Forbes Dropbox Profile Divulges Details of Jobs' and Apple's Acquisition Offer

[Phillip Swanson]

Rumors surfaced last month that Dropbox balked at an $800 million acquisition offer from Apple. A new profile of the company in the upcoming issue of Forbes confirms the deal, and a lot more.

The Forbes cover story details Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi’s personal meetings with Jobs, the first of which occurred in December of 2009 at Job’s Cupertino office.

I mean, Steve friggin’ Jobs,” remembers Houston, now 28. “How do you even prepare for that?” When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: “I know what you do. — Forbes

Houston and Ferdowsi cut Job’s pitch short and informed him the company wasn’t for sale, even for 9-figures. ,.

Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. “He said we were a feature, not a product,” says Houston. Courteously, Jobs spent the next half hour waxing on over tea about his return to Apple, and why not to trust investors, as the duo—or more accurately, Houston, who plays Penn to Ferdowsi’s mute Teller—peppered him with questions. — Forbes

Jobs later suggested they meet at Dropbox’s San Francisco office, but Houston declined, instead offering to meet in Silicon Valley. Job’s didn’t like the suggestion and cut off contact with Dropbox. The next time Jobs would mention Dropbox was this June during the iCloud announcement where he knocked Dropbox’s attempt to solve the cloud storage problem.

Jobs may have knocked Dropbox during his last keynote, and indeed included cloud storage as a mere feature of a larger product in iCloud, but that doesn’t change the fact Dropbox is an insanely successful company. Dropbox now has more than 50 million users, and recently raised $250 million in capital investments.

Source: Forbes

[mortopher]

iCloud is great and all, but I don't see myself closing my dropbox account anytime soon.

[thetoothfairy]

I use dropbox once and a while however I will not pay them for more space... to expensive if you ask me.

[EskimoRuler]

I love dropbox, use it for school. It worked great when working in visual studio on my laptop then being able to open up the project in the lab. But i paid for the 50 GB plan for a while once but i felt like it was too expensive for the amount of space that you get

[scottjl]

dropbox is nice, but other services like sugarsync are half the price for the storage. add in that dropbox gives away a ton of storage i just don't see myself paying for their service. now with icloud and apple pushing developers towards it i think dropbox will be wishing they sold out years ago.

[teej1410]

iCloud for my apple device apps and songs etc. Dropbox for everything else.

[GmAz]

HAHAHAHAHA. All I picture is the guys from Dropbox giving Jobs the finger and shooing him away. Dropbox is doing just fine and their product is amazing. I will agree their price is somewhat expensive, I am tempted more and more with it as I find myself using it daily.

[duromega]

I use dropbox to upload some personal stuff, if I can do the same with icloud I will stop using it