For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.

If it makes them feel any better, I told people in the 90s that the WWW didn't make sense because we already have telnet, archie, gopher, veronica, and ftp. What can WWW give me when I already have those tools to connect with...

Story time.

Around 2005, I was hired by a company that was building software for USB drives, to build a porn site.

Turns out, they wanted me to build a poc for an authentication solution: some USB drives would have a fingerprint reader and they wanted to build this auth system based on that.

So I built that, but "perplexingly", they didn't get any finance or enough prospect customers, so the project got shelved.

Then, I was handed another project they had on the back burner, a sort of firewall for devices, meant to prevent exfiltration of company documents on unapproved USB drives.

I built the single user version, eg you had to be admin to allow devices and the product sold quite well, even winning some prizes iirc.

We started getting requests to have a centralized admin interface and a way to allow/disallow copying some file types. I started working on the centralized admin and the company hired a very talented engineer to build the file filtering thing. This last thing was based on a windows API that allowed for virtual file systems. Things were ticking along nicely and the company even hired a business manager to try to come up with other products we can build with our existing tech.

One afternoon, over a bunch of cold beers, to link with the hell on earth that happens right now in London, me and this person came up with a cunning plan! What if you sell an 1GB USB drive with an extra 1GB of space?

The plan was simple: plug in the device, you get a drive that's the regular USB drive, but also another drive, backed by the virtual file system thing and a version of my http auth thing, and you would read/write from a server on the Internet.

Big boss liked the idea and I started researching how to get servers and the like, while a third engineer was tasked to build the desktop app needed.

It all came crashing down, days later, when this engineer declared that is not possible to have a windows app minimize to sys tray and the project got cancelled. I left the company not long after that .

This was the story on how a small German-Romanian company could have beat Dropbox.

Maybe this is sarcasm and I just didn't catch it, but I think Dropbox made a mark, and a good one at that.

The tool strangely still has a certain something that I reach for from time to time. Cross-platform(cross-era even, I just used it to move something off an ancient Windows 10 install), painless sync, painless auth, painless sharing(or not), painless updates, simple billing that isn't so high I have to factor it into my plans, and the app doesn't try to ramp my price based on how many devices I access my data from. It's just a good piece of software at a good price.

Commercially they did just fine as well according to the article: $6B in market cap, $2B/yr rev and $2B personally for Drew. Maybe not the top of YC leaderboard, but well above average.

I want more services like this one, and will keep paying for my modest storage amount until they tell me to go.

Don't forget CVS

I still use it for NetSBD source

I use FTP mirrors for various source code

I use FTP for moving files to and from mobile phones

I have never used Dropbox. That company made some people wealthy no doubt but that doesn't help me

I also use USB sticks extensively, e.g., primarily for booting computers, but also for data storage

I have broken a couple when using them in non-NetBSD OS but never lost one

I think it’s more of an ease of use issue. When I was in grad school, I used to cycle my work between dev on a MacBook and heavy processing work on a desktop. This was 2011/2012.

Dropbox helped here. They had a Linux client and a Mac client and kept both in sync.

Mine was somewhat of a niche use case. I think every one who cycled between Linux and Mac for their daily work back then thought - yeah I can definitely use those tools but an automatic sync would be nice.

What Dropbox didn’t have was a moat that comes with android or iOS. I use iCloud now since my need to move between different devices doesn’t exist anymore.

Only took 19 years!

My tools are syncthing + samba: Mac Mini running Syncthing to sync the iCloud folder to my local linux server which is also running Syncthing. Linux folder synced is exposed as SMB share so I can access it from other systems.

or, run your own Hotline server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

It has become true now though!

I have a subscription which I want to cancel but can’t because there are other users. Basic features require upgrading.

The upcoming Claude Brandon release will make Dropbox obsolete.

Finally realized what Steve Jobs said was true: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

Or maybe he did

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

The crazy part is, you pretty much can just do this yourself now, simply by pasting the famous HN comment into a good agentic AI.

While I understand and respect DanG's perspective as well as the original poster's, that comment is never not going to be funny and I'm unwilling to pretend otherwise. That said, everybody who revisits the Dropbox comment thread for a laugh really should take some time to read the rest of it. It represents a high-water mark in HN comment quality, as well as an interesting harbinger of future star power in the startup community. Some other people participating in that thread ultimately did good work and made a name for themselves, not just Drew.

"...building a net worth of more than $2 billion..." - congrats Drew and team! For all the critics, from day 1, the founders are billionaires / early employees at least in the 10s if not 100s of millions -- and so much value created for people syncing files around the world -- while hackers are still saying "...but rsync"