Back in December of 2009, Steve Jobs of Apple had invited a young software engineer – Drew Houston, for a private meeting to discuss where they were heading in the “Cloud” storage business. Houston is of the “DropBox” fame today, but back then he was another entrepreneur with a clear vision and objective.
When Jobs showed interest in his project and tried to acquire DropBox as part of the Big Apple, Houston politely refused and said “DropBox is not for sale, no matter the status of the bidder“. It really takes a lot of guts and determination to say ‘No’ to an offer like that i suppose.
DropBox has since been growing at a steady momentum with 50 million users today using the service as a means of storage. The hard fact is that almost 96% of these users are subscribed to the free account which gives 2GB of storage. For this Drew simply says “Most of these 96% of the free subscribers are using up their 2GB so fast that we are seeing almost thousands of them per day upgrading to a paid service”.
DropBox has 2 premium paid services which cost $10 for a 50Gig space and $20 for a 100Gig. The revenue expected for the year 2011 is $240 million which is more than three times per employee of the company, considering that it employs just 70 people and most of them are engineers. With the existing customers itself, Houston is expecting to double his sales even without signing up a single new customer for 2012!!!!
Read the complete story here – Inside Story of DropBox.
See video below for what Drew Houston had to say on turning down Apple
Courtesy: Victoria Barrett of Forbes
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Praveen. Wonderful and very impressive.
Doing business just for business and Looking business as passion are two different roots. When your passion become business, It will yield unexpected affirmative results on track like this one would be best example. I love Houston’s positive decision and confident approach at his passion.
Mani – Yea it is indeed a great decision, but we can appreciate it today only because DropBox has made it big. If the company had failed miserably with its idea, then we might have said he made a huge blunder by not accepting the offer. Taking sides is easy, but being in his shoes at the time, would have given me the creeps.
thats a great news. I never heard about this. thanks dude.
Thanks Eric, hope you found it useful.
When I wrote my post about my favorite plug-ins Praveen, one of my blogging buddies mentioned to me that he backs up his sites and stores them in DropBox. I had heard of this company but until then, never really knew what they did.
He and I had a conversation about that and I started considering doing the same thing. I mean think of it this way. Everything you back up on your computer, you can always have easy access to it through their service. I mean overall, that’s really cheap.
Thanks for sharing this..
Adrienne – Yea, this is a great idea which has taken an awesome shape and success in today’s challenging world. I did sign up for the service a while back, but never actively used it for whatever reason. It is neat and cheap.
Very interesting story Praveen. I use Dropbox and love the way they market their application. I’m happy they are growing as well as they are.
Thanks for sharing,
Bryce
Bryce – Glad you liked it, and happy to know you are already one of many millions of subscribers to dropbox. It is quite a good service I should say, and being free tops it all.
Hi Praveen, This story will probably be the subject of business school lessons in the future. Whether it will be seen as a smart move or foolhardy remains to be seen. But I vote for a smart move. I’m a paid user of Dropbox and love it for its ease of use and its efficiency. I really hope this company succeeds and thrives!
Hi Carolyn – I agree with you that this story might end up in the school lessons, all successful ventures usually have an amazing history, worth studying.