It's been a wild, almost two-year ride. It started in Boston's South Station in November 2006 where one night, while waiting for the Chinatown bus to New York, I wrote the first lines of code of what eventually became Dropbox. I had forgotten my USB drive at home and was frustrated that I couldn't get any "real work" done. Arash joined shortly thereafter, and we set up shop in Cambridge for the
Y Combinator program. That summer is worthy of many blog posts, but we have countless fond memories of coding like crazy and setting our own hours ("the sun's come up again, we really should go home, no really...") Our office sublet had "personality." When we arrived, our little room was bare except for a framed portrait of a donkey, and a whiteboard which permanently bore the vestiges of some earlier startup's plan for world domination, no matter how many times we scrubbed it. And the entryway always smelled "interesting", to put it delicately. Fast forward to today. We're in San Francisco; we've got a beautiful office and comfy chairs. There are few visible remnants of our humble beginnings, but the spirit remains the same. In the meantime, we've built an
amazing team, work with
fantastic
investors, and most importantly have been fortunate enough to have tens of thousands of people from all over the world try Dropbox and participate in our
vibrant community. We're excited to announce, after what's been a long wait for many of the folks on our beta list, and a great launch at the
TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, that Dropbox is finally publicly available for everyone to try. (
Go get it!) Of course, we've got a few other announcements. We get hundreds of feature requests, but none have been as passionate (or persistent) as those for a Linux client. Of course, it helps that we're Linux zealots ourselves, with about half of us using Linux as our primary desktop environment. Dropbox for Linux is something we needed too. So we're happy to announce that the
Linux client goes live today, and is functionally identical to our Windows and Mac versions. (Special thanks to our alpha testers, and the
poets in the forums.) Sometimes you need your files on the run, and we were amazed that no one had made it easy. So we developed an iPhone-optimized interface that lets you get to your Dropbox from anywhere, including special support for photo galleries. (It works great on other mobile browsers, too.) Our most common request has been for more storage. Next week, you'll be able to buy a 50GB Dropbox for $9.99/month, or $99.99/year. Don't worry -- the free 2GB accounts will always be free, and you can keep the amount of space you had in the beta. Stay tuned for more on this. As always, we've been blown away by your support and enthusiasm -- nearly 200,000 people signed up for the waiting list -- and we read every piece of feedback and every
tweet. So thanks again, and let us know how we can make Dropbox continue to change the way you think about your files and storage.
UPDATE: We've
been dugg -- show us some love :)
