Think what you will of their writing and opinions, but one thing The Economist get right is that they don't assume you know what things are, it's spelled out at the first mention. So first mention of PE would be: private equity (PE).
Or
> And Sequoia’s (a venture capital firm) investment in Dropbox was a great one, second to Airbnb in Fund 12 (another venture capital firm).
Its OK for articles to be a short few paragraphs with a smaller audience rather than a few long pages and explain every single thing at a basic level to try reach everyone
I agree this is true for the economist readers, but I clicked the link thinking this was about how Dropbox (in a company) is an obvious target for privilege escalation (for red teams and hackers), which also sounds plausible and interesting.
But I don't mind, after a few seconds of loading my mistake was obvious.
But this is being shared outside that context. Deciphering acronyms for the HN titles would seem like an okay start. There are several common use alternatives. Wouldn't hurt to be explicit.
Probably. But I like reading a lot of articles I'm not the target audience for, because I like learning things. Writing it like this excludes a ton of people who might not already be insiders to become insiders.
Maybe that's a choice, a way to keep knowledge away from outsiders, to feel better about knowing that people who read your article are cool like you, and that's fine. But if the goal is to educate and reach a broader audience, it isn't effective.
OK, but the definition of not being the target audience is you bear that burden, not the author. If the author bore that burden, you'd be the target audience!
the only PE relevant to hackers is PE32 file format for exe files
> But a lesson from this story is twofold: when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it. Economically, the return from a capital efficiency standpoint would be much better. Second, public companies that are truly just a feature never give you great returns.
Dropbox was a private company when Jobs offered to buy it for $800 million in 2009. Drew Houston (the founder) has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation since then and is today worth over $2 billion. He's also on the board of Meta.
So the point about investing in companies that are features might be a decent (if obvious) one for retail investors looking at public equities, but the lesson here isn't "when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it".
Though I think it fair to speculate that if he had taken the deal he would likely have more money today, at the cost of less status
But being the CEO of a well-known startup has a lot of status benefits compared to just being rich. And that's all what matters at this level of wealth.
And it gives you a sense of purpose, which we all need.
The point is that different people have different priorities, and retiring in your mid-twenties to enjoy your many millions is a perfectly reasonable choice.
When you start out with effectively nothing, you are forced to take a day job while you build something out on nights and weekends. The pressure is high to take early investment - and essentially work for your early investors, instead of working for yourself, just so that you can work on your baby full-time.
When you have a war chest, then many more capital-intensive opportunities are available to you. Want to build hardware (i.e. without crowdsourcing)? Factories? Pharmaceutical R&D? Training open-weight LLMs? Hell, you want to start an airline? Take your pick, and I'm barely scratching the surface.
It's hilarious to think that an $800 million exit would force you to never work again. That's crazy. It only forces you not to work on that company you exited from. The exit enables you to work on almost anything else you can think of. You put $25 million away in close-to-zero-risk investments to let you live off quite an insane amount of interest (even if you only get 2% interest, that's $500k/year) and then have $775 million to work with.
And you can still achieve things during retirement through adventurous travel or philanthropy.
1. 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.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. 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?
This is exactly what I've done: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
Not quite sure how the author reached that conclusion, considering – by their own calculations – Dropbox is profitable, rich on cash flow and worth at minimum 10x what Steve Jobs offered for it.
What you're missing is that he was able to build his company, run it for years, get paid well and step down from the CEO position with a stake worth a couple of billion dollars.
You can't always reduce everything to money. Lots of entrepreneurs, perhaps the majority, would consider Drew's outcome to be the ideal one: you get to do what you love, raise your baby and earn a fortune.
Not everyone wants to sell out, start a family office and spend their days on a boat pondering what the purpose of life is and what they should do next.
Reaction to fragmede as I am rate limited:
You don’t have to travel full time.
And yes working at Dropbox is boring. Dropbox stores files. Things haven’t changed since 2009. There is not any product growth. They still store files. 95% of their daily operations is sales. That doesn’t sound enticing to me.
It might be difficult to believe, but some people enjoy running companies just as much as others enjoy traveling the world. Different people have different interests and goals in life. Neither is wrong.
Also, we can't just have people who retire as soon as they have enough money to travel around the world for the rest of their lives, we would only have inexperienced people in many important positions. 3 million is probably enough for that, if you don't demand too much luxury, and that's close to 1% of US families.
This feels like a judgement purely in financial numerology. Is bigger of necessity "better" for every founder?
