Two people who never met created 'Dropbox' which earn hundreds of billions of yen


by Web Summit

" The Boss " updated weekly by BBC is a special content introducing business leaders around the world. In this The Boss, Drew Houston and Alaschi Feldosi who are founder of " Dropbox " which is a groundbreaking existence of cloud storage service are picked up, and two people who were not acquainted at the time of founding were found how It is told whether Dropbox was started.

How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44766487

Drew Houston, who is also the founder and CEO of Dropbox, was conceived of a cloud storage project in 2007 when he was 24 years old and was forced to secure funds for realization That's right. So I decided to rely on Y's combinator of Silicon Valley's most famous venture capital.

Although the Y combinator had a strong interest in Mr. Houston and Dropbox he conceived, he also hoped that Mr. Houston wanted to acquire a strong business partner at the same time. The argument of the Y combiner side comes from the rule of thumb of the past that the probability of a venture succeeds if it becomes possible to allocate one or more to a decision by two or more founders It was.

Mr. Houston who invented cloud storage service called Dropbox


by Web Summit

However, Mr. Houston at the time was conceiving Dropbox by himself, and friends seemed to have been unable to participate in business for various reasons. However, it is necessary to look for co-founder, that is, Mr. Houston needed to make "a completely unknown person" co-founder. In addition, it seems that the time limit for looking for co-founders was only two weeks.

While looking back at the time, Mr. Houston said "I felt like I received an email for admission from my favorite university, but the deadline for the application is only a couple of weeks and I had to decide on that day anymore "It is said that it was in a situation where it was inevitable.

And quickly moving Mr. Houston persuaded a 22 year old student named "Arash Feldosse" in just two hours of chat and let him quit school to join his own business. For Mr. Houston Mr. Feldoss said that he was a "friend of friends" relationship, but he seems to have never met before.

Houston and Mr. Feldosch first met, and Dropbox was founded in 2007. In just 11 years, Dropbox has grown to have a corporate value of more than 12 billion dollars (about 1.3 trillion yen), and Mr. Houston has three billion dollars (about 340 billion yen ), Mr. Feldos has been calculated as $ 1.3 billion (about 150 billion yen).


by rawpixel

Dropbox was born by two founders, but the idea seems to have come up when Mr. Houston came upon a bus from Boston to New York in late 2006. At that time, Mr. Houston just graduated from the Department of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was in the middle of going on a long trip by bus about six hours.

In this trip Mr. Houston seems to have thought about making business ideas, but he seems to have forgotten the stored memory stick at home at the time all of the business ideas that Mr. Houston was conceiving at the time, Remote storage that can be accessed online from anywhere "It seems that it became the trigger of the idea of ​​Dropbox. Later, in less than two weeks, Mr. Houston created a prototype for Dropbox and he came up with a name.


by Nathan Dumlao

Only a couple of months after Mr. Houston conceived the idea of ​​Dropbox and created a prototype, the Y combinator shows interest in Dropbox. And Mr. Houston met Mr. Feldosch who was studying electrical engineering and computer science at his own alma mater MIT, and they will be founders of Dropbox.

Mr. Houston talked about Mr. Feldoss' drawn into his business, "After seeing it for one or two hours at the student center, Arash (Mr. Feldossi) was leaving school the following week." "Looking back It was a pretty crazy act ...... I'm sure Arash 's parents were planning another plan for him, but Arash was really excited about starting Dropbox. " I am talking.


by
Martin Lafrance


And with investment from Y combinator, Dropbox will start service in 2008. Early Dropbox seems to have created a promotion movie for discussion sites and bulletin boards like Reddit and Slashdot to attract customers. It was said that it appealed the service to influencers in the technical field, expecting many users to actively speak about Dropbox. This promotion activity was successful, and the number of Dropbox users jumped from about 5000 people to 75,000 people in a few days. Furthermore, it seems that the number of users has expanded to about 10 to 200,000 people in about 10 days.

After that, Mr. Houston and the human team formulated a user introduction system that introduced incentives, and the number of users will increase dramatically. This "user introduction system with introduced incentives" was that if existing Dropbox users introduced new users, it would provide free cloud storage space.

The following article also explains measures that Dropbox earlier won the customer acquisition.

How did Dropbox · Airbnb · reddit · Tinder etc. earn the initial user? - GIGAZINE



Dropbox, which has acquired millions of new customers at once in this way, will be accepted by the eyes of that Steve Jobs, and in 2009 it is likely to have proposed an acquisition . Although Mr. Houston refuses to talk about Jobs offer, in the past interview , episode that Jobs was threatening to "kill" against Dropbox refused offer was popping out. In addition, after that, Apple will start iCloud which is its own cloud service in 2011.



And in 2016 the number of users exceeded 500 million Dropbox. Among them, 11.5 million people pay annual fees and use paid services. Furthermore, we also listed on March 2018, with annual sales exceeding 1 billion dollars (about 110 billion yen) and the number of employees has grown to over 2000 people.

Two founders who supported the early days of Dropbox, which grew into a large company, at the time of writing the article, Mr. Houston works as CEO and Mr. Feldosch works as a senior management team.


In addition, the secret story about Mr. Houston and Mr. Feldoss from the viewpoint of the Y combinator who first invested in Dropbox and made a big contribution to the establishment is described below.

What is the foundation confidential story that YC founders who contributed to Dropbox startups talk about? - GIGAZINE

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