I feel like this has got to be one of the most infamous / inspiration posts in HN history. Just to be able to look at the MVP of a billion dollar company and watch it get scrutinized, doubted and critiqued at that early stage.. it's an amazing look for anyone w/ thoughts of launching a startup.

On the other hand, some of those criticisms were, like, obviously foolish, even at the time.

Like: "The only problem is that you have to install something."? Regular users don't care and they didn't care then.

Linux users can build this quite trivially? Yeah, but your average person can't, so who cares?

"Not income generating"? It's storage. People pay for storage all the time.

Agreed on all your points except the last one.

Not sure if it was just in my part of the world, but when Dropbox started, people only paid for local storage. And that was mostly technical people outside of small USB drives.

I enjoyed the Linux comment too. It's as if they were only concerned with the other 97% of the market! Those fools.

it's still making a loss though...

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

I apologize for calling this person out, but I found this funny:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem

"quite trivially"

To be honest this was my first reaction to Dropbox as well: just set up a VPN. Looking back, it's clear that I underestimated the advantages of Dropbox and the size of the market. Drew was prescient in identifying an elegant solution to this universal problem.

Probably a significant chunk of the world's economy is from taking an already existing product and making it more accessible.

You should put this quote on of those startup tshirts or posters and sell it.

You do it. A good chunk of that is copying an alraedy existing product.

and get a static ip or a dyndns account, and forward the port on your router. And then make sure your machine is never down. It's really a time waster for the average dev ofc

"getting a FTP account" ≠ "self-hosting a FTP server"

fair

> For a Linux user

aka approximately no one, and certainly not anyone with a smartphone (technically Linux but you can't set up all these services easily).

We've banned this account.