Careful! A lot of would be Drew Houston's end up discouraged by naysayers. As a founder, it took me a while to know who to listen to. One of the toughest things about doing a startup is people telling you you're wrong all the time. One of the things YC (and pg in particular) gets right is that they're very encouraging of potential for success.
Perhaps this was your problem. Who is not important, what they are saying is.
You're being told you're wrong? Why? Do they have a point or does their argument break down to simply 'because' or 'because no one has done it that way before'?
If they have a point, at the very least, they probably just pointed out a problem you need to over come in the future and you can thank them for expanding your understanding of the situation.
> Do they have a point or does their argument break down to simply 'because' or 'because no one has done it that way before'?
You'll find that the vast majority of arguments that people give you have a point. Look no further than the arguments provided against Dropbox here. The real difficulty is knowing which points are more important than others.
For example, whether developing a desktop program has the potential to be the next big startup in part depends on whether or not you believe the desktop market will still be around in the next some odd years. There is no 'right' answer to that question unless you happen to be able to see into the future.
> A lot of would be Drew Houston's end up discouraged by naysayers.
I think this is one of the more troubling aspects of entrepreneurship. Most of today's really big, wildly successful tech companies sounded like really dumb ideas when they were first launched. I wonder how many Googles/Facebooks were never founded because their founders were discouraged by naysayers??
good point, not everyone has skin as tough as me (I'm in the sciences, where the most searing crucible is not your colleague's criticism, but the cold, silent, emotionless failure of an experiment).
