An Amazon engineer had a little idea that turned into a billion-dollar business
Once upon a time, Amazon was a dot-com-era technology company best known for selling books. Then, in 2003 and 2004, Amazon wanted to streamline its internal process between the programmers and the hardware engineers. It was a move that many other companies were taking, but an Amazon engineer had a brilliant idea: Why not use the same project to design an application that could rent chunks of Amazon’s computing facilities to customers?
On August 24, 2006, the public beta of Amazon’s “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS). And so, the ability to rent computing capacity managed by someone else was born.
How big is Dropbox? Hint: very big
An article in Forbes has some astounding stats that give you a sense of the size and scope of Dropbox’s business.
- A billion files saved every 24 hours.
- It has 100 million users, twice as many as a year ago.
- Nearly 96 percent of its customers use Dropbox for free.
- About $500 million in revenues.
- Almost 250 employees. It started the year with 90 employees.
- A year ago when its revenues were $250 million, it was valued by private investors at over $4 billion.
