dhouston

there are some other signs they don't really get it, as far as dealing with students. the most obvious one to me is requiring teams to be on site in lexington. first, commuting from boston or cambridge is a pain if you don't have a car (there's certainly no T or commuter rail, maybe bus or bike if you're extraordinarily motivated), and second, the hours of a VC certainly aren't compatible with the hours of a startup hacker unless they plan to have kids roaming around the office park at 2am (right..)

it'll be interesting to see how these summer programs continue to segment themselves to accommodate niches that are generally excluded by yc (techstars/single founders, highland/students, etc., ) most amusingly the "mistakes" :)

couple of clarifications :)

1) i have other people working with me on this. i did prototype it alone, but i don't intend to be a single founder. i won't belabor it here, but it's really a good idea to get other people on board and the reasons yc and everyone have for not encouraging single founders are valid. your odds are much worse, and playing superman gets old after a while when you're trying to do everything -- and it's more fun to have more people involved and excited about the idea anyway.

2) re: applying: i am applying for this round, but actually didn't apply for funding for the last wfp. however, i did apply 2 years ago (with a cofounder) with another idea and wasn't selected.

haha, great (tragicomic) headline. but i think this is an important lesson. api/platform providers and the startups that build on top don't really have aligned interests when it comes to building companies. mashup makers (e.g. frappr/platial) are basically free R&D for the platform (google), and if a startup creates a mashup with a lot of value, it's unlikely the startup will be able to capture it -- or conversely it's doubtful that google will be able to keep its hands out of the cookie jar and sit back while the profits go to the startup (yes, google could acquire the startup but it certainly isn't obligated to.)

microsoft left dozens if not hundreds of startups in its wake this way (cherry picking good ideas and bundling them with the next version of office/windows/visual studio), and i'm sure there are more contemporary examples in the making (amazon could do this with S3/EC2, e.g. by selling an "s3drive" or other value-added services.)

it's too bad to see this though; it's a big disincentive to innovate on top of these platforms.

1. re: the first part, many people want something plug and play. and even if they were plug and play, the problem is that the user experience (on windows at least) with online drives generally sucks, and you don't have disconnected access.

windows for sure doesn't hide latency well (CIFS is bad, webdav etc. are worse), and most apps are written as if the disk was local, and assume, for example, accessing a file only takes a few ms. if the server is 80ms away, and you do 100 accesses (e.g. the open file common dialog listing a directory and poking files for various attributes or icons) serially, suddenly your UI locks up for _seconds_ (joel spolsky summarizes this well in his article on leaky abstractions.) ditto saving any file; you change one character in your 20mb word file and hit save, and your upstream-capped 40k/sec comcast connection is hosed for 8 minutes. sure for docs of a few hundred k it's fine, but doing work on large docs on an online drive feels like walking around with cinder blocks tied to your feet. anyway, the point of that rant was that dropbox uses a _local_ folder with efficient sync in the background, which is an important difference :)

2. true, if you're both not at your computer and on another computer without net access, this won't replace a usb drive :) but the case i'm worried about is being, for example, on a plane, and dropbox will let you get to the most recent version of your docs at the time you were last connected, and will sync everything up when you get back online (without you having to copy anything or really do anything.)

3. there are some unannounced viral parts i didn't get to show in there :) it'll be a freemium model. up to x gb free, tiered plans above that.

nope. informally came up with and tossed around 6 or 7 ideas at the same time -- not so much coding as investigating/talking to potential customers and bouncing them off other friends and entrepreneurs. this was crucial -- ideas don't really fall out of the sky, they evolve.

there were several times where i'd get really excited about one idea -- like pacing in my living room at 5:30am excited -- and then 5 days later find out (via a different set of search terms or something) there were 3 other people doing the same thing, with a head start and more money.

ultimately they say scratch your own itch -- this was a problem (syncing a 3gb file across several computers efficiently) i routinely had working on a prior company i had started and i was frustrated that no one had solved it well, and it turned out to be more promising than my original company :)

yup; i'd be happy to talk offline about it; shoot me an email at drew@getdropbox.com .

thanks :)

a linux port is doable (mac will come first) -- everything's written in python and was designed from the outset to be portable. although this isn't the initial focus of dropbox, a linux port would be interesting for maintaining small web sites or web apps -- instead of using scp/sftp or equivalent you could just modify the files on your desktop and have them synced to your web host.

data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like what mozy does.)

it should degrade gracefully and work without admin rights; in addition you can download (and soon, upload) via the web interface if you're not at one of your computers.

yup -- i didn't get to mention it, but a big piece of dropbox is that it's a local/"normal" folder that's synced in the background -- you can work on your files offline (that, among other things, drove me nuts about typical online drives) and get local IO speeds (good for photoshop, film, etc.)

oh, and a mac port is coming :)

right -- but if your employment docs say, for example, that your employer owns all IP you create including stuff you do on your own time and out of the office (yes, a draconian clause, but not that uncommon!), you can be in big trouble if your startup takes off and your former employer is legally entitled to (i.e. you don't own) the IP you created -- either your employer can try to lay claim to what you've built or your investors/acquirer will find out during the due diligence process and not move forward as a result.

that said, i'm not a lawyer, and i'm sure others can provide related nightmare stories -- but everything i've heard indicates it's really better to not screw around, and to have a paper trail indicating that you own your IP.

-drew

this is dangerous advice -- regardless of whether or not enforcement on these agreements is likely or possible, you will spook investors/acquirers if you don't do your due diligence in this area and don't have the necessary documents to prove ownership of your IP.

-drew

agree with above, and just went through this a week or two ago. i got a letter from my company saying they have no ownership stake in what i'm doing (an extra complication was that i'm working part time in the office and part time on my idea as part of an agreement we struck.) it cost me like $1,000 out of pocket to get an attorney and a letter drafted saying my employer has no "right, title, or interest" in my new venture and related patents/applications/copyrights/etc., but in the grand scheme of things it's a no-brainer to make sure the IP around the idea/new business is clean.

if you have questions about this shoot me an email at houston at alum.mit.edu ... it was a pretty straightforward process.

-drew