Founder Office Hours With Chris Dixon And Josh Kopelman: Dispatch.io

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

If you have a product that could potentially appeal to everyone, how do you pick which customers to go after first? In this episode of Founder Office Hours with investors Chris Dixon and Josh Kopelman, Dispatch.io founder Jesse Lamb asks whether his file-sharing service should focus first on early adopters, consumers, or small businesses.

Kopelman predicts, “You are going to reach them all the same way. A big believer in the “consumerization of the enterprise,”, he says, “I am not sure you would do anything fundamentally different if you are going after a small business or a consumer.”

But you have to start somewhere. Dixon suggests to “find the people with the greatest pain” like designers who have to send big files to clients, or perhaps partner with an established service that Dispatch.io is building on top of to gain initial distribution.

Whatever approach Dispatch.io chooses, Kopelman says “sell an application rather than a platform.”

Dispatch.io helps people share files across services, whether they are using Dropbox, Google Docs, or something else. The company was a runner-up at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New Yrok City earlier this year.

Watch the previous Founder Office Hours episodes with Schedit and Profitably, and other Founder Stories here. Dispatch.io’s original 90-second Hackathon demo is below.

The problem of cloud fragmentation is you've got files all over the Web -- in Google docs, Dropbox, Basecamp.

How do you go from one site to the other?

There's a way to explain this is with a demonstration.

If we could get the laptop - so I'm going to start a startup right now.

But my contractors are, we're going to need a W-9 form.

So I'm going to put that in our Basecamp.

Nick just going to click the button and boom, it shows up right in my Basecamp.

What 's a start up without investors?

So we're gonna go to 'YCombinator' where they have 'Term Sheet'.

We'll send that to Google docs because I'm gonna edit that.

So we upload the Term Sheet to Google docs.

And in a few seconds it's gonna appear here and give it a few seconds this is in the cloud so it's magic and it takes a few seconds so here it is.

So we're going to go into our term sheet and edit it just to show you that it works.

There we go. Term sheets are boring, Let's go back to Google Docs,
Why
don't we create a list of potential investors. So lets throw Ron Conway, Paul Graham, Dave Tisch and Fred Wilson, why don't we throw them in this list because, those are always a good thing to have a list of names that could potentially be useful, but I want to have access to this all the time so I'm gonna throw it into my Dropbox.

10 seconds.

It's gonna appear on my Dropbox, visit Dispatch.io,
Dispatch.io
or follow @Dispatch Dispatch.io for more information, boom it appeared in my Dropbox, it works, that's Dispatch.io

Thank you Dispatch.io, Dotch are you ready to go?
so we're ready to go.

So, yes or no?

One, we need

Josh Kopelman is a venture capitalist and Managing Partner at First Round Capital . Previously, Kopelman founded Half.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2000. He remained with eBay for three years, running the Half.com business unit and growing eBay’s Media marketplace to almost half a billion dollars in annual sales. In late 2003 Kopelman helped to found TurnTide, an anti-spam company that created the world’s first anti-spam router. TurnTide was acquired by Symantec just six months later. In 2001 Kopelman co-founded...

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Chris Dixon currently works as the CEO and Co-founder of Hunch. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode. In addition to his personal investments, Chris is also a...

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