jhondroulisSmashing piece. Reads like a movie script follow up to The Social Network.
bashar327Except in this case it doesn’t sound like he ripped off his employers and screwed over his friends.
omaramikeThree cheers for Houston for doing what Apple and Google haven’t been able to yet. I wonder how long it will before iCloud’ing will be a verb. Let’s hope D [...]
robcannonFantastic success story. Their service isn’t nearly as attractive as Ubuntu One’s, but they’ve nailed simplicity and popularity.
mminelligreat article but I don’t agree that Netscape was a one-time meteor. Without Netscape there is no Dropbox.
chasInteresting story, but, can they fend-off the Goliaths, Google and Apple in time?mminelliPlus box.net
Victoria Barret, Forbes StaffYes, Box.net is a real competitor going after business users. Dropbox is meanwhile beefing up its newish Teams group to more proactively seek out businesse [...](This story appears on the Nov. 7, 2011 cover of Forbes.)
Here’s that rare Steve Jobs story, one that’s never been told, about the company that got away. Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.
In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his Cupertino office. “I mean, Steve friggin’ Jobs,” remembers Houston, now 28. “How do you even prepare for that?” When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: “I know what you do.”
What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs’ pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn’t selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius).
Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. “He said we were a feature, not a product,” says Houston. Courteously, Jobs spent the next half hour waxing on over tea about his return to Apple, and why not to trust investors, as the duo—or more accurately, Houston, who plays Penn to Ferdowsi’s mute Teller—peppered him with questions.
When Jobs later followed up with a suggestion to meet at Dropbox’s San Francisco office, Houston proposed that they instead meet in Silicon Valley. “Why let the enemy get a taste?” he now shrugs cockily. Instead, Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud, and specifically knocked Dropbox as a half-attempt to solve the Internet’s messiest dilemma: How do you get all your files, from all your devices, into one place?
Houston’s reaction was less cocky: “Oh, s–t.” The next day he shot a missive to his staff: “We have one of the fastest-growing companies in the world,” it began. Then it featured a list of one-time meteors that fell to Earth: MySpace, Netscape, Palm, Yahoo.
Dropbox’s ascent has been just as stunning. The 50-million-user figure is up threefold from a year ago, and it has solved the “freemium” riddle, with revenue on track to hit $240 million in 2011 despite the fact that 96% of those users pay nothing. With only 70 staffers, mostly engineers, Dropbox grosses nearly three times more per employee than even the darling of business models, Google. Houston claims it’s already profitable but won’t reveal margins.
It’s only going to get better. That 96% of nonpaying customers is throwing their stuff into Dropbox at such a pace that thousands of people each day blow through the free 2 gigabytes of storage, and upgrade to 50 gigs for $10 a month or 100 gigs for $20. Even if Houston doesn’t sign up a single customer in 2012, his sales will double. As we go over this math Houston pauses to garnish this lovely inevitability: “But we will sign up many, many customers.”
jhondroulisSmashing piece. Reads like a movie script follow up to The Social Network.bashar327Except in this case it doesn’t sound like he ripped off his employers and screwed over his friends.omaramikeThree cheers for Houston for doing what Apple and Google haven’t been able to yet. I wonder how long it will before iCloud’ing will be a verb. Let’s hope D [...]robcannonFantastic success story. Their service isn’t nearly as attractive as Ubuntu One’s, but they’ve nailed simplicity and popularity.mminelligreat article but I don’t agree that Netscape was a one-time meteor. Without Netscape there is no Dropbox.chasInteresting story, but, can they fend-off the Goliaths, Google and Apple in time?mminelliPlus box.netVictoria Barret, Forbes StaffYes, Box.net is a real competitor going after business users. Dropbox is meanwhile beefing up its newish Teams group to more proactively seek out businesse [...]
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Smashing piece. Reads like a movie script follow up to The Social Network.
Except in this case it doesn’t sound like he ripped off his employers and screwed over his friends.
Three cheers for Houston for doing what Apple and Google haven’t been able to yet. I wonder how long it will before iCloud’ing will be a verb. Let’s hope Dropbox doesn’t get buried by the giants. …They’ll have to keep up or get “Dropboxed.”
Fantastic success story. Their service isn’t nearly as attractive as Ubuntu One’s, but they’ve nailed simplicity and popularity.
great article but I don’t agree that Netscape was a one-time meteor. Without Netscape there is no Dropbox.
Interesting story, but, can they fend-off the Goliaths, Google and Apple in time?
Plus box.net
Yes, Box.net is a real competitor going after business users. Dropbox is meanwhile beefing up its newish Teams group to more proactively seek out businesses. Still though, they’re doing no outbound calling on that front.
Also – they know exactly which company’s employees are using Dropbox the most – a salesperson’s dream target list. Great piece and its so nice to see good guys making it happen.
Dropbox will be able to hold them off, at least in the next few years. It is cross platform unlike Apple’s version and is much simpler with desktop integration that Google lacks. I am a big Apple fan and use iCloud but Dropbox is much simpler in getting something off my iPhone onto my Mac or vice versa.
It’s going to be tough competing against iCloud and Amazon’s Cloud service especially if they have built in advantages of getting customers.
Box.net is also a major threat with its free 50GB offer. At the end of the day, Steve Jobs may be right. Cloud service is a feature, not a product. This could be a commodity integrated feature where there is little profit except for the big players like Apple, Google, Amazon.com
My favorite.
I’m amazed. Very good interview and article! Any chance to get it in one page to read?
I just looked into this. Unfortunately, there’s no way to undo the pagination. You can buy a copy of the magazine (in stores soon!).
Thx for your comment on this. We’re working on implementing print functionality that will also enable one-page view. It’s one of the many product enhancements on our very long road map. Life is always about priorities, and we have so many, as I’m sure you can imagine.
Lewis – Thanks for the comment. Though we’d all like to hear that single-page view will be here tomorrow, your response is the next best thing.
I, for one, appreciate that both you and Ms. Barret took the time to respond in this comment thread.
You are working on it? Haha, just say multiple pages increases your page views and allows you to sell ads for more money. We are all adults and will accept the reality of website economics. It’s not really a feature that needs “working on”.
With iOS 5 or Safari you can do this with the new Reader feature. It is pretty awesome.
Yes, you are correct. We do have a business to run, and page views help generate the revenue needed to provide our audience with great content and great products. In the last year we’ve totally re-architected our site, which has resulted in many, many priorities. We have received very few comments asking for single-page view options, perhaps because consumers experience pagination on nearly every other major news and information site. That said, we know it’s important and we are certainly moving to provide the experience that you and others would like. It’s all a process to create the best consumer experience possible. Thx for you interest in all this. Now, back to Victoria’s insightful story on Dropbox…
I would like to share articles with colleagues, many of whom do not realize that Forbes has become a sophisticated source of diverse points of view (which it was not, in the past). It’s impossible to do so with the current pagination and PDF formation limitations. Note that such shared copies also can include advertisements, which is worth additional revenue. Sharing links is just not the same and has no endorsement value.
Lewis, while you are considering improvements, I would get rid of the three headers and two ads that push the title of an article nearly below the fold. it is annoying enough to get those big ads that push everything down to get your attention, but your basic template requires scrolling to even see the article you came to Forbes for. It has actually turned me off of going to Forbes.