The tech world has a new darling du jour: It's Dropbox, a popular digital storage and file-sharing service. The company's founder and CEO, Drew Houston, earned the attention of the late Steve Jobs — and reportedly a 9-digit buyout offer — when he smartly reverse engineered the Mac operating system so the Dropbox logo "elegantly" and automatically appeared as a seemingly organic icon in the Apple menu bar. "Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that," writes Victoria Barret in a Forbes cover story on the hot startup. Here, a brief guide, by the numbers, to Dropbox's rapid ascent:
50 million
Number of users Dropbox has in 175 countries. The San Francisco-based company is just 5 years old
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4 million
Number of users Dropbox had in January 2010. A month earlier, Steve Jobs had summoned Houston and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, to his Cupertino office. Jobs "presciently" saw that Dropbox could be a valuable asset to Apple, but Houston said he was determined to remain independent and expand. Jobs told Houston Dropbox was "a feature, not a product."
$800 million
Amount Apple's Jobs reportedly offered to pay for DropBox
$250 million
Amount of funding Dropbox secured from "seven of the Valley's elite venture firms" in August. "This is the hot company," says a well-known investor who didn't get a stake in the company
$4 billion
Value of the company, based on that venture-capital investment
$81 million
Amount of funding Dropbox competitor Box.net secured last week
325 million
Number of files that are saved to Dropbox each day
1
Number of users who join every second
$240 million
Revenue Dropbox is set to bring in for 2011. Houston says the company is already making a profit, but he won't divulge specifics
96
Percent of Dropbox users who pay nothing. Users get 2 GB of storage for free. For $10 a month they can upgrade to 50 GB; for $20, they get 100 GB
70
Current number of Dropbox staffers, most of them engineers
200
Number of staffers the company plans to have soon — "still an absurdly low number given the company's size," says Barret
9
Number of staffers it had in 2008
1
Number of rooms in the Dropbox office "on gritty Market Street" in San Francisco
85,000
Size of the office, in square feet, the company is soon moving to. The new digs will have views of San Francisco Bay
1 out of 4
Number of Dropbox users who come via referral. Instead of advertising, the company offers existing users 250 megabytes of free storage if they refer a friend
222 million
Number of people who have iPhones, iPods, and iPads, who may now use Apple's newly launched iCloud rather than Dropbox. Though Houston "believes Dropbox will torpedo the backup industry within five years, he especially fears iCloud," says Barret. At this point though, Dropbox "remains a hell of a great alternative" to using iCloud, says Sam Biddle at Gizmodo
28
Age of Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston
5
Age at which Houston first began playing with an IBM PC Junior
Sources: Cult of Mac, Forbes, Gizmodo, ZD Net Asia
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