Steve Jobs told Drew Houston Dropbox was a feature, not a product
Drew Houston · Dropbox: Drew Houston · Nov 9, 2020 · at 38:16
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston recounts his 2009 meeting with Apple CEO Steve Jobs after declining Apple's acquisition overtures.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Drew Houston
Cloud file sync only became a mainstream consumer need after the iPhone
“This only became a mainstream need after the iPhone because most people had one computer at home, but then suddenly with a smartphone, everybody's got two. And for the first time, you need to get stuff back and forth very easily, and the only way to do that is…”
Dropbox accidentally became cash flow positive shortly after its public launch
“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.”
Drew Houston declined Mark Zuckerberg's 2009 attempt to acquire Dropbox
“He was interested potentially in acquiring Dropbox. We were still building, so we weren't really interested in that.”
Searching public human knowledge is easier than searching internal company knowledge
“We live in a world where it's easier to search all of human knowledge than my company's knowledge.”
Drew Houston named Dropbox after shared folders used at LAN parties
“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…”