[lazerwalker]

I wouldn't necessarily frame that as an inevitability of Dropbox as a product, as much as an inevitability of the traditional VC funding model.

It's likely you could build a very healthy business selling people file syncing — I personally use a tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor that seems to be doing just fine. The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.

[cj]

> The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.

This.

The local pizza joint is probably a great family operated business with a enough profit to support the owners + employees (but probably not enough profit to support the owners, employees AND investors).

If you take that same pizza joint and give them $10m from investors, the pizza joint will attempt to franchise their store to a dozen new locations, and they'll probably fail in the process.

Some companies simply aren't meant to be billion dollar companies, yet raise money as if they will be.

[TremendousJudge]

>Some companies simply aren't meant to be billion dollar companies, yet raise money as if they will be.

Well, according to some quick searches the founders seem to be doing pretty alright by themselves. It depends if your objective for founding a company is "do something useful" or "get filthy rich as soon as possible"

[scarface74]

If you take venture funding - by definition you’re not trying to run a lifestyle business - your only goal is an exit strategy.

[rorykoehler]

Whose exit strategy? The companies or your own.

[scarface74]

What’s the difference? If you take investor money you have given up control of your own fate.

[kjs3]

When I did my (one, never again if I can help it) venture funded startup, "the only goal is an exit strategy" came up a lot, and always when one of the founders talked about a growth opportunity that would pay off over years and not months.

[usrusr]

If that's your success metric you are acting fraudulently as soon as you take investor money, because you won't get that without claiming to commit to the goal of making them rich(er) as well.

[Gibbon1]

I think that's the Blockbuster model. I'm unsure but I think Blockbuster net profit during it's existence was roughly zero.

[BubRoss]

I agree although your example hinges on scalability where Dropbox hinges on simplicity that is at odds with growth.

[VBprogrammer]

This was one of the biggest takeaways from the "Startup podcast". If you haven't heard it, it details Alex Blumberg (of this American Life fame) attempts to create a company producing high quality long form podcasts.

At one point he and his partner are getting excited that they are on the road to profitability in 6 months. One of their VCs gets upset by this saying that targeting profitability is a sure way to end up with a lifestyle business.

[sarah180]

The VC isn't exactly wrong about this. If you want a valuation in the hundreds of millions or billions, your goal is to figure out how to grow fast and capture defensible territory in a market. Profit is less important than growth—as long as you have a path to profit based on that growth.

If you're not aiming for this kind of territory, you're not really compatible with the VC financial model, which is designed around high risk and high reward. 30–40% of startups end up in liquidation, and 95% never meet their projections. Unless some your successful companies have fantastic returns, your fund will fail.

This is something you should understand before you take VC money.

[VBprogrammer]

This has been the SV narrative for the last decade or so but I'm not sure that it will stand the test of time. It seems likely that the bubble will pop on these companies going public without having returned an honest penny.

But there is probably a reason I'm not drowning in money like most investor types.

[whyenot]

For anyone that doesn't know, the startup (Gimlet Media) was purchased by Spotify for $230M this past February.

[braythwayt]

A bit of a tangent, but it feels to me like using wads of funding to try to create hypergrowth is a good fit for "winner-take-all" markets, like those with network effects.

Social media fits. Syncing documents, maybe not-so-much.

So Dropbox invests in areas where there are possible network effects, like collaborating on documents. Because that's what fits its funding model.

But simple file syncing... This is not a winner-take-all market.

[cloverich]

> But simple file syncing... This is not a winner-take-all market.

On its own, probably not. But you could imagine several avenues they could naturally grow into, that would _eventually_ turn them into the equivalent of a full OS. Its not something I would personally bet on, but also not something that, if it worked out, would totally surprise me. E.g. maybe _they_ should have invented Google Docs, and then...

[braythwayt]

As a customer, this is a problem for me.

——

Analogy: I offer to cut your lawn every week, and to shovel your driveway/walk when it snows, all for an annual fee you find attractive.

I get a lot pf customers, put together a pitch deck, then raise a bunch of money to expand.

With the money, I buy a fleet of massive snowplows, trucks that can carry ride’em mowers, equipment for doing landscaping, and while I’m at it, I start up a property management company that specializes in AirBnB owners.

“Sorry,” I tell you, “But I have to raise my fees, your property is too small for me to take a advantage of my equipment, and Also it’s inefficient to have lots of small customers so I’m tacking on a per-invoice surcharge.”