Work didn’t like it as Dropbox was new/unknown and eventually banned us from using it. This was about 15 years ago and the only way to share files between colleagues was to manually upload a file to their shared drive (through a browser) and then ask your colleague to go download it.
Works Dropbox was replaced by Microsoft. My personal Dropbox was replaced by Google Drive, and then by iCloud.
Nice to know Dropbox is still make lots of cash really. They started it all.
Actually box.com was first (launched as box.net in 2005), and Dropbox was founded in 2007.
BrandonM on April 5, 2007 | parent | context | favorite | on: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive
I have a few qualms with this app:
1. 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.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. 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?
As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.
Being bought by PE is a death sentence. Maybe drawn out by years, but a death sentence none the less.
Prices goes up, quality of service goes down. After few years, everything goes down the drain, PE and their execs can't figure out what went wrong.
Often they do sell it for parts, or they enshitify the hell out of it to squeeze revenue from loyal customers. Not necessarily because it's the optimal strategy, but because truly fixing a business is hard and these are decent shortcuts from their perspective.
But that's not a given, sometimes they do truly turn it around for the better.
Maybe we’re Notion/Evernote? Buy Hackpad, plow a ton of money into Paper (which was legitimately good), then quietly deprioritize it.
Maybe we’re actually some kind of enterprise document productivity suite? Buy HelloSign. Plow a bunch of money into a desktop app. Pull more plugs.
A lot of smart people were trying. We made a lot of bets (too many?). None of them proved to be a second act, and the competitors eventually caught up.
From the customer perspective it is a pretty important product.
The customer may not be aware of this until it is too late. It becomes tempting to store your data with application providers because it seems more "cost effective".
I try to avoid storing a lot of data with services that offer online storage as part of a product. For instance image storage coupled with image processing applications. Because I really care about my pictures, so I don't want to have my choice of image processing software dictate where I store them. There's also the fact that I do not trust the company that makes the software I use for image processing. I use their software because in the pre-enshittification era of their business, I got used to using it. Switching has a cost.
Now the image processing software I use is a bit of a liability. They haven't done anything that is so bad that I'm motivated to ditch them, but it feels like they are one bad product decision away from me jumping ship.
I haven't looked at Dropbox from an investment point of view, so I can't say if their business is growing, declining, still sound, or just unsexy because it is undramatic. Perhaps there has been drama and I didn't notice. But from a user point of view it is really attractive to have storage services that are JUST storage.
I find real value in not having storage tied to Google, Microsoft, Adobe and whatnot. And if that makes Dropbox boring: good. They should be utterly dull.
Make a product that solves a sufficiently common problem, and make it extremely high quality. Want more growth? Find another problem to solve and launch a product in that space.
As for Steve Jobs and selling out, Apple bought FingerWorks. That's how they ended up with excellent, multi-touch touchpads while the rest of the computing world suffered. Make great products (or "features") and never sell out to soulless megacorps.
As a result, the problem you solve have to be sufficiently complex with a huge surface to guarantee platform operators don’t cannibalize you. If LLMs weren’t an active area of expensive research and advancement, for example if it was just a couple of models with a simple defined interface, majority of people would use whatever one came on their device or OS. Dropbox had a novelty for its file syncing simplicity and it took few years for platforms to catch up. it was able to establish a market share, but the scale of the others dwarfs it. If LLM advancement hits a wall an all models converge, we might find Apple, Microsoft and Google becoming the most dominant consumer AI providers with other experiences building on top of them, like how apps do today with these storage services.
Large behemoths struggle in innovating new and novel ideas, but they can execute on well defined ones. For example, imagine if something like Tailscale’s use case becomes very common place. You would have “Apple Network”, “Google Chrome Connect” and “Windows Copilot Device Active Link”
> ICloud went on to become a bigger business than Dropbox
And a worse app/service and that's saying something because Dropbox isn't even a shell of what it used to be. I'd agree with Jobs' observation of original Dropbox being a feature. But not any more.
As for "take it".. really?
> The product has largely remained the same
It seems to be coming from someone who hasn't been using Dropbox, at least not of late.
Also, I think their paying users used to be 2-3%. So yes PEs like this kind of chance of quick squeeze and squeeze and dry it and then leave it to die. I would reckon PEs would see a lot of one-time juice making opportunity here.
I've always wondered why not everyone's using it. People are largely ignorant about their privacy and security it seems.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive | https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash