Dropcam's entrepreneurial story: initially to spy on a dog

Dropcam's story is a classic Silicon Valley http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/7297.html "> Success story."

In Friday, Google (Weibo) 's Nest company announced that it would buy Dropcam at a cash price of 555 million dollars.

Dropcam is a company founded only 5 years ago in San Francisco, the founder of Gregg Daffy (Greg Duffy) and Amir Virani, a former engineer at Xobni. (Xobni is an e-mail management application that was bought by Yahoo in 2013 and is said to be priced at more than 30 million dollars.) ）

Dropcam is a simple webcam that allows people to monitor their homes or places of business. Dropcam's surveillance video will be stored in the cloud, and they can pay for it if they need it. The company says 39% of customers are now willing to buy cloud video.

No one would have imagined that Dropcam was originally invented to help Tamiflu's father monitor a dog. Duffy's father wanted to know which of the dogs his neighbors had raised in his yard.

Duffy's father, who used to play with webcams, wanted to rely on it to spy on the dog, who was in his yard. But he can't handle his camera, they don't work. Also, he doesn't want to save a lot of video files on his hard drive.

Duffy and his friend Virani realised they stumbled on the next big idea: home surveillance cameras. In their vision, the camera should be able to launch itself when the object is detected and store the video on the cloud.

Sadly, no one wants to invest in this idea until they find the tech pioneer Mitch? Kapoor (Mitch Kapor). Kapoor provided them with seed money. Duffy and Virani wrote most of the original code for DROPCAM and formally launched the product in 2009.

Kapoor is the founder of Lotus Development. Lotus developed the early spreadsheet software Lotus 1-2-3 and sparked the PC revolution. He later became a venture capitalist, and his Kapoor capital (Kapor) provided seed money for many companies, such as AngelList, Asana, bit.ly and uber--.

In the early days, Tamiflu and Virani personally packaged and delivered every Dropcam purchased by the user.

With the support of Kapoor, it is easier for them to make new financing. After the seed rounds were financed, they received a total of nearly 48 million dollars, including 30 million dollars in a round of financing about a year ago.

Last week, Dropcam was bought by Nest.

Dropcam never disclosed its income status. But Re/code's journalist, Liz Gannes, points out that Dropcam is the best-selling security camera on Amazon's website and has recently entered other retail stores, such as Apple and Best Buy. Dropcam has become a popular baby surveillance camera.

Of course, Duffy's father finally found the dog that was in his yard, and there was a video card.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)