems are for.
However, the fact it has not died and is in fact 'a success' from the capitalist side of things, means what I think about filesharing being an OS service, doesn't really matter. Microsoft and Apple and all the other vendors are asleep at the wheel - but it has to be said that its just a distro upgrade away from being the end of Dropbox for a lot of people.
That web interface is soooooo much easier to understand and use. Makes me sad how unnecessarily complex modern UI is, not just on dropbox, but across the whole web.
The response when he shared the file on his messenger was "why are you sending me this crap" :)) so funny if this was part of the original presentation of what would become dropbox.
Seems like BrandonM's quote comes up all the time, but Joel Spolsky wrote in 2008:
“Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn’t that exactly what Hailstorm [2001] was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.
And what is this Windows Live Mesh?
It’s a way to synchronize files.
Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.
I think it's interesting to go back to that thread, look at what the author (BrandonM) has done since then and learn some important lessons about being able to step outside of your own head to see the bigger picture.
Looks like he's still working for another company and has an unfinished blog (http://shebang.brandonmintern.com) but he seems like a really smart guy. The takeaway I got from the thread is "Don't be afraid to try something and finish it".
You guys had a lot of courage and perseverance to take an idea that people trivialized, have a working implementation, build a company around it and then IPO.
Looking at his LinkedIn profile, it seems like he was still in college then. He was wrong, of course, but I think his errors were pretty reasonable given his situation.
It's very easy for tech people to say, "But it's totally easy, you just [long string of steps that they've learned over the course of years]." It takes time to learn that no, easy things for you can be hard for others. If you want them to use the thing, you have to make it dead easy. I note that Apple made a shit-ton of money because so many tech companies (e.g., MP3 player makers) refused to really learn this lesson.
His second point, that USB sticks were still necessary, wasn't bad, just not forward-looking enough. He wrote it before the introduction of the iPhone, after all. But back then, high-quality connectivity was much less common. Then, Dropbox would have worked better for some than others.
And his third point was correct. Charging cash money is important.
So really, it's not a bad comment for a CS student. And it reminds me that I'm very thankful that most of my youthful opinion-spouting happened in offline and pre-web contexts.
if every Brandon out there was able to see the big picture, Dropbox would have had A LOT more competition, when Dropbox was still in the early stages. It would have made it a lot harder for Dropbox to succeed, right?
So in a way, the fact that the millions of Brandon's out there who think curlftpfs is the best, and are not capable of seeing the true value of Dropbox--perhaps that was a positive thing for Dropbox, right? Otherwise they might have tried to make a similar product and competed with you years ago :)
Next up AirBnb and perhaps Stripe (speculation). Those early YC investments are really paying off huge returns.
Unlike investing in the stock market, where you want to hit lots of singles, angel/startup investing is all about hitting home runs as the vast majority of the time you are going to strikeout.
One of the highlights of my MIT experience was going to your ~yearly tech talks that you did at the beginning of the fall semester. I’m excited to see Dropbox continue to grow as a company. :)
I think you handled BrandonM's critiques pretty well, and not immediately getting defensive around the products shortcomings was well played. Congrats to you and your team.
On point 1, he failed to understand that 99.9% of population is not IT savvy, not to mention how much time such setup would take and then maintain to run smoothly with all security patches, etc.
2. He misunderstood initial description of Drop; that the files will reside locally even if you lose internet connection you still can access those.
3. He was wrong about "viral" but right about inability to "make money off of this" :)
By the way Jessica, you told me that year that if one of us went public you'd do a keg stand. Just let me know in advance when that's going to happen so I can book a flight :)
Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN:
I genuinely laugh every time at that comment every time this gets reposted, as if 99.99% of people wouldn't run away if they read 'curlftpfs' and 'mounted filesystem'
Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.
Ha-ha, but for every one where the criticism turned out to be wrong, how many are there where the criticism was spot on? We laugh at things the HN Dropbox critique and the Slashdot iPod critique, but without people there to criticize and point out potential pitfalls, we’re all just patting each other on the back and telling each other how awesome everything is. Is that how good ideas grow?
It would be a fun experiment to put comments like this as quotes on the "Add Comment" page so you had to read them while typing your own comment. Might make people take a second or two extra to reconsider.
> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
I don't think that comment is necessarily unfair. Dropdox does charge for the service if a user wants over 2GB. I think the more questionable comment is that first point:
>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.
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!
"he suggested Drew delete his Demo Day presentation in the middle of giving it, and then recover it from Dropbox and keep going. Usually we don’t suggest gags like this during pitches, but this one made people pay attention."
Dropbox is on my list of reasons why I no longer naysay anything run by technical founders with some product sense. I remember hearing they were just essentially re-selling AWS storage back in the day (before they started building their own data centers). I thought 'why would anyone want to buy marked up AWS storage'. Then a few years later I learned to stop doubting great product focused entrepreneurs ever.