Lawn-cutting can indeed grow into a bigger business, and for me, that’s great. But for you, maybe the best thing would be to hire a teenager who is happy cutting lawns for a decent price.

Summary: If a company is in business A, but it isn’t happy doing A and really wants to do B, C, and D to satisfy its investors’ ambitions, that may be an excellent play for the company, but a terrible play for its existing customers.

[Apocryphon]

Sounds like what UpThere was working on. They ended up bought by Western Digital.

[cevn]

> tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor

what is it? I'm lookin for alternatives

[throw7]

I use syncthing.

[smush]

TL;DR -> Please give Syncthing a try, it does just what it says on the tin and with no fuss once setup.

In the beginning, there was the 3.5" floppy disk, trudged along in my backpack in its little box with the 4 blank ones (which only ever got used by the slackers who forgot their own), used for little notes on the single README.txt featuring a .LOG at the top so each time I opened it, Notepad would insert the time/date.

Then along came the 1GB Kingston DataTraveller flash drive, what an amazing device! It held not only that increasingly read-only README.txt file, but also a portable knock-off of Onenote 2003 which name I forget (Agilix? Wikidpad? I no longer remember)

Then in 2012, Dropbox rolled into my life and I was in hog heaven, getting up to 5G from various referrals before moving in 2013 to Skydrive (now Onedrive) because a recent HTC purchase included 25GB of free storage space in addition to the already commodious 7GB(!) of free sync space. Clearly I want to be offline first, so I'll keep syncing the briefcase on the flashdrive (now a 4GB SanDisk) and carry that last floppy disk...after all if I still have an IBM USB floppy drive, might as well carry the disk right?

Fast forward several years. The 1GB and 4GB flash drive are keeping each other company in the retirement home of the electronics drawer, ready at a moment's notice to hand me a zipped up copy of Sim City 3000 or Timone and Pumba's Jungle Arcade or other such digital hoarder file from old CDs I dare not read any more but still want their contents.

In my pocket is a whopping 32GB Samsung stainless steel drive, and in my bag where the floppy disk used to live in honor is now a SIXTY-FREAKING-FOUR GB SanDisk extreme pro flash drive featuring Hiran's boot CD, DBAN, Ghost, Kali Linux, Peppermint OS, and more at the touch of a fingertip.

But the files? The briefcase has been synced oh, 4 months ago now? These days I don't plug it in as much, the old habit of plugging it in to work, home devices as soon as I log in long gone. Why do that when I can use Syncthing, an amazing tool that syncs the files with any and all devices however you want to slice n dice em. All you gotta do is introduce them with a handshake and boom, files are synced all over the wire, automatically and without being uploaded to Google's, Microsoft's, or Apple's cloud servers for heuristic analysis and advertising targeting.

I have arrived at file portability nirvana, and it is with Syncthing.

[cevn]

Oh my god, it's SO GOOD. I'm uninstalling Dropbox everywhere now. We're in the future of file sharing!!!!

[alpaca128]

Same here. I used to run a local Nextcloud server, but Syncthing is simply so much easier for what I need. And adding a "server" that's constantly switched on is as simple as installing it on one more machine.

[leadingthenet]

That actually looks really nice, thanks.

[pickdenis]

No idea what he's talking about but try out Unison! I use it to keep files on my computers synced to a central server. It works absolutely great and handles conflicts in the most sane way (imo).

The only caveat I've found so far is that you may have to increase the number of filesystem watches if your default value is too low, otherwise unison won't be able to monitor all of the files you are trying to sync.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

[liability]

NFS+wireguard

It just fucking works. Took a few minutes to set up and it's been working great. Several TB of storage for the price of hardware I already had lying around doing nothing.

[ryandrake]

I heard you can do it quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

[kraig]

what is this 1992

[scarface74]

I believe this was reference to an old quote on HN when Dropbox was introduced.

It’s the HN equivalent of “less space than the Nomad, No Wireless. Lame.”

[szatkus]

FTP doesn't even support secure transfer, right?

[benj111]

SFTP?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_File_Transfer_Protocol

[avip]

Only for the linux user.

[jsymolon]

If you're into hosting yourself, owncloud

[teddyh]

You mean NextCloud.

[notsofastbuddy]

Perhaps Tarsnap

[lazerwalker]

Sync.com