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I think this kind of thing gets overlooked a lot on HN considering the tech heavy role most have here. Personally I'm not surprised at all.

But never underestimate marketing. Building the best widget in the world means nothing if no one knows it exists.

(that being said having the best widget in the world is, in itself, a great marketing tool)

At the same time though, their products so good that it wasn't really necessary for them to hire some stellar biz dev/sales whiz, they were instead able to use these methods to attract users. I don't think these methods would work as well if the product was not up to par.

Well, they do say that the product is #1. I think the focus of the slides was the nontechnical stuff.

I think that's partly because that was the focus of the talk. I believe that Drew (for example) had a working prototype of Dropbox before applying to YC, and he'd been thinking about it for years. Then, after funding, it was quite a while (I think 6 months+) before the initial version was released. That's a lot of work on tech.

I'd love to hear a talk on the tech journey of DropBox.