Comment by dang

Could you please not post like this to HN? Your snarky comment is worse than the one you're putting down; he was obviously trying to be helpful and responded sweetly to Drew's reply in the original thread. His real mistake was being unlucky enough to have people posting internet-jerk comments about it 13 years later.

It is probably the most cited HN comment of all time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), the word "app" referred to YC application, not software apps, and you can see in his point #3 the widespread assumption that no one would ever pay money for this.

The surprise was that Dropbox proved the common knowledge wrong, but that didn't happen till later. When YC funded Dropbox, it was because they believed in Drew, not file synchronization, which is also information that wasn't available till later. So if we are to look at that thread fairly, in context, we should see it as a successful conversation with a graceful ending, rather than mocking someone for not knowing the future.