Drew Houston on deciding to pursue Dropbox

I found this great post from the founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, on Hacker News.

Someone had asked him if Dropbox (currently valued at $5b) was his first idea.

“[I] informally came up with and tossed around 6 or 7 ideas at the same time — not so much coding as investigating/talking to potential customers and bouncing them off other friends and entrepreneurs.

this was crucial — ideas don’t really fall out of the sky, they evolve.

there were several times where i’d get really excited about one idea — like pacing in my living room at 5:30am excited — and then 5 days later find out (via a different set of search terms or something) there were 3 other people doing the same thing, with a head start and more money.

ultimately they say scratch your own itch — this was a problem (syncing a 3gb file across several computers efficiently) i routinely had working on a prior company i had started and i was frustrated that no one had solved it well, and it turned out to be more promising than my original company ”

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863