The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“He was like, alright, well, in so many ways, he's like, well, you guys are a feature, not a product. You know, we're gonna have to build our competitor, and I guess we'll have to get to work on, you know, in so many words, killing you guys.”

“In self-driving they have like level five full autonomy, like totally self-driving human out of the loop, but a lot of the commercial value gets created at like the level one, level two, like, all right, let's give people a working search box. Let's actually g…”

“Well, and then I think that the big thing our customers really want or where Dash fits in there versus Glean or some other companies is like, you don't have to spend six months and 50 grand to get started.”

“The products launched, but you would never be able to look at our numbers and see when that happened.”

“People sort of skip to like level five full autonomy, or we're going to have like an autonomous knowledge worker that's just going to take, that's going to, and then we won't need humans anymore kind of Projection that that's going to take a long time, but the…”

“There's also, like, non-NVIDIA stacks, like the Grok, or Cerebris, or some of these custom silicon companies that are super interesting, and all, and outperformed the NVIDIA stack in terms of latency and things like that.”

“And I think as a civilization, we're going to like, Hopefully in, you know, five or 10 years be like, man, we took this like crazy detour where we basically hooked up that brain power to this thing that was just like burning off half of it as friction with our…”

“Copilot doesn't know about your Slack and Gemini doesn't know about your Salesforce.”

“Going from, you know, maybe seven, six million valuation in 2007 to twenty seven million in 2008 to then four billion valuation in 2011, you know, being on magazine covers, just that whole experience was wild.”

“Steve Jobs was like on stage in 2011 announcing iCloud, calling out Dropbox by name as something that will be viewed as archaic.”

“I killed carousel, killed mailbox. Went all in on productivity. To some extent that was an easy, a relatively easy decision because most of our subscribers, you know, 80% of people paying for Dropbox were using it at work”

“When we launched dash, we usually do like a press Thing. You know, conventional press, tech press, we got like almost no coverage for it. And yet all the stuff we did on social or going direct was like way, way, way more impactful.”

“In 2007 too, like we, instead of hiring PR firms and buying AdWords and stuff, we were creating these like viral videos and we were using math, you know, using math from epidemiology to create these viral loops. In a lot of ways, Dropbox took that transplanted…”

“Most of the founder CEOs who've been at it for 1020 years plus I'm at 17. Like I almost all of them read voraciously.”

“A lot of Stuff that used to be in, you know, Word docs or Excel files, like, all that has tilted towards the browser, and that tilt is going to continue.”

“When we talked to customers, we found that there were like literally people In IT, whose jobs it is to, like, manually go through, log into each, like, log into Office, log into Workspace, log into each tool, and, like, go comb through, one by one, the links t…”

“I got an email from Paul saying, Hey, like your idea, but you need a co-founder. If you're going to get into YC.”

“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…”

“We were very careful to get the product right through the beta, and then at public launch, we turned on the paid version, and we sort of became accidentally cash flow positive after that, because it was just growing so quickly.”

“He was interested potentially in acquiring Dropbox. We were still building, so we weren't really interested in that.”

“Coming up with things like, ah, the referral program, and which had this two-side incentive where if I give you, if I tell you about Dropbox, you get free space, I get free space. That drove, like, 30% of our sign-ups for a while. Shared folders inherently vir…”

“We have half a million paying businesses on Dropbox, two and a half billion in revenue.”

“We put this video on dig and read it and our beta waiting list went from 5000 to 85,000 people overnight.”

“It was like Blackberry's and Nokia's best sales years happened in the lot, the years after launching the iPhone. So it doesn't, these things don't actually change immediately.”

“So a lot of what we did to make Dropbox successful is like, we took a lot of the consumer internet playbook. Applied it to business software from a virality and kind of ease of use standpoint.”

“So I made this demo video that actually hit the top of Hacker News for a couple of days in 2007.”

“When we were building Dropbox, like our team was only maybe 10, 15 people when we were reaching millions of people millions of customers.”

“One thing we would always do is everybody would set up a shared folder called a Dropbox. On their computer. So I'm like, maybe I should just call it Dropbox. And that was, it was really that I am conversation where, where I settled on the name and I'm just lik…”

“And then I posted my demo video to Hacker News, and it hit the top of Hacker News for like two days.”

“And I get a one-line email from Paul Grime. Saying, they like the idea, certainly liked your software, but you need a co-founder.”

“No, it was a series of conversations, you know, but not a lot, you know, it was like the equivalent of a few days. If you're, you know, a few coffee dates, basically, and I'm like, alright, I'm expecting to have to talk to the parents, and like, do all this st…”

“We had a handshake deal that night. So one business day turnaround.”

“Where Arash just said, hey, let's meet up, and we hung out in the Student Center for a couple hours, and he dropped out of school the next day.”

“Probably about, I'd say a couple months. It was six weeks, six to eight weeks. You know, when it's early you can make massive product, progress like that.”

“Some. I think they've done some analysis. That's, there's still stuff in there.”

“The team, I'm thinking about, you know, seven to seven million, we're probably fewer than, under 50 people.”

“Last number we published was two hundred million.”

“So I actually applied in 2005 to the first batch with that SAT prep company, Accolade and was rejected.”

“When I was in eighth grade, I think, I'd signed up to test this online game, so I started poking around under the hood of the game, and I found all these security vulnerabilities. And I emailed the developer. It really is over ICQ. I'm like, hey, you know, you…”

“We started recruiting the smartest people we knew from MIT as engineers. And so we would do these recruiting trips out there. Arash and I would go meet people in their dorms and pitched our first few engineers that way.”

“It stayed at the top of Hacker News for two days.”

“I had started another company at the time doing online SAT prep of all things.”