falsify this. Show me a way you'd be able to prove they do/don't, that would work for humans.

However, in the last handful of years, I've been incredibly disappointed in the stagnation of their products.

Dropbox was the first 'virtual desktop' I created that allowed me to hop into new companies and get going in a seamless way. Beyond just dotfiles, I was able to keep applications too, it was so easy to sync and get everything setup at a new company.

When repl.it came out, I wondered why Dropbox hadn't done that first. There's all sorts of room for innovation here - being able to install the right binaries, perfectly configuring a cloud command line setup, syncing configs, etc.

Photos - I have the majority of phots from my adult life stored on dropbox. But the searching is crap compared to google. It's not easy to share or make albums. Dropbox could have been a mini-social media site, a way to share photos, collages, albums easily with friends - but it has half the features of google photos!

Collaborative Editing - They probably could have done something here too, but I never saw a compelling attempt.

Dropbox is still a great product for file syncing, but I fear that they will slowly lose relevance if they don't get another hit product.

It should be muscle memory to do the easy stuff. And then it turns out, the 'hard' questions are often just a combination of easy things.

Also if this rumor is true, they also get massive white glove engineering support: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/21/google-scores-six-year-meta-...

But it took him 10 years and he probably had the chops to get to director/VP level at big tech if he would have grinded on that path.

He's not hurting for money - he lives quite a bit nicer lifestyle than an average FAANG engineer but his ceiling was high on either W2 or starting his own thing. He could definitely retire but now he's just back at it after some time off for the love of the game. He's a grinder by nature.

The other friend is a solid engineer but not top tier, doesn't love the business side of things. So getting acqui-hired into a decent paying job (probably 300k) working remote on his project that got open sourced is probably his dream.

I mean, i'm sure he would have loved to make many millions instead of a tiny acquihire, but he is much happier not having to deal with business stuff. This is a much more realistic view of 'success' than the outlier success storeis you hear on hacker news.

*My advice*

I would find a business partner if you don't love that side of things. Work on this part time, get some seed money, and if you can get a couple PAYING customers part time, then go for it - if you're ok with the more likely outcome of not becoming uber rich.

1 Friend, started a consulting company, worked his absolute ass off, made many millions, but also maybe not a lot more than if he had worked his ass off in big tech and climbed the ranks.

Another friend started a product company, raised a seed round, worked on it for many many years paying himself peanuts, eventually had to take a job at a big tech company for a few years and his side business was part time, then quit big tech to focus on it again, acquihired after 8 years. Now he gets to work on his project and get paid a decent amount by some mid tier tech company, so he's happy.

Financially, not the optimal move, but he loves working on his own ideas, and I think he's happy about that.

Are you making peanuts in a remote location, and you'd be happier making slightly more if you were in charge of your destiny?

If you spend five years on your project to get acquihired by some mid level public company- is that success or would you be devestated?

Do you have the chops to build a business, raise money, find customers, recruit employees? Yes, do you think you'd enjoy it?

Then there's Anthropic...huge user.

I don't believe any of those companies have as many billion dollar successes as Google. They aren't the only company to do this, but they certainly do it at an unprecedented scale.

Meta on the other hand, really just has ads.

It's also nice that it stores all my preferences in the cloud, so switching machines is seamless (helpful when my macbook broke a couple weeks ago and I had to use a loaner chromebook for a day).

It's also well integrated with google3 and codesearch, and seamlessly runs tests on remote machines with tmux integration and all.

Not all of google tooling is my favorite (like their source control), but the IDE is great.