With today’s news that Dropbox acquired Mailbox—check out the Wall Street Journal for the full story—we’re re-releasing our video of the San Francisco startup’s co-founder, Gentry Underwood, speaking at our Des Moines event this past October.
“I think one of the best examples out there right now of a startup that focuses is Dropbox,” he said. For the next minute and a half, he shared his observation that Dropbox stuck with its offering even though when it launched it wasn’t needed by the millions of individuals it serves today. The story illustrated his point: “Learn to tolerate uncertainty.”
Here’s the full text of Underwood’s reflection on Dropbox:
Thanks to our sponsor
I think one of the best examples out there right now of a startup that focuses is Dropbox. How many people use Dropbox? … Wow, that’s awesome. If you’re in the front, basically all the hands went up. So Dropbox is obviously really simple, it’s just sychronizing a folder, that’s really all it does. But when it started it was also sort of an esoteric need. I mean really you only needed that if you had more than one computer, and the kinds of people who had more than one computer were kind of an early adopter, nerd crowd. And so for the first year or so—Dropbox was a Y Combinator company I believe in June of 2007—their growth was really not much. And it wasn’t really until iOS devices came out with the App Store and you could put in an app that would allow you to see all the files that were on your computer, it was the fact that people had an iPad or an iPhone and they wanted to get to that file that was on their desktop, that is it wasn’t until everybody had multiple computers, one of which was in their pocket, that this became everyone’s problem and that little shift changed everything. So over the course here you can see a very quick spike that began to happen towards the end of 2008 and by April of 2009, Dropbox had acquired a million customers, which is a really big deal. They said in October of last year, so about a year ago, that they’ve hit 50 million customers, so you can imagine the graph just keeps going and going. But there was a period there of being dedicated to a vision and working on it without really seeing results that as an entrepreneur we all know is like ‘ooff’ very painstaking, and you have to be willing to kind of hold that and believe in the vision and hold to it even when it’s not working.
For Underwood’s full talk, see our post: “Gentry Underwood takes a designer’s approach to startup problems“.
Big Des Moines (formerly Thinc Iowa) joins Big Omaha and Big Kansas City to make up The Big Series, the nation’s most ambitious events on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Credits: Video by Event1Video.
