He began hacking together a rudimentary file-sharing application that would allow him to synchronize his files via the web. With his files in Boston and no connectivity on the bus, Houston decided to use his time productively. Unfortunately for Houston, he forgot the USB thumb drive that stored all his work. Houston had originally planned to get some coding done on his laptop during the four-hour drive. In December 2006, Drew Houston was on a bus to New York City from his home in Boston, where he was studying at MIT. Dropbox 2007-2011: A Lean, Mean Referral Machine What he had was an incredible idea––and that idea was enough to make everyone in attendance sit up and take notice. When Dropbox founder Drew Houston presented at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in 2007, he barely had a functional prototype.
How Dropbox is reinventing itself to be like Atlassian to stay competitive. Why Dropbox’s fixation with the “prosumer” market ultimately led the brand astray. How Dropbox’s double-referral program drove massive growth after other growth strategies failed. How Dropbox leveraged existing behaviors in a new way that solved a genuine problem. Here are some things we’ll learn as we explore Dropbox’s history: However, after years of positioning itself as a near-invisible background process, Dropbox has evolved to become a more active, engaging application with a true UI––a change not everyone has embraced. Not too shabby for a product that Steve Jobs famously dismissed as “a feature, not a product.” It changed how we think about online storage. It was one of the first consumer-focused, cloud-based services. Dropbox promised to solve a deceptively complex problem––giving people a way to store any file, from any device, in a single online directory––in a simple, elegant way.ĭropbox didn’t just change how we store things in the cloud. Dropbox was the first truly cross-platform, cloud-based storage service. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Dropbox almost single-handedly created the cloud-based storage market as we know it. One company in particular, however, would exceed the expectations of Y Combinator’s demanding panel of judges, later becoming one of Silicon Valley’s earliest “unicorn” companies and the first Y Combinator company to go public. Cloud-based distributed database company, Cloudant, was another. 
Online commenting platform Disqus was among the companies that showcased their products that day. Most companies that presented on that fateful Thursday didn’t make it, but some did. Only four of the 19 companies participating in Demo Day 2007 had working betas.
They were there for Demo Day, Y Combinator’s highly-anticipated biannual startup showcase. On Thursday, August 9th, 2007, the founders of 19 startups gathered at the now-defunct office of the Y Combinator (YC) accelerator in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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