Dropbox launch story

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Drew Houston, co-founder of Dropbox, talks about the decisions that guided its launch, for which he says their biggest risk was to make something no one wanted. File sharing software isn't exactly top of people's wish list so the challenge was to make a system so instantly appealing that, having used it once, people would suddenly find they needed it, and that it was a good enough experience to return to and use again.

Houston discusses how the tech innovation world is divided into two camps: rather than launch early and often, as many start ups do, the Dropbox team waited until they had 'something that didn't suck' before launch. They were also very focused: restricting the service to 'doing a few things well', rather than overloading it with features that didn't fully deliver.

Rather like Dropbox itself the presentation is refreshingly simple and straightforward.