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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that counter-intuitive, though? A sample of two "rock stars" doesn't seem to be enough to draw conclusions from it.

For instance, whereas Airbnb can admittedly be seen as a questionable idea (but not outright bad), Dropbox (the idea, before implementation) sounds like a very good idea. Maybe not a $7b idea, but still very good.

Of course, among the YC funded startups, there may be a lot of ideas that sounded bad at first; but if all those startups are in fact financially irrelevant, should they be used to try to build a theory of success?

- - -

It's interesting to learn that if YC funded 10x more startups they would be just as successful (and maybe more, since there could be a big success in the startups that are left out) -- it means that if the selection process rate is around 10%, YC could do without it entirely, with no significant effect to its bottom line.

Also, I took this picture this summer http://i.imgur.com/B30hL.jpg

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Dropbox (the idea, before implementation) sounds like a very good idea. Maybe not a $7b idea, but still very good

I don't think so. My first encounter with DropBox was very similar to my first encounter with Google... but it was "Oh look - another way to share files" rather than "Oh look - another search engine".

Or indeed many, many people's reaction to the release of the first iPod ("Oh look - another mp3 player").

Predicting their current level of success from the point of initial investment - pretty close to impossible without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Their success depending so much on how well they executed and the smart changes of direction that those companies made along the way.

(with, maybe, the exception of the iPod which was a bit more obvious for those that paid attention to iTunes)

E.g. Would DropBox be anywhere close to their current position if they hadn't figured out their freemium / recommendation based model for customer acquisition?

The reason dropbox wasn't an obvious winner was that it had so few features.

"I can't sync more than one folder? It syncs everything to every device? (not anymore). It doesn't use WebDAV? Oh well, at least it's simple. I'll just use it until something better comes along."

And they win.

Of course they have plenty of features, an API and much more flexibility that before if you want it, but none of that complicate the core function - a directory that syncs.

Although I predicted the iPod would fail (...!!), I strongly disagree with you about Dropbox.

I dreamed about something like Dropbox before Dropbox existed; I always have had many different machines that needed to be "synchronized" by hand. I carried around hard drives, and Iomega disks and whatnot, and used "Beyond compare" to sync all of those and it was a nightmare.

The recommendation model of Dropox had nothing to do with me adopting it -- I didn't receive a recommendation and didn't send any. But I was very excited when I was first able to use it, and still find it amazing.

DropBox is awesome - and I use it myself :-)

Before I used it DropBox was just another file sharing/syncing software. One of a whole stack of 'em that all seemed to suck in one way or another.

I'm sure that they all promised that they would be bringing cloud file storage to the masses as part of the initial pitch.... and I tried them all because, like you, I wanted this service before any of 'em existed.

Why did DropBox win and all of those others failed (or, at least, didn't succeed so wildly)? Why was it obvious to investors that DropBox was going to win, and the others "fail"?

We obviously agree on everything... except the "Dropbox promise". I don't think Dropbox had any competitor when it was founded and I'm not sure it has any now.

Dropbox is not another file sharing software; the application form to YC doesn't even mention file sharing:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html

Dropbox isn't even about cloud storage.

Dropbox synchronizes your files between your different computers -- silently, automatically, without you doing anything except turn those machines on.

Nobody did this before Dropbox and still nobody is doing it now (except maybe AeroFS, which is much more difficult to setup and use -- but certainly not iCloud or any other "solution" that is restricted to one OS or company, and certainly no backup solution either).

That's why it was a fantastic idea... which has since been coupled with a brilliant execution, yes. But the idea itself was amazing.

I'm sure there were companies that were doing the same thing as Dropbox at the time that Dropbox was released. To name one example - Microsoft's SkyDrive (apparently called Windows Live Folders at the time), released either around the same time or prior to DropBox, depending on your definition. It's been a while since I've used it, but I remember the functionality being roughly equivalent between the two products (in that they fulfill the base use case of silent synching between two computers)

That isn't to say Dropbox didn't blow them out of the water in regards to execution, but it wasn't an idea that was completely without precedent. Ideas rarely are, even if they seem like that in retrospect due to one company out executing everyone to an insane degree.

