A short interview excerpt in which Dropbox founder Drew Houston recounts launching a 3-minute demo video that topped Hacker News for two days, attracting early interest and criticism. He describes persistent skepticism from commenters and investors who called online storage a commodity or argued competitors (like Google) would dominate. Houston explains the need to balance 'thick skin' to ignore noise with sensitivity to customer and team feedback, and he notes investor skepticism did not necessarily imply the idea was invalid.
Chapters
Where I made this 3 minute demo video with some music equipment that I had for my band and I put it on Hacker News. It stayed at the top of Hacker News for two days. I got the thing I was looking for, which is the email from Paul. The thing I didn't want was that you also need a co founder in three weeks. But that was the first. I think we did that at least. We did that at least twice. First to get into yc, then to build some momentum around the company.
There's this infamous comment either on that post or a future one you made. Probably that one where someone's like, I think this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Don't these people know that WGET exists? You can just use that. No one needs a company for this. We send that around to other founders when they get demotivated because people shit on their idea on Hackney News or Reddit or something else.
Well, we were getting it from all different directions.
So actually we can jump to that because I think that's a really interesting point. One of the things I respect most about you is you have.
Just like.
Kept doing your thing, no matter what noise there is in the ecosystem about Dropbox this or Dropbox that, whether it's like, I don't need this because I can use wget or this company's overvalued or whatever. And now you're just like this behemoth and everyone's like, well, we were wrong about Dropbox. How do you handle just constant negativity from people saying this isn't going to work or anything like that?
Well, I think the first thing is you have to recognize that always going to happen. And we experienced that from the day we founded the company, actually before that and all the way to now. And when you zoom out, you realize that a company like Apple, quarter after quarter can post like the best, the most revenue, most profit of any company in business history. It's over the next day, but they're really dead now. So you have to kind of, you have to appreciate that that's human nature and that's just going to happen. 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 team's unhappy, you have to respond to that. So that's a weird dynamic that you have to handle. But I think it starts just getting some perspective that that's always going to happen.
How do you decide when you need to address something with customers or team versus just let it go in its normal course.
Well, I think the. Well, maybe more than the fundraising context. So in addition to people on Hacker News, a bunch of the comments were negative, but actually a bunch were positive. We heard a lot of, we got a lot of pushback from investors saying, hey, look, this is, you know, Google's going to do this. It's a commodity. Online storage was kind of the startup cliche of its time, the way that Bitcoin or other things have been. And frankly, I agreed with them. I was like, yeah, Google can probably do this. Yeah, we don't really have a lot of structural advantages. Yeah, we're not really sure how we're going to make money. We don't even have users. But at the same time. So that's all true. But that's, you have to realize that's like, that's not causal. Like, that isn't. It's sort of. Just because other folks have done something doesn't mean it's a. Or done it in a way that you don't think is good. Doesn't mean it's inherently a bad idea. Or maybe put another way, I would ask investors, do you use. Yes, there are 50 of these things out there, but do you use any of them? And they would say no. And I'd say, yeah, isn't that interesting?
