Dropbox

“So fast forward to today, and Y Combinator has funded 632 startups that now have a combined valuation of over twenty billion dollars, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly, and Stripe.”

“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.”

“I think where it gets a little harder is you have to simultaneously have thick skin and be able to tune things like that out. But you also have kind of thin skin, and if your customers are unhappy or your team's unhappy, you have to respond to that.”

“Everybody loves the idea of focus, but what focus actually means is like shooting stuff you love and turning down things you know you can make work.”

“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.”

“The sort of origin story of the company was when I was riding the Chinatown bus from Boston, New York, and forgot my thumb drive. Couldn't get anything done on the trip.”

“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…”

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

“Your job as CEO changes every six months, every year, every couple years. Just nobody tells you that. And in fact, some of the things that made you good at the prior stage are becoming a hindrance for the next stage.”

“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.”

“Filecoin is not to be seen as a Dropbox replacement, although there will be Dropbox-like things that build on top of Filecoin. I think you should think about Filecoin as replacing cloud storage. So it's something that Dropbox would use.”

“I actually like solo founders. I know that's an unconventional thing in the Valley, but Drew was initially a solo founder with Dropbox. And a lot of other great companies were as well, or had one founder who really drove the project through.”

“A lot of famous investors, I won't name, passed on Dropbox at a two million dollar valuation, saying, the space is too crowded.”

“The seed rounds today, Are bigger than, like, the Series A that Dropbox and Airbnb did with Sequoia, which I think was roughly a mil each.”

“Like say Dropbox and Airbnb, they took like over a year to go from Demo Day to their Series A. So you don't have to actually rush into things at Demo Day. There's a lot of room in the post seed world where you can kind of invest like maybe at a slightly higher…”

“The best companies will create a market. So if you look at sort of what Weebly's done, if you look at what Airbnb's done, if you look at what Dropbox has done, all, all companies have created their own market. I say this because by definition here, market rese…”

“We raised 650 K on a two million dollar pre-money valuation. So 2.65 post. That was considered above average, slightly above average. We were all very jealous of Dropbox, who had raised a five million dollar post money valuation”

“Frankly, I think the really big product market fit moments for every company are pretty unmistakable. Like, the Dropbox founders have called it stepping on a landmine. I just, I really don't think you can mistake it. It really happens in a way that you lose co…”

“Dropbox raised their first round at like a two or three million dollar valuation. And it worked out okay for Drew and team, right? They won IPO this year.”

“Some of the best companies we've ever funded happened when either there was a full downturn or at least a blip.”

“So when Dropbox launched, there were already about 20 cloud-based file storage companies. Dropbox was like the 20th company in its space to launch.”

“Drew applied to YC as a single founder, and he was actually initially rejected and told to go get a co-founder.”

“They sent Drew, the founder, a term sheet. They faxed it to him. Anybody even remember what a fax machine is? They faxed him a term sheet with a blank valuation.”