> but certainly not iCloud or any other "solution" that is restricted to one OS or company,

This part is important. The Microsoft service only synced to your other Microsoft things. iCloud only syncs to your Apple things. Dropbox syncs everywhere.

Was it obvious? I always thought DropBox won because of its built-in viral marketing through sharing and the streamlined installation + web frontend. But was that before or after investors began pouring money into it?

Frankly, I still don't understand why everyone's so excited about dropbox.

Go to pretty much any college and see how students share files.

Dropbox is to file sharing, as facebook was to social networking as Google was to search.

When I try to IM a person a picture, they may be on any one of a dozen IM systems (almost all of the compatible with Adium) - and my success in DMing them a picture is <10% trying to get through firewall. Email used to be my goto approach, but that took a bit of the spontaneity out of it.

Dropbox gives me the ability to drop an image on our shared folder and "real time" have it pop up on their side. I do this all the time, and it's just one of many, many common uses of Dropbox.

Easily the most useful new utility that I've added in the past three years to my OS X system.

But - your perspective on Dropbox - is precisely why it was so hard to predict - even after using it, who on earth would have know that it would have taken over the file sharing space so quickly? And _everyone_ thought google was going to get into this space much, much earlier.

As it is - on the surface, google offers better value and more space for your money - but I don't have a single friend who has switched over to their shared drive. We've all stayed on Dropbox because of the network effect (we've all got shared files via Dropbox - don't want to add yet another file sharing system to slow down our computer.)

We'll see if that works out in the long term - it certainly did with search.

There speaks the man who never had to share files with twenty different people, each using different computing platforms and of varying technical competence.

Cross-platform internet file sharing in a transparent way is a (surprisingly?) hard problem. Before Dropbox there were many companies who had tried to make a success of it and they had all failed[1] in one way or another. (Not cross-platform enough, not seamless enough, reliance on ads for income etc etc.) DropBox succeeded because they took that hard problem and made it look easy.

For me, Dropbox beautifully solves four hard problems:

1. Keeping all my documents in sync between several computers, so that I can pick up work on any one of them at any time

2. Off-site incremental backup

3. Sharing and working on a set of project files with non-technically-minded collaborators

4. Sending and receiving large files

Moreover, it just sits there quietly solving problems 1 - 3 day-in, day-out, and I never have to think about it.

I have to think about it all the time. It flatly fails to serve my gaming club. We have a Gb of card images for our card games. Almost every club member cannot share these files, since they run out of space.

Think about it. Sharing files between 25 club members, using our own bandwidth, our own disk space. And Dropbox thinks we should pay them big bucks for this. For what? Storing our files on their server, insecurely? If they had an option to stop doing that, I would select it.

SO no, it doesn't solve any hard problems for us.

Well, OK. The fact that it doesn't solve any problems for you has little bearing on the excitement of those who, like me, find that it solves many of their problems.

The reason that storing files on their server (and using their bandwidth, as well as yours) is important is that it means I don't have to keep all my synced computers on at all times. That's a big deal for me.

It sounds like yours is another problem, which Dropbox is not well adapted to. Perhaps you'd be better off with PowerFolder or similar.

Just posting my experience, like others here do all the time. Another example is instructive.

My problem is, Dropbox scales the cost as the number of people looking at a folder increases. As an Engineer I see that as marketing, their cost doesn't increase incrementally in this case. It seems unnecessary and blocks me.

Btw you would only have to keep 1 synced computer on, some of the time. Not a big deal actually. And why keep my data around on their server after we're synced? Simpler for them I suppose, but insecure for me.

I could try and get everybody in the club to install another tool; might look into that, thx.

Because IT JUST WORKS. Dropbox is multiplatform, fast, almost zero-hassle to install and maintain and free (up to a size limit). What more could you ask?

I often work on my Macbook on the train, then when I get to the office I switch to a Win7 PC and continue working on those same files. There is zero hassle and I can hardly imagine a better solution. ()

As a bonus I get access to all my files from my smartphone and ipad. And with the ipad being such a pain in the ass to synchronize, you really need some kind of dropbox-like solution.

() - Maybe if you did all your work inside VMWare and had the state of the OS image automatically synced between computers that would be a nicer solution... Then you would not have to close your project files on computer #1 and reopen them on computer #2.

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