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It didn’t take long for Internet users to transform the successful Mars rover landing into its own meme — with funny images popping up maybe 5 to 10 minutes after the Curiosity mission’s first steps went off without a hitch last night.

Mere moments after the Mars rover’s first image of the planet’s surface went online, Matthew Inman (aka The Oatmeal) had superimposed a vicious Alien within it and shared on Facebook. There were so many Curiosity-related posts (including memes) on community news site Reddit that they actually overpowered the number of cat pictures, which is not an easy task.

Then, this morning, VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell informed me that there’s a Tumblr page dedicated to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) mission activity lead Bobak Ferdowsi, who most people know as that dude with the gnarly Mohawk from last night’s Curiosity mission broadcast. The Tumblr page, appropriately named “NASA needs more Mohawks,” already has eight pages of meme-based content dedicated to Ferdowsi and others from the JPL crew.

The rapid meme creation shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, especially since meme-maker 4Chan recently announced its billionth post. That said, I was a little surprised at the number of image that were actually funny. We’ve taken the liberty of collecting a handful of the good ones in the gallery embedded below. (And since our Disqus-powered comment section allows for image-based replies, feel free to point out any good memes we missed.)

h/t to Chris “Crispy” Lloyd for the headline

Filed under: media, science, VentureBeat

Silicon Valley is full of unsung heroes: Mike Krieger, Arash Ferdowsi, interns, the TechCrunch sales team, Heather Harde and the countless engineers that keep the products we love from failing to be the products we love. One of these unsung heroes is SV Angel’s David Lee, who has served as a mentor and sounding board for almost every smart person in the Valley as far as I can tell.

But as of today Lee is a little more “sung”; In a discussion with Michael Arrington on stage at TC Disrupt New York, investor Ron Conway made it even more clear that SV Angel is actually managing partner David Lee’s fund.

The fact that Lee, who used to work at StumbleUpon and Google before co-founding SV Angel, runs the fund is perhaps the Valley’s best-kept not-secret. While Conway actually is listed as investor and not partner on the firm’s Crunchbase profile, it doesn’t stop press and others from constantly writing stuff like, “Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund,” paying scant or no attention to the man actually behind the curtain.

“This is David’s fund,” Conway said to Arrington in response to questioning about financing rumors. “But I have a huge vested interest.” Conway is still the largest investor in SVAngel, which also loops in Arrington himself as a Limited Partner, Kevin Carter, Robert Pollak and Conway’s middle son Topher Conway. “I get to come in and help entrepreneurs, I get to do what I enjoy,” Conway went on.

Interestingly enough, LP Arrington pressed Lee and Conway to comment on the “rumors” that the fund might be raising $400 million, “We are exploring all options …” Lee responded, saying that they are indeed looking for investment but refusing to give more detail.

When asked what startups were particularly interesting to SV Angel, the dynamic duo listed Pinterest (of course), Airbnb, Stripe, Square and Boku. When asked the same question of VC firms, Lee and Conway singled out Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Greylock, Accel and General Catalyst as top choices.

In terms of where he saw the fund’s investment trajectory headed, Lee said that he read somewhere on TechCrunch that the way people are shopping is drastically changing (I’m going to hope he was talking about this post) and that he is most excited about companies like Warby Parker and Pinterest that are transforming the way people consume content, create relationships, and well buy stuff.

“The sharing economy,””the open graph distributed economy,” and the “P2P sharing” model all got shout out as ecommerce movements that could soon see an influx of (new?) SV Angel cash. SV Angel’s last raise of $20 million happened a year ago last April and, with a rapidly expanding portfolio, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the “rumors” Arrington alluded onstage to are indeed true.

Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston has one of the hottest startups in the game. With $257.2 million in funding and a $4-billion valuation it’s poised to triple an already impressive user base of 45-millon. So when did Houston know he was sitting on something pretty? Erick Schonfeld finds out in episode III of Drew Houston’s Founder Stories interview.

Houston says there “were a couple of important inflection points.” The first occurred after Dropbox released a demo video that captured Y Combinator’s attention and helped Dropbox secure an invitation to join the exclusive startup program. Milestone two occurred a year later when Dropbox released a separate video on Digg during its private beta launch.

In that second video, Houston says his team layered “easter eggs… aimed at the Digg audience” into the otherwise mainstream presentation. The splash of creativity worked. Within 24-hours Dropbox “had 75,000 people signup for the wait-list.” They were expecting 15,000, tops.

Not wanting to risk testing a buggy product on all 75,000, Dropbox carefully screened who could kick around early versions by extending invites through “a Gmail style closed beta.”  Their strategy paid off. Just seven months after public launch Dropbox hit 1-million users. Roughly a year later they counted 10 million.

With success in hand, Houston offers this advice to founders: “Research what other companies have done” but be cognizant of the fact that “often what works for one company is just completely the wrong thing for another company.”

Make sure to check out the entire video for additional advice and watch episodes I and II of Houston’s interview with Schonfeld.

Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring Alexis Ohanian, Fred Wilson and Kevin Ryan are here.

Episode IV of this interview is coming up.

In episode II of Erick Schonfeld’s Founder Stories interview with Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston, Houston describes how releasing a demo video to Hacker News during Dropbox’s early days catapulted his company into elite company.

