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Dropbox is the world’s leading cloud storage service, used by over 50 million people worldwide to securely sync files across multiple computers, access documents from anywhere, and share files and folders of any size. The idea for Dropbox was conceived on a bus ride, when founder Drew Houston was frustrated that he had forgotten his USB memory stick at home and began engineering a cloud-based file-sync solution. Knowing he had to be in Silicon Valley to achieve his ambitions, Drew moved to San Francisco together with co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and joined YCombinator, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious acceleration programs. Much of Dropbox’s success is attributed to its simplicity: users can be up-and-running in minutes, for free. They can share the service with their friends and get extra space, and they quickly sign up to a paid plan when they hit their maximum storage limit. With this simple formula Dropbox draws in over $240 million per year – three times more per employee than Google. The company has grown rapidly since inception and today has over 50 million users with another joining eery second. Over 1 billion files are sync’d across the network every three days. Not stopping at dominating the consumer market, Drew and Arash are quickly expanding into business and the enterprise as well. Dropbox recently raised a venture round valuing the company at over $4 billion, positioning them to become one of this decade’s greatest success stories. |
“Revenue is on track to hit $240 million in 2011 despite the fact that 96% of those users pay nothing. With only 70 staffers, Dropbox grosses nearly three times more per employee than even Google. [...] It’s only going to get better. ” “Trying out the service for free, users become hooked. In the case of Dropbox, they’re hooked on having their data in the cloud.” “Add Dropbox to the list of consumer techs that have infiltrated the workplace, like iPhones, Gmail and Skype. [...] millions already sign up with their work e-mail addresses. “ |
Dropbox: Explosive growth in cloud services
