Thread: Dropbpox and a Drew - 4B Eval at 28 years old. An excellent read on Startup Business 101.

I encourage you to read this story and take from it what you will. This is the story of Drew Houston, who once upon a time forgot his USB thumb drive on a bus trip to NY, stuck with his laptop, and none of the files he needed (on his thumbdrive), he thought of Dropbox and instantly starting writing the code. Now evaluated at 4B, with Drew at about 600M on paper.

It's an impressive story, as well the interview (video) in the story. This is the same guy that turned Steve Jobs down for 800M cash on the spot for the technology and company.

Drew is a pretty cool cat not only to drink with, but to do business with. An Entrepreneur his entire life, there is something to be learned, if nothing less than inspiration of taking a simple idea and making it work. Literally.

Here's the beauty of it (IMO). He created a solution to a problem that nobody ever really knew existed or paid attention to.

Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup - Forbes

Enjoy-

Very nice read. thanks for sharing.

This was a good read, I love Dropbox, very useful!

Very cool story!

Thanks for this post, it's been a while since something interesting has been posted here.

Dropbox has done extremely well in managing its meteoric growth. But they now have a huge bullseye on them, with competitors that are more than capable of stealing away their market share. The $250M warchest, spent wisely, should help them to defend their turf. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually succumb to an acquisition offer that's too good to pass up.........

Agreed. Google and Apple are the players they'll go head to head with. And much like you say, with a war chest of 250M, they can do some damage in the vertical space. It's pretty blue blood to turn down 800M a year or so ago. It will be interesting to see where and what it develops to.

Impressive and inspiring.

Originally Posted by 2Props

Agreed. Google and Apple are the players they'll go head to head with. And much like you say, with a war chest of 250M, they can do some damage in the vertical space. It's pretty blue blood to turn down 800M a year or so ago. It will be interesting to see where and what it develops to.

I don't think it took much thought to turn down Apple's money in '09. Dropbox was growing rapidly, their burn rate was miniscule and they were flying high under the radar (yes, that's an oxymoron) b/c the big boys were focused on the enterprise end-users for most any cloud offering. Pretty sure that Drew also drew inspiration from the path that Facebook had taken of not selling out early.

As for competition, there's a bunch of "lesser names" like Microsoft gunning for them as well. Just watched Monday's episode of "Hawaii Five-0" on the DVR this evening, and Microsoft paid for product placement of SkyDrive several times. Amazon is also huge in the cloud space, and they have some strong cross-selling leverage b/c their EC2 offering is most companies' entry point into moving apps and infrastructure into the cloud (for better and worse).