Entrepreneurship invasion

Apr 19, 2007

So yesterday, I'm in my office trying to catch up on email when a student who I haven't seen in a long time stops by my office. In the process of catching up, he asks me about how one takes a year off from MIT.

"Why are you taking a year off?" I ask.

Well, he tells me, he, an MIT friend, and another guy have started a company. He wants to take a year to devote himself fully to the start-up. And he's trying to get a freshman I know to join the team, too, at least for the summer.

The company is called Dropbox, and I must say I'm impressed by their technology and ease of use. Click here or on their logo below to see the demo... I thought it was awesome.

They're in beta now, so if you run Windows (I don't; MacOS and Linux coming soon, I'm told), you may want to sign up and try it out. Basically, it is a super-easy way to synchronize files across computers.

I love being at a place where students are so creative and are always starting amazing things like this. And I love randomly hearing about them on some random Wednesday afternoon.

From the You-can't-make-this-up Department: Another student who's taking a semester off to grow his now-successful startup just stopped by the office, while I was writing this entry. I didn't plan it, it just happened.

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Yay for entrepreneurship! I love this kind of stuff too. Thanks, Matt!

Posted by: Daniel '12 on April 19, 2007

Wow, Dropbox looks amazing.

Posted by: Eirik ('12?) on April 19, 2007

i love entrepeneuring, although i refer to it as 'freelance inventing'... most people dont understand the reference. MIT is the perfect place for people like us. Inventions give that sort of thrill to the zeal of education. Its good stuff.

and that is a pretty awsome company.

Posted by: Lendz on April 19, 2007

The best of the best DROPBOX apps is the original Tango DropBox for use with server. http://www.etonica.com

Posted by: Frank on April 19, 2007

hey -- this is drew houston '05 (founder of dropbox and the 'mit friend' from the article

) -- being a recent grad i can vouch for the kind of enthusiasm and support that the MIT community has for entrepreneurship (the E-club, enterprise forum, etc.); it makes the jump a lot easier.

if anyone has any questions about entrepreneurship at mit (or wants to learn more about dropbox

) give me a shout at houston at alum dot mit dot edu. take care!

Posted by: Drew '05 on April 19, 2007

dropbox looks cool!
in the demo, value of the check is cool ...
did someone calculate the vlaue...

.002+ (e^i(pi))+ 1
1.002 -1+ i(sin(180)) = 0.002

was there a time when a person could buy something for 0.2 cents in the US? -

Posted by: checkvalue on April 19, 2007

Nice, this is a slick tool! Thanks for posting it, Matt! And, yeah I thought the dollar value on the check was pretty cool too - interesting way to write two-tenths of a cent.

Posted by: Arkajit on April 19, 2007

really, really interesting!

Posted by: Basant on April 19, 2007

Question, is the 100K price only for MIT students?

Posted by: Lendz on April 19, 2007

it seems interesting, i might give it a try when the macos version comes out. i was actually thinking of doing something similar but gave up when i realised that it would take too much of my time and i don't really need it because i use my network server to store all the data of on going projects

virtual ftp drives are all i need (FTPDrive on windows, FUSE on linux and MacFUSE on MacOS) to make all software work with data on server as if it were on my hard drive

anyway, this post made me think about something else, what about international students? can we take a year off(and stay in the US) to start our own company or work on some projects for a year? are we allowed to earn money while we're in college? oh, and i forgot to ask earlier, were there any international kids at CPW?
i'm sorry about my spelling and grammar, it's 2am here and i'm in the middle of switching to polyphasic sleep schedule :D

Posted by: Sh1fty on April 19, 2007

Dropbox looks awesome- I'm definitely downloading it when it gets out of beta. Very cool.

Liked the check, too.

Posted by: Shannon on April 19, 2007

It's pretty cool to see students being creative like this. It's good that he's just taking the year off and not doing the whole drop out idea as you never quite know if something is going to final.

Best of luck to the founders.

Posted by: Neil Kelty on April 19, 2007

Hey, congratulations Drew. That looks like a fantastic app, very clean.