“I hoped that the response would be good so that Paul [Graham] and Y Combinator would see it.” The response was better than good. Houston says the video held the top spot at “Hacker News for a couple of days” and it turns out the right people were watching. One viewer was Arash Ferdowsi, who was so impressed that he paired up with Houston as a partner. Houston also credits the video with helping him receive almost immediate and valuable feedback.

Asked if he was worried about copycats stealing the concept at the time – Houston responds, “It is easy for me to explain the idea, it is actually really hard to do it.”

Below, Houston takes us inside Y Combinator and describes how Paul Graham weighed in with key advice while Houston was under the Y Combinator wing. ”Our first sort of marketing attempt was like throwing spaghetti at a wall …we really struggled in terms of how to articulate this with investors because we had never really done that before, and Paul was really helpful to us in terms of distilling down the idea into a much shorter and sort of more compact presentation.”

Advice in hand, the team went before a room full of investors at Demo Day, where you get “waived like a piece of steak” and hit it out of the park by walking them through an admittedly risky demo that could have wiped-out their entire PowerPoint presentation.

Having survived the high-wire act, Houston says today, “Dropbox users save a billion files every three days.”

Make sure to watch the entire video for additional insights and be sure to catch the first episode of Schonfeld’s interview with Houston here.

Past episodes of Founder stories featuring Eric Ries, Fred Wilson and Dustin Moskovitz are here.

Episode III of this interview is coming up.

Red-hot startup Dropbox — you know, the file syncing service that just raised $250 million at a $4 billion valuation — has announced something this week that’s getting slightly less attention than its massive funding round, but is exciting all the same: the company has released an improved version of its mobile APIs, making the service better both in native apps and mobile web apps alike.

Dropbox first launched its mobile API in May 2010, and it’s been implemented in loads of mobile app since then. But it’s had a few issues that have been remedied with the new version of the API.

For one, it’s now adding support for ‘app folders’. Prior to this update, if you wanted to let a third-party app hook into your Dropbox account, you’d be giving it access to your entire account — which didn’t necessarily make sense for, say, a camera app. Now apps will be able to associate themselves with a single folder (which the user can move and rename as they’d like), without having to hand over the keys to the kingdom.

Likewise, security has now been beefed up using an authentication system that doesn’t require you to enter your credentials within a third party app itself. Instead, when you go to authenticate with an app, you’ll be swapped over to either the mobile web version of Dropbox or your native Dropbox app (Facebook and some other services use a similar mechanism).

The API also gives third party applications access to the versioning/revision system that Dropbox uses, which’ll let users jump back to previous versions of files and undelete them.

As we were reporting the news about Dropbox’s $250 million funding round, Forbes went live with a fascinating story, detailing how co-founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston turned down a “nine-digit” acquisition offer from Apple back in late 2009 when the company was only two years old.

The late Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic co-founder and former CEO, reportedly led the first (actually, only) meeting and apparently told Dropbox’s founders that they should sell because Apple would crush the company with a competing product – the recently debuted iCloud service.

From the Forbes article, written by Victoria Barret:

In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his 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.”

What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs’ pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn’t selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius). Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market.

Read the full story here, it’s very much worth your time.

We knew it was in the works, and now Dropbox has confirmed that it has raised a massive round of funding. The company has landed $250 million in Series B financing (bringing its total of capital raised to $257.2 million). Last we heard the round values Dropbox at $4 billion.

Index Ventures led the round, with participation from a stellar list of new investors (Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners). Early backers Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated in the round. Founded in 2007, Dropbox was initially jump-started at Y Combinator.

Update: they reportedly turned down Apple, and Steve Jobs himself, who wanted to buy Dropbox for a ‘nine-digit’ sum, back in late 2009.

Dropbox says it now has more than 45 million users saving one billion files every three days, and that it is poised to triple its user base this year.

The fresh money will be used for acquisitions, strategic partnerships and the recruitment of new people, the company said in a statement.

One of Dropbox’s main competitors, Box, also recently raised a monster round of financing, bringing its total capital raised to $162 million.

Dropbox Raises $250 Million in Series B Funding

More than 45 Million Users Saving One Billion Files Every Three Days

Dropbox, a service that lets people bring their documents, photos and videos everywhere and share them easily, announced today that it has completed a $250 million Series B financing. The company will use the funds to accelerate its rapid growth, make acquisitions, pursue strategic partnerships, and grow the team. Dropbox has more than 45 million users saving one billion files every three days, and is on track to triple its user base in 2011.

The financing was led by Index Ventures and includes participation from new investors Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners, and Valiant Capital Partners. Early investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated. Dropbox has received a total of $257.2 million in funding.

“Our goal has always been to build a service that hundreds of millions of people would love and trust. We’re inspired by the consumers and businesses who depend on Dropbox, and we will continue to make sure that the world’s devices, services, and apps work together seamlessly,” said Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. “We’re thrilled to have such world-class investors joining forces with us.”

“We are delighted to have led this financing and believe Dropbox has the potential to become an iconic technology company,” said Danny Rimer, general partner at Index Ventures. “Over the past four years, Dropbox’s talented team has created a great service with a very strong business model, and we look forward to helping the company build upon this outstanding foundation.”

About Dropbox

The mission of Dropbox is to simplify life for people around the world. Dropbox lets people bring their docs, photos and videos everywhere and share them easily. The service has more than 45 million users in 175 countries saving one billion files every three days. Dropbox was founded in San Francisco in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi and has received a total of $257.2 million in funding.