In late 2006, early 2007 cloud storage,
or online storage startups were kind of the thing
that is like the startup cliche basically and so
on TechCrunch you would have these roundups,
so like okay here are the next 100 online storage companies
that have launched and it was just kind of a joke and,
but at the same time I had all these problems with this
because I had this company and all of our crown jewels
I had on this little thumb drive and I was always like
one stupid mistake away from disaster, right.
I would carry it like in my shorts and I would pull it out,
and the connector would be bent and I would like
pray that I could like bend it back softly,
but firmly enough so it would keep working.
And I would - I mean, these are all things that people would do,
I would still be emailing myself stuff,
I would still be carrying this thing around,
on my little leash and it just drove me nuts and I went
through Michael Arrington's articles and I tried all
100 other things and I found something interesting where
none of them really solved the problem for me,
even though there were a lot of them.
And in particular you had to get like one thing
to - one service that was like a website,
you could upload your stuff too and then you had get another
app that was like that would sync things across your computers
and you get another app to back up your computer and I'm
like as we would later tell investors like,
I mean, I can't really imagine Tom Cruise in Minority Report
like logging into his Gmail to like pick up the attachment he
sent himself that morning or like forgetting his thumb drive,
it was just over here and your stuff follows you round and
that's the whole point like someone else takes care of it.
And we had a glimpse of that at school and
I'm sure you guys have something similar,
we had this system called Athena,
where you sit down at any of tens of
thousands of computers across campus,
all your stuff's in front of you,
you don't think about it and it's kind of - it's not a
very - it's not a consumer kind of typical environment
so it's kind of Unix focused and things like that.
But still you're not like sprinting back
across campus to take up your paper,
you're not worried about backing it up because
again someone else was just taking care of it.
And nobody here really built that
for the rest of the world and like this was pre,
you know, iPhone and iPad and all the amazing things
that have happened in the last five years and it
wasn't actually a very mainstream use case,
I mean, people were not syncing things across like six Linux PCs,
even then most people just had one computer.
But anyways it drove me nuts enough where the kind of last straw
was - I was in Boston South Station at the Chinatown bus terminal
and if any of you had the pleasure of riding the Chinatown bus,
it costs like 10 or 15 bucks and it takes you from Boston to New York
and is famous for such things like tipping over or things like that.
So, fortunately that wasn't part of the story.
And I got to New York okay,
but there was a problem which is I had been making this mental
checklist of like all these great things that I was going
to get done because I had four hours in front of me where
nobody was going to bother me and here all the great things
I was kind of accomplish and I excitedly sit down,
I open up my, I guess,
ThinkPad at the time and I'm like I get that feeling in
the pit of my stomach which many of you have experienced
at one time or another where I was like start feeling around
in my pocket and I just get this vivid picture in my head
of my thumb drive sitting on my desk at home and,
you know, and then I'm like okay,
instead of getting all these wonderful things done,
I'm just going to think about what an
idiot I'm for the next four hours,
but thought for about 10 or 15 minutes,
but then actually open up the editor and started writing some
code having actually no idea what this would turn into,
but I'm getting so frustrated that nobody
had really solved this problem.