While Dropbox stayed independent, it was struggling to make money. Houston said Jobs called Dropbox a “feature, not a product” and joked that he tried to “kill” Dropbox with iCloud. Houston has become the public face of Dropbox, while Ferdowsi deals with much of the internal management. The early years were spent with hard work and hard coding, often to an office soundtrack of rock bands like Weezer, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and, one of Houston’s favourites, Pearl Jam. “Arash and I kind of met for a couple of hours, then he dropped out and we decided to spend most of our waking hours together for the next few years,” Houston says. He was introduced to fellow MIT student Ferdowsi by Kyle Vogt, co-founder of Cruise, a multi-billion dollar self-driving car company owned by General Motors. Houston applied to join Y-Combinator, a now hugely prestigious start-up programme in Silicon Valley. Realising he had left his USB drive for his laptop at home, in frustration he began coding a tool to store his files remotely. Houston developed the idea of Dropbox riding the Chinatown bus from Boston to New York. He was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked on several start-up ideas. While gaming as a teenager, he began looking for bugs in video games, leading one developer to contact him and ask if he wanted to work for them instead. The founder always appeared to have an early knack for business.
Not that Houston wants to appear fazed by the share price: “I just tell people we have this new score card that is going to move around a bit,” he jokes.īut the path to Dropbox’s float, arguably the most anticipated Silicon Valley listing so far this year, has not been smooth. Its listing on the Nasdaq in New York in March valued Houston’s company at $9.2bn (£7bn). The shares have climbed steadily, valuing the company at $13.5bn. Dropbox revolutionised the process long before Apple or Google. The company has defied the odds and gone from start-up to a multi-billion dollar tech listing in a little over 10 years, making him a billionaire and proving the naysayers wrong.ĭropbox was founded in 2007 as a cloud storage company that let users transfer files over the internet.Īt the time, transferring files in this way was slow and cumbersome, and often came with huge and slow email attachments. Yet Dropbox founder Drew Houston now has plenty to smile about.
The company was set to be killed by its rivals and consigned to a what-if. Just three years ago, Dropbox was written off in one scathing prediction as “the first dead decacorn”, a failed company valued at more than $10bn.
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