![]() ![]() He wanted to personally show off his demo to YC cofounder Paul Graham in the hope of securing a place. Just four months after hacking together his prototype on the bus from Boston to New York, Houston flew across the country to San Francisco. Houston uploaded the video to a Hacker News thread and submitted it as part of his application. What he did have was a four-minute video showing how Dropbox worked. The problem was that when Houston applied to YC, he didn’t have a Minimum Viable Product. I tried everything… but each product inevitably suffered problems with Internet latency, large files, bugs, or just made me think too much.”ĭespite still being enrolled at MIT, Houston hoped to gain a place at the Y Combinator accelerator in San Francisco to develop his idea. “I worked on multiple desktops and a laptop, and could never remember to keep my USB drive with me… My home desktop’s power supply literally exploded one day, killing one of my hard drives, and I had no backups. He began hacking together a rudimentary file-sharing application that would allow him to synchronize his files via the web. With his files in Boston and no connectivity on the bus, Houston decided to use his time productively. Unfortunately for Houston, he forgot the USB thumb drive that stored all his work. ![]() Houston had originally planned to get some coding done on his laptop during the four-hour drive. In December 2006, Drew Houston was on a bus to New York City from his home in Boston, where he was studying at MIT. Dropbox 2007-2011: A Lean, Mean Referral Machine What he had was an incredible idea––and that idea was enough to make everyone in attendance sit up and take notice. When Dropbox founder Drew Houston presented at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in 2007, he barely had a functional prototype.
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