In episode II of�Erick Schonfeld’s�Founder Stories�interview with�Dropbox�co-founder,�Drew Houston, Houston describes how releasing a demo video to Hacker News during Dropbox’s early days catapulted his company into elite company.
“I hoped that the response would be good so that Paul [Graham] and Y Combinator would see it.” The response was better than good. Houston says the video held the top spot at “Hacker News for a couple of days” and it turns out the right people were watching. One viewer was�Arash Ferdowsi, who was so impressed that he paired up with�Houston as a partner. Houston also credits the video with helping him receive almost immediate and valuable feedback.
Asked if he was worried about copycats stealing the concept at the time – Houston responds, “It is easy for me to explain the idea, it is actually really hard to do it.”
Below, Houston takes us inside Y Combinator and describes how�Paul Graham�weighed in with key advice while Houston was under the Y Combinator wing.�”Our first sort of marketing attempt was like throwing spaghetti at a wall …we really struggled in terms of how to articulate this with investors because we had never really done that before, and Paul was really helpful to us in terms of distilling down the idea into a much shorter and sort of more compact presentation.”
Advice in hand, the team went before a room full of investors at Demo Day, where you get “waived like a piece of steak” and hit it out of the park by walking them through an admittedly risky demo that could have wiped-out their entire PowerPoint presentation.
Having survived the high-wire act, Houston says today, “Dropbox users save a billion files every three days.”
Make sure to watch the entire video for additional insights and be sure to catch the first episode of Schonfeld’s interview with Houston�here.
Past episodes of Founder stories featuring Eric Ries, Fred Wilson and Dustin Moskovitz are here.
Episode III of this interview is coming up.
Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a...
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Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with "good" ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005.
Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...
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Drew Houston is CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, and has led Dropbox’s growth from a simple idea to a service relied upon by millions around the world. Drew leads Dropbox’s activities, and is actively involved in its business and product decisions.
Before founding Dropbox, Drew attended MIT where he studied computer science. He took a quick leave from school to form Accolade, an online SAT prep startup, and also worked as a software engineer for Bit9.
After graduating from...
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Paul Graham is a partner at Y Combinator.
He is also the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first ASP, which in 1998 became Yahoo! Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters.
Graham has a B.A. from Cornell. He earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences (specializing in computer...
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After studying at MIT, Arash Ferdowsi founded Dropbox with Drew Houston. Dropbox was a TechCrunch50 finalist in 2008.
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