Ask YC: YC (Dropbox) vs YC (ZumoDrive)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438410

by startingup • 18 years ago

29 33 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Sorry for the attempt to be cute with the title :) but seriously, isn't there a substantial overlap between these two? Does it matter if two YC companies end up directly competing? As a very occasional angel, I wonder how this works ...

qhoxie• 18 years ago

I believe that PG has said in the past that YC has no problem investing in companies within the same market. If they are promising enough and the market is sufficiently large, it won't be an issue.

The storage market with these two companies seems like a pretty good example.

pg2• 18 years ago

Originally they weren't competing. ZumoDrive evolved out of Versionate. Even now there are significant differences in the way the two work. They should be able to both succeed.

wensing• 18 years ago

Will those significant differences be obvious to the consumer?

pg2• 18 years ago

I would expect so in this case, because they'll cause the two startups to market their services differently.

nailer2• 18 years ago

Have you encouraged them to join? Dropbox has more customers and awareness. Zumodrive has better technology. They'd be stronger together than apart.

pxlpshr• 18 years ago

Hmmm, I'd like to see a formal comparison of the two. I haven't used zumodrive but I'm soooooo impressed with Dropbox. It's amazing.

I know this is against the grain, but Dropbox replaced SVN for our development projects. It's a lot easier for designers to use... SVN is too tedious.

albertni• 18 years ago

What makes you think it would make sense for two small startups to just "join", especially in this space, where it's not like you can just plug the technology of one into the other.

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

Due the fact that companies often evolve substantially from their original business models, it is impossible to make a lot of investments without at some point having clashes among your portfolios. A group that makes 40 per year couldn't possibly avoid such a thing.

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

And given the current funding climate, it would be great for such companies to merge.

fallentimes4• 18 years ago

Why?

Don't you think the transition period would dramatically hurt productivity? What about clashing cultures? M&A usually fails.

ajkirwin• 18 years ago

Dropbox.

perezd• 18 years ago

I'd like to know the answer to this too, I feel like there are a ton of viable options out there now, but I am waiting to see who stands out as defacto.

The ZumoDrive/iTunes integration is truly innovative, though. Majorly cool!

Dilpil• 18 years ago

Nothing wrong with diversification. If it is good for the economy at large to have so many competing smaller entities, then perhaps it is good for an individual fund to have stakes in many competing smaller entities as well.

crad2• 18 years ago

ZumoDrive is notably down right now.

500 - Internal Server Error Oops, something went wrong on the server. We'll investigate this ASAP. In the mean time, click here to go to our home page.

On every page :-(

crad2• 18 years ago

It's back now :)

shergill• 18 years ago

Cloud living is pretty expensive :(

alaskamiller• 18 years ago

I own AMD and Intel stock.

Rabidmonkey1• 18 years ago

I would love to see ZumoDrive support Linux. I've recently adopted Linux pretty much full time, and the Dropbox client for it is great; it really offers seamless integration.

Does anyone know if ZumoDrive plans to offer Linux support in the future? I have a huge flac library I'd love to be able to stream to my lower storage laptop. Heck, I'd store a ton of stuff in the cloud.

davidz• 18 years ago

We are looking to support Linux soon :)

whalesalad• 18 years ago

ZumoDrive turned me off instantly with their horrible Mac offering. I like the idea, but Dropbox actually has a real nice client on Mac.

keevon• 18 years ago

I'm curious what it is you don't like about the ZumoDrive Mac client.

Ask YC: YC (Dropbox) vs YC (ZumoDrive)?

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