Dropbox – On my Om

November 14, 2020November 14, 2020

I was reading an opinion piece by Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of an online storage company, Dropbox. While the piece’s thrust is about the important and long term relevance of immigrants to this country, I couldn’t help but focus on the role his parents played in helping build his future. And he isn’t alone.

Yesterday, when reading the S-1¹ filing from on-demand delivery service, DoorDash, this comment by founder Tony Xu pulled at my heartstrings.

“Mom put food on the table by working three jobs a day for 12 years. After deferring her dreams for more than a decade, she saved enough money to return to school and open her medical clinic.”

Success often is viewed as a singular achievement when, in reality, it is a cumulative result of many sacrifices. And there is none like the parents — especially the immigrant parents. I remind myself of that every weekend.

Every Saturday, almost like clockwork, before even I grind the beans of my coffee, I make a phone call — to my aging parents in India. We talk only for a few minutes, and it is mostly banal, but it is a great reminder of the many sacrifices they have made for me to get where I am today. I can’t forget the decisions they made. Every conversation is a reminder of clothes not bought, vacations not taken, and joy put on hold so I (and my siblings) could have a better life.

November 14, 2020, San Francisco

DoorDash S-1 Filing[↩]

October 29, 2020October 29, 2020

Incoherence

There are some days when I wake up in a state where my mind is in overdrive. I jump from one thought to another, mostly due to some weird logic, and by the time it is noon, the whole thought process has become incoherent. Today was one of those days — I was contemplating the … Continue reading Incoherence

June 18, 2020June 19, 2020

Dropbox is a total mess

I was reading Nikita Prokopov’s blog this morning and came across his very visual damnation of what is wrong with Dropbox. Like me, he too had thought that “in the beginning, Dropbox was great, but in the last few years, they started to bloat up.” He visually shows that as an existing customer, you need … Continue reading Dropbox is a total mess

October 15, 2019

Computer files are going extinct. It is about time. And here is why.

February 27, 2018March 2, 2018

The OmShow Podcast Dropbox like its hot

In the new podcast, Chris and I talk about Dropbox, its amazing story and its challenges ahead as a public company. The company filed for an IPO recently. We discuss how not all storage is equal, and the best way to extract premium dollars from a storage operation is to combine it with more useful applications. Dropbox, so far, hasn’t succeeded in its ability to get its 500+ million registered users to buy into its app attempts so far.

Some previous posts that I refer to in this podcast:

February 25, 2018February 25, 2018

From launch to IPO, Dropbox hasn’t changed much

This week Dropbox filed for an IPO, and it brought back a lot of memories. In 2007, I first wrote about the company and I was mostly enthusiastic. Here is what I said: While it seems that everyone wants to develop a better syncing or storage or sharing technology, the population at large doesn’t seem … Continue reading From launch to IPO, Dropbox hasn’t changed much

September 11, 2017September 11, 2017

Are top US startups really startups?

Pitchbook, a data research company has come up with a list of top 14 most valuable startups in the United States. There are no real surprises — they are all ranked by valuation and they all are valued at north of $4 billion. They are all household names – barring Outcome Health and Samumed.

And they have been around forever. They have thousands of employees and many have billions in revenue. What they are not is liquid on public markets. They have not IPO’d. In a different Silicon Valley, they will all be public companies and they won’t be deemed startups. Revenue, growth, relative size, market share – pick a metric (except for lack of profits in many cases) and you know they aren’t really startups.

So can we stop calling them startups — and instead maybe call them VC-backed private companies — otherwise the label startup loses its meaning. Continue reading “Are top US startups really startups?”

January 31, 2017February 2, 2017

DropBox – From zero to a billion in a decade

I first met Drew Houston and his co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi, over nine years ago. They had been quietly working on Dropbox and were going to announce it as part of their presentation for the YCombinator demo day. When I met with them, the Young MIT dropouts pointed out they wanted to change mainstream behavior of carrying around USB sticks and make personal file sharing dead simple. They were confident that the relative ease of use of their offering would win over the masses. Good Luck, I said. Well, they nailed it. Continue reading

Letter from Om