A cloud storage service that lets you save files online and sync them to your devices.
YC Summer 2007 · Accepted · Read the original on getintoyc.com →
Drew Houston wrote this in 2007 with a private beta in a few people's hands and about 5,000 lines of code. He was leaving Bit9 to do it "regardless of YC funding." The demo was a screencast he posted to Hacker News.
Eleven years later Dropbox IPO'd on the Nasdaq. Today it runs around $2.5B in revenue at 40%+ operating margins with ~18 million paying users — a mature, profitable cloud business, not a hyper-growth story anymore. In May 2026 Houston stepped down after 19 years as CEO to become executive chairman, handing the company to co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi and betting the next chapter on Dash, an AI search layer across 30+ work apps.
The part worth sitting with: most of what made Dropbox work is already in this application. The screencast instead of a pitch. The "my little sister" test for simplicity. The flat refusal to build an "online disk drive." Read it knowing how it ends.