Celebrating #Dropbox10: Drew and Arash's favorite songs from 2007

Since the company’s founding day in 2007, we’ve been honored to see the Dropbox community develop, grow, and thrive. To celebrate, we’re putting together a series of posts looking back at an exciting—and often surprising—decade. Join us as we reminisce, share a few stories, and reflect on how the industry has changed.

One of the best ways to capture a moment in time is through music. We asked founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi to share the songs they listened to most when they were first creating Dropbox. Here are the tunes they most frequently streamed…or rather, synced to their iPods.

Drew

1. “Anna Molly” by Incubus

“If coding the first prototype of Dropbox had a soundtrack, Incubus's 2006 album Light Grenades would be it.”

2. “Unemployable” by Pearl Jam

“I've always been a big Pearl Jam fan; for years they've recorded all of their shows and made the bootlegs available for download. I remember they played a show in Boston right after I finished college in 2006 and dedicated this song to all the new grads.”

3. “Dani California” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers

“Whenever I visited my friend Adam (fellow MIT classmate/fraternity brother and fellow YC founder) in San Francisco he'd always have [the album] Stadium Arcadium playing.“

4. “Garden Grove” by Sublime

“I remember Sublime's self-titled album playing on repeat into the middle of the night as I slogged through making take after take of the first Dropbox demo video/screencast in March 2007 (using some audio equipment borrowed from my ‘90s rock cover band), hoping to get Y Combinator's attention (it worked!)”

5. “Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer

"We had just gotten Rock Band which was one of the company's favorite pastimes in the early days. ‘Say It Ain't So’ became the ‘Dropbox National Anthem’—it was a team karaoke favorite and the one song all our musicians knew how to play (in real life).”

6. “Someone Great” by LCD Soundsystem

“One of our fellow Y Combinator companies, Fuzzwich, allowed anyone to create little cartoon videos (no talent required). We all made and watched hundreds of these ‘minivids’ and this was one of the default backing tracks. Ten years later, listening to it still conjures up images of Flash players and dialogue bubbles."

7. "Umbrella" by Rihanna

“You couldn't go far in 2007 without hearing this song. Ella, ella, ella…”

Arash

“A sampling of '07 hits I remember hearing/playing a lot :P”

8. “Say It Right” by Nelly Furtado

9. “The Way I Are” by Timbaland

10. “Party Like A Rockstar” by the Shop Boyz