Dropbox's original YC application

Company

Dropbox synchronizes files across your or your team's computers. It's much better than uploading or email, because it's automatic, integrated into Windows, and fits into the way you already work. There's also a web interface, and the files are securely backed up to Amazon S3. Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team. Hackers have access to these tools, but normal people don't.

At the time of this application, Dropbox was in private beta with batches of new users added every few days. A screencast was available at http://www.getdropbox.com/screencast/, and the latest Windows build could be downloaded at http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/DropboxInstaller.exe.

Possible future features

One interesting possible feature is syncing Google Docs/Spreadsheets (or other office web apps) to local .doc and .xls files for offline access, which would be strategically important as few web apps deal with the offline problem.

Founders

Drew Houston (age 24, MIT SB computer science, 2006) is the sole founder at the time of application. He was previously a project lead and software engineer at Bit9, Inc.

Drew has been programming since age 5 and working on startups since age 14. He scored 1600 on the SAT and started a profitable online SAT prep company in college (accoladeprep.com). For fun, he reverse engineered the software on a number of poker sites and wrote a real-money playing poker bot.

Additional team members

Jeff Mancuso, a Stanford graduate and creator of Sftpdrive, is putting together a Mac port but cannot join as a founder due to a former cofounder starting a similar company called Sharpcast. Tom Hoover from MIT is also helping out but works with Drew at Bit9, and a non-solicit clause in Drew's employment contract prevents him from being recruited as a founder.

Drew is aware that the odds aren't good for single founders and intends to get someone else on board—another good hacker and/or a more sales-oriented person. He has several leads and has been networking aggressively.

Progress

The team has been working on Dropbox for 3 months part-time, with approximately 5,000 lines of client code and 2,000 lines of server code in Python, C++, Cheetah templates, and installer scripts.

A prototype was completed in February. Beta was in people's hands at the time of application. A version ready to charge for was expected in 6-8 weeks.

The Problem and Solution

Most small teams have a few basic needs: team members need their important stuff in front of them wherever they are, everyone needs to be working on the latest version of a given document (and ideally can track what's changed), and team data needs to be protected from disaster.

There are sync tools (e.g. beinsync, Foldershare), backup tools (Carbonite, Mozy), and web uploading/publishing tools (box.net, etc.), but there's no good integrated solution.

Dropbox solves all these needs and doesn't need configuration or babysitting. It takes concepts that are proven winners from the dev community—version control, changelogs/trac, rsync—and puts them in a package that non-technical users can figure out.

Why Dropbox is different

Competing products work at the wrong layer of abstraction and force the user to constantly think and do things. The "online disk drive" abstraction doesn't work because you can't work offline and OS support is brittle. Anything that depends on manual emailing or uploading is a non-starter because it's basically doing version control in your head. But virtually all competing services involve one or the other.

With Dropbox, you hit "Save" as you normally would, and everything just works, even with large files. Binary diffs ensure that only the changed portions go over the wire.

At a higher level, online storage and local disks are big and cheap, but the internet links between them have been and will continue to be slow in comparison. The core technology in Dropbox—continuous efficient sync with compression and binary diffs—is what will get us there.

Competition

Carbonite and Mozy do a good job with hassle-free backup, and a move into sync would make sense. Sharpcast (venture funded) announced a similar app called Hummingbird, but they're taking an extraordinarily difficult approach involving NT kernel drivers. Google is coming out with GDrive at some point. Microsoft's Groove does sync and is part of Office 2007, but is very heavyweight and doesn't include any of the web stuff or backup. There are apps like Omnidrive and Titanize, but the implementations are buggy or have bad UIs.

Business Model

The plan is a freemium approach, where free 1GB accounts are given away and additional storage is charged for (approximately $5/month or less for 10GB for individuals and team plans starting at approximately $20/month). Small and medium businesses already pay for solutions that are subsets of what Dropbox does and are harder to use.

Tiered pricing for business accounts will include upper tiers that retain more older versions of documents, branded extranets for secure file sharing with clients and partners, and an enterprise plan with premium pricing.

Drew has already been approached by potential partners and customers asking for a web services API to programmatically create Dropboxes (e.g., to handle file sharing for Assembla.com, a web site for managing global dev teams). There's a natural synergy between project management and groupware web apps and Dropbox for file sharing. There have also been requests for an enterprise version that would sit on a company's network (as opposed to the S3 store) for which significant revenue could be charged.

Legal

Some work was done at the Bit9 office. Drew consulted an attorney and has a signed letter indicating Bit9 has no stake or ownership of any kind in Dropbox. No code was written by anyone other than the founders.