I'm a high school student (junior) and I've been lurking around the MIT blogs for a long time - I guess this is as good a time as ever to say hello. I have a web app of my own, called Quizlet ( http://quizlet.com ) I launched it this January and it's got ~18,500 registered users, so things are going well. But anyways, I've always considered MIT my first choice. I'm definitely interested in hearing more about the entrepreneurship possibilities at MIT.

So Drew, I'll ping you via email

Thanks.

Posted by: Andrew Sutherland on April 19, 2007

Oh man, DropBox looks like the sweetest thing ever invented basically ever. That is so, so cool.

Posted by: Kristin K. '11 on April 19, 2007

Dropbox looks amazingly thought-out and simple to use, hopefully a version comes out for Mac soon.

Also, I'd like to commend you guys for putting the VA Tech logo on the MIT blog site, they need everyone's support now more than ever.

Posted by: CC on April 19, 2007

that's such a good idea!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that's awesome

Posted by: 0 on April 22, 2007

hi
i know this is out of topic, but is it possible to get Matt's email address?

Posted by: international student in trouble on April 22, 2007

Dropbox looks really amazing.

Posted by: social networking on April 22, 2007

Will be waiting for MAC version...

Posted by: publish articles free on April 22, 2007

I agree, good idea.

Posted by: online on April 22, 2007

aye, international student, their are probobly two emails mcgann has, one personal, and the otherlogical. his personal i have no idea, probobly madmatt@something . something

But his logical one is mcgann@mit.edu. pretty logical last-name@mit.edu

Like i said, hes probobly got a personal E-mail account which he looks at on a daily basis, his @mit.edu one i am not so sure of, remember to write in plain text not rich formatting so as to not get absorbed by their highly sophisticated spam filtering.

P.S still waiting for an answer to the 100K question mentioned previous.

Posted by: lendz on April 23, 2007

it's madmatt[at]mit[dot]edu and you could've found that out on your own. all MIT email addresses look like this: username[at]mid[dot]edu so all you need to do is find the username. what you had to do was find one of his posts with pics that he hosted on his athena web space. athena web space URLs look like this: http://web.mit.edu/username/... i hope Matt won't be mad at me for posting his email address...

Posted by: Sh1fty on April 23, 2007

this kinda doesn't have much to do with the topic but I am a high school sophomore thinking about MIT for college. We are finishing up choosing our classes for next year and as of now I have chosen: English 11-Honors, Math Analysis-Honors, Principles of Business and Marketing, Spanish 4-Honors, Physics -Honors, Virginia/US History-Honors, and Chemistry I-Honors. I was wondering if I should switch out Principles of Business and Marketing for AP psychology since Business and Marketing is not an honors class and to get in an AP class in my junior year and follow that up with 6 APs in my senior year.

Posted by: emil on April 23, 2007

aww... so he changed it did he? hmm... interesting, last year it was mcgann@mit.edu that makes sense for him to change it to madmatt. i still think he has a personal email, though.

Posted by: lendz on April 23, 2007

ehmm,
thanks lendz and shifty
that was very helpful

Posted by: international student on April 24, 2007

Here is something for you all aspirants plus students (I am sorry professor but I need to do this.)

This is what they[CBS the 60 min show] said about IIT.
Combine MIT, Princeton and Caltech, then what you will get: IIT. Admission Percentage : 2%.

Now see this (You knew it Marilee, since I told you.):TISCO is "not likely to recruit" IIT graduates any more, Muthuraman said at the meeting of the pioneering batch of IIT Madras. He felt the IITs thrive on their "past reputation" and he preferred other college students who were amenable to company training.

Hmmm. So all eyes?? Then see this: A student of MAI, in his third year, developed a new rocket technology... OOOO. Laughing? Well...well. Me too. But, hey, hell this is working quite fine for me.

Bye
From Russia
With Love
Abhishek Madhur

Posted by: Vishaque on April 24, 2007

And Dude, did you wishper something like Son of StarWars

HA HA HA...

God (if He exists?) Bless you.

MIT Admissions

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Matt McGann '00

Entrepreneurship invasion

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