I remember seeing the release of DB on HN and immediately had a "holy shit" moment, I was literally carrying a portable shuttle computer back and forth to the office before DropBox - congrats to the entire team and thank you for a product I've used daily for 10+ years!
And this is yet another good lesson for would be angel investors AND startup employees - DropBox to me was one of the most obvious product-market-fit startups with a great, competent founding team, A+ quality investors etc and it still took them 13 YEARS to go public and drive liquidity for founders, early employees, etc.
Readit News
And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with!
Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)
I like to think that I've gained a lot of perspective over the last 11 years; it's pretty clear to me that point #1 was short-sighted and exhibited a lot of tunnel vision. Looking back, though, I still think that thread was a reasonable exchange. My 2nd and 3rd points were fair, and I conceded much of point 1 to you after your reply (which was very high quality).
Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now in seeing how well you were able to execute. Kudos on that!
Congrats on your success! I wish you nothing but the best going forward!
Also, one thing I think people ignore is that BrandonM's comment was notable because it was voted to the top.
Which means that the people reading and voting on the thread, at the time, thought it was the best reply. But no one will ever point a finger at them, because they're anonymous. They also have less chance for self-reflection - who remembers an upvote?
I thought dropbox was a great idea from the very beginning... but I've been repeatedly amazed at the scale of the opportunity. People working cross-mobile/desktop must be a big part of it.
You seem like a great person & I wish you well with your own projects.
I think the typical HN user has morphed a bit at this point(re: crypto) but it’s great to be able to reference the totally aloof engineer that existed at that time.
However, the fact it has not died and is in fact 'a success' from the capitalist side of things, means what I think about filesharing being an OS service, doesn't really matter. Microsoft and Apple and all the other vendors are asleep at the wheel - but it has to be said that its just a distro upgrade away from being the end of Dropbox for a lot of people.
“Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn’t that exactly what Hailstorm [2001] was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.
And what is this Windows Live Mesh?
It’s a way to synchronize files.
Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
Has he made any public comment on synchronizing files / killer app in the intervening years?
I think it's interesting to go back to that thread, look at what the author (BrandonM) has done since then and learn some important lessons about being able to step outside of your own head to see the bigger picture.
Looks like he's still working for another company and has an unfinished blog (http://shebang.brandonmintern.com) but he seems like a really smart guy. The takeaway I got from the thread is "Don't be afraid to try something and finish it".
You guys had a lot of courage and perseverance to take an idea that people trivialized, have a working implementation, build a company around it and then IPO.
It's very easy for tech people to say, "But it's totally easy, you just [long string of steps that they've learned over the course of years]." It takes time to learn that no, easy things for you can be hard for others. If you want them to use the thing, you have to make it dead easy. I note that Apple made a shit-ton of money because so many tech companies (e.g., MP3 player makers) refused to really learn this lesson.
His second point, that USB sticks were still necessary, wasn't bad, just not forward-looking enough. He wrote it before the introduction of the iPhone, after all. But back then, high-quality connectivity was much less common. Then, Dropbox would have worked better for some than others.
And his third point was correct. Charging cash money is important.
So really, it's not a bad comment for a CS student. And it reminds me that I'm very thankful that most of my youthful opinion-spouting happened in offline and pre-web contexts.
Deleted Comment
if every Brandon out there was able to see the big picture, Dropbox would have had A LOT more competition, when Dropbox was still in the early stages. It would have made it a lot harder for Dropbox to succeed, right?
So in a way, the fact that the millions of Brandon's out there who think curlftpfs is the best, and are not capable of seeing the true value of Dropbox--perhaps that was a positive thing for Dropbox, right? Otherwise they might have tried to make a similar product and competed with you years ago :)
Unlike investing in the stock market, where you want to hit lots of singles, angel/startup investing is all about hitting home runs as the vast majority of the time you are going to strikeout.
Edit: someone posted an archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20100817162301/http://dl-web.dro...
One of the highlights of my MIT experience was going to your ~yearly tech talks that you did at the beginning of the fall semester. I’m excited to see Dropbox continue to grow as a company. :)
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
2. He misunderstood initial description of Drop; that the files will reside locally even if you lose internet connection you still can access those.
3. He was wrong about "viral" but right about inability to "make money off of this" :)
Congrats on listing!
[1] https://m.wikihow.com/Do-a-Keg-Stand
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
"Why would anyone want to keep downloading the same content over and over again when you could just ftp it to your machine?"
Deleted Comment
lol
>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.
That is the epitome of not getting it.
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!
"he suggested Drew delete his Demo Day presentation in the middle of giving it, and then recover it from Dropbox and keep going. Usually we don’t suggest gags like this during pitches, but this one made people pay attention."
Assuming no subsequent investments, dilution, selling of shares, etc.
And this is yet another good lesson for would be angel investors AND startup employees - DropBox to me was one of the most obvious product-market-fit startups with a great, competent founding team, A+ quality investors etc and it still took them 13 YEARS to go public and drive liquidity for founders, early employees, etc.