The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Steve Jobs told Dropbox it was 'a feature, not a product' in 2009
“He was like, well, you guys are a feature, not a product. And now we're gonna have to like compete with you and kill you and you don't have distribution and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.”
Jason Lemkin: Low-growth SaaS 'zombies' like Dropbox near 40% margins
“You talk about zombies, but some of these zombies are approaching 40% operating margins, and look, it's not fun, I don't think it's fun to be running Dropbox today, ok, I don't think it's fun, I don't think it's anything like when Drew started, but they're app…”
O'Driscoll: Dropbox lacks a significant enterprise customer base compared to incumbents
“Your right to win is predominantly in your existing customer base, and ServiceNow is a big one, and Salesforce has a big one, and brutally in the enterprise, Dropbox doesn't.”
Levine: Sequoia's seed deals in Airbnb and Dropbox are history's best
“Two of the best deals of all time were seeds by Sequoia. I think an initial almost 600,000 dollar investment in Airbnb and a million dollar investment in Dropbox to get very large ownership positions.”
Lemkin: Dropbox is currently experiencing negative 1% annual growth
“Dropbox growing minus one percent a year is not crushing it, is it?”
Drew Houston: Sequoia's Mike Moritz closed Dropbox investment in one business day
“We met on a Friday. Pejman actually came with us to our pitch, which was apparently, which I learned later is extremely unorthodox. And then Mike Moritz, kind of the godfather of Sequoia came to our apartment on Saturday morning. We had a handshake deal on Mon…”
Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi interviewed every employee until 500+ headcount
“At Dropbox, we had this initiative to try to replace our final interviewer for a very long time has been the co-founder. Arash has been the co-founder. He interviewed every single person of the company until we were like 500 plus people.”
Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon all launched in seemingly small niche markets
“All of those companies look small in the beginning, you know, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, like the lists, you know, even Uber in the beginning, they all looked like they were going after something small in the beginning, Amazon just doing books.”
Dropbox Priced Its 2018 IPO Below Its Final Private Round Valuation
“And as we saw today with Dropbox, the IPO priced Below the last round valuation.”
Fushman: 70% of Dropbox users were located outside North America
“Dropbox had 70% of its users outside of North America, and the biggest chunk of those were in Europe”
Houston: Dropbox reached millions of customers with 10 to 15 employees
“When we were building Dropbox, like our team was only maybe 10, 15 people when we were reaching millions of people millions of customers.”
Partovi: Dropbox hosted intern Parents Weekend to convince family members
“Dropbox did a lot of innovation in terms of their intern program. For example, they had a parents weekend where they would invite the parents of the interns to come just so that they would feel comfortable.”
Malik: Early adoption of unique channels drove growth for Dropbox and Pinterest
“Dropbox, Dropbox, like with the referral program, Groupon and email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo, and just like a totally unhinged social media, right? All of them were kind of first to this concept and it really, really worked.”