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Havish Gupta
Figuring Out • 7m
In 2008, Drew Houston, a tech enthusiast, was traveling to New York for a trip and decided to work remotely. But he forgot his USB flash drive at home. Frustrated, he thought, "Why isn't there an easier way to access and share files?" This led to the idea of Dropbox, a seamless cloud storage platform that would allow people to store and access files from anywhere. But there were a few problems: 1) Building the infrastructure was expensive. 2) Investors doubted whether people would really need such a service. The Solution: Instead of spending months and a lot of money building the product, Houston created a fake demo launch video of the product that didn’t even exist yet! The Result: The video went viral on forums like Hacker News, and the waiting list skyrocketed. This convinced investors to fund Dropbox, and that's exactly what Houston needed to move forward. Later, Dropbox was even funded by Y Combinator and is now a $10 billion company with over $2.5 billion in revenue.
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