YC Founders at Work Series: Dropbox interview today at 1:00pm PDT | Hacker News Reader

YC Founders at Work Series: Dropbox interview today at 1:00pm PDT

ycombinator.posterous.com

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For those you can't make it, I'll try to have a copy of the interview up on YC's blog by the end of the day!

Thanks! These are amazing. How will they tie into Founders at Work v2, the book?

Please ask if they're profitable and what % of users pay for their service.

we can't tell you that! :-)

Worth a shot :)

How come? Honest question. Would making that information available hurt your business somehow? Don't get me wrong, my typical impulse is to play numbers very close to the vest, but I'm realizing more and more that the real risk of transparency is usually pretty low.

I think I probably have enough transparency-is-groovy street cred to say this: they don't owe you a number, and they don't owe you an explanation, unless you are credibly trying to buy their company. (This is the generic "you", not the specific "you" here.)

I'm certainly not suggesting they owe me/anyone else anything! I was just curious what their rationale was for holding back. Maybe it's a really good reason I hadn't considered.

If they make a ton of money, then it might encourage competition. If they don't make any money, then it might be embarrassing.

Yes. If they aren't profitable, I would hesitate to pay them for my backups, since I might doubt they would be around N years from now.

It's the only part of an interview with Dropbox that would be interesting.

I have a business plan where I send out a dollar free to anyone who logs onto my site. With $5M of funding from YC I think I could also get 4million 'customers'

As it stands I use dropbox for free. When they/or their vc decides to start charging me I will switch to the next free competitor, this is not a business model.

Am I the only one who is getting the Weebly interview instead?

Curious to know if Dropbox intends to approach academic institutions in the near future to replace their current home directories/centralized file repositories.....

Can anyone else not hear Jessica's audio?

It's back on!

Sorry. Another technical difficulty on my side. For some reason my new microphone stopped working during the broadcast! When I post the mp3 file, I will also include my questions in the text.

I'm watching the live feed now, but unfortunately the audio is borked and Jessica is muted. Since I can't read lips, I'll have to hope this is fixed when it's put up later.

Edit: It's fixed.

very excited for this

I'd like to hear from Arash too.

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