Dropbox: Drew Houston

In 2006, Drew Houston got on a bus from Boston heading to New York. He planned to use the three-hour ride to get some work done, so he opened his laptop, and realized he had left his thumb drive with all of his work files at home. Drew decided he never wanted to have that problem again. On that bus ride, he started writing the code to build a cloud-based file storage and sharing service he called Dropbox. Fourteen years later, Drew and his co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi, have built Dropbox into a public company worth close to $8 billion. Order the How I Built This book at: https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings. And you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.

• 0:45Guy Raz?

  But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes

• 1:30Guy Raz?

  based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt.

• 2:54Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together.

• 3:36Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale and people bring taste, judgment and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 4:21Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 5:06Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Hey, really quick before we start the show. The How I Built This book is now a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. So, thank you to all of you who ordered it and for your support of this show. If you haven't picked it up and you want to learn the secrets of how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, How I Built This, the book, is for you. It's now available wherever books are sold and in most countries around the world,

• 5:52Guy Raz?

  or by visiting howibuiltthis.com or guyrazz.com. And thanks.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I'm trying to work these different leads on co-founders. And then I had met this kid, Kyle. And so Kyle's like, hey, you should talk to my friend Arash.

• 6:08Guy Raz?

  And what do you know about Arash at that point?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Virtually nothing.

• 6:11Guy Raz?

  Just a recommendation from somebody else who's like, hey, this guy, he might be a good co-founder.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he's still in school, right? So we get together in the student center and just start hashing it out. And that was what was so crazy. I was just like, you gotta drop out of school to do this. And I'm like, all right, I'm expecting enough to talk to the parents and like, do all this stuff. And he just bounces. A couple of days later, he had just dropped out of school.

• 6:42Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:55Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz. And on today's show, how Drew Houston came up with the idea for Dropbox on the day he forgot to bring his thumb drive for a weekend in New York, and how that idea grew into a multi-billion dollar business.

• 7:14Guy Raz?

  I probably don't have to explain why walkie-talkies are sold in multiples. Yes, in practice, you could use just one, I suppose, maybe to scan the frequencies or eavesdrop on other two-way radios. Or you could just talk into it and hope someone hears you. But that's no fun and not really what these things were designed to do. To get the most out of a walkie-talkie? Ideally, you have someone else or even lots of other people talking on the same channel. And this idea is basically what venture capitalists and other investors call the network effect. And in the past few years, products that grow through networks have become extremely

• 7:58Guy Raz?

  attractive to these investors. And why? Because the network effect allows a product to grow on its own without a whole lot of marketing. So here's an example. Someone sends you a survey to complete, and the survey was created using SurveyMonkey. You fill it out and send it back. And by doing that, you have seamlessly become a SurveyMonkey user. And the next time you want to create a survey, you are likely to use SurveyMonkey. It's the same story for Calendly. When someone invites you to schedule a meeting, you get an email from Calendly inviting you to use the service as well. Slack works in a similar

• 8:40Guy Raz?

  way. If one person on a team uses it, the rest of the team will jump on as well. It's a concept called product-led growth. If you use it, your friends have to use it to engage with you. And then you are all users, and the product grows and grows and grows. And this early insight, back in 2006, is what allowed Dropbox to scale into a multi-billion-dollar business in a few short years. Because Drew Houston knew that the product he was building would grow organically and exponentially, all at the same time. Because when one person signs up for a Dropbox account and wants to share a file or document with another

• 9:24Guy Raz?

  person, that second person also has to sign up for a Dropbox account. And most people do because it's free. The vast majority of Dropbox users don't pay a dime for it. Yet the company makes huge profits from the 3% to 5% of its customers who pay, mainly businesses. Now, if you don't already know, Dropbox is basically a hard drive in the cloud, and you can seamlessly access all of your data from any of your devices. And Drew came up with the idea when he took a weekend trip from Boston to New York and forgot to bring his thumb drive. So after mulling over the idea for a few months, Drew decided to apply to the now legendary accelerator program,

• 10:09Guy Raz?

  Y Combinator, or YC. But before that happened, before he grew Dropbox into a company with a $7.5 billion market cap, Drew was, not surprisingly, the kind of kid who was obsessed with computers from a very early age. He grew up in Acton, Massachusetts. It's a suburban site of Boston. His mom was the school librarian and his dad was an electrical engineer. And when Drew was just five years old, he wrote his first line of code in BASIC.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  I dabbled in programming, but then my dad would bring home computer games from work. So these adventure games like King's Quest and things like that.

• 10:48Guy Raz?

  King's Quest was great.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I played a ton of computer games when I was little and then was also just interested in figuring out how they worked and making my own computer games.

• 11:00Guy Raz?

  And I guess like at age 14, you really jumped into computers as a job, like a summer job to work for a gaming company? What's the story?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I was in eighth grade, I think, I'd signed up to test this online game. So I started poking around under the hood of the game and I found all these security vulnerabilities. And I emailed the developer, really is over ICQ. I'm like, hey, you know, you guys need to tighten up a few of these things. And they're like, OK, got it. You're right. Would you like to fix that for us? It was a startup, so they're like, well, we can't really pay you a salary, but we can give you stock options.

• 11:42Guy Raz?

  Did they know you were 14, by the way?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I'm like, is it OK if my dad signs the paperwork? And they were fine with me working remotely and part-time and everything.

• 11:51Guy Raz?

  Wow, so they gave you equity in the business? And by the way, did that ever, I don't know, did it ever come anything?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely not.

• 11:58Guy Raz?

  No, okay, I got you. It's just like, it was basically smoke and dust, right?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was a great experience. I mean, it was awesome. I was like, I was a game developer. This was my dream. I thought that's what I was gonna do with my life.

• 12:10Guy Raz?

  All right, you're working for this company and you're in high school. And this has become like what you do throughout high school? Like, you're not doing car washes? You're, you're working for this company? Or you go work for other companies doing similar things?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Well, it was a really important stepping stone because, you know, my resume before that was babysitting. So having a programming job became a way in to get another programming job at a different local, a different startup that was local. So there was this, this startup called Soft Servo Systems. And what I did there was they had, they were running everything on Windows. I was like, hey, if you, if we can move this stuff over from Windows to Linux, which is free, then you could save even more cost on the hardware. So, you know, I'm like figuring out how to move all this stuff. And these were just, it was just kind of one interesting project after another.

• 13:07Guy Raz?

  So you, you finished high school and you went to MIT?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:11Guy Raz?

  And, and your ambition, from what I gather from this conversation, was to go on and maybe start a gaming company or make games somehow? Was that, is that right?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Well, I had, during high school, as I had these, because I was a literal game developer. But then these other experiences with startups expanded my horizons a lot. And so I'm like, all right, in college, I'm like, I definitely want to do engineering. Definitely want to be involved in startups. And my first company was an SAT prep company. It's called Accolade.

• 13:41Guy Raz?

  This is why you were at MIT?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I took, I took a leave of absence in the middle of MIT and teamed up with a teacher at my high school, who actually had his own, his own little SAT prep business that he was running out of his living room. You know, the SAT is changing because it went from 1600 points to 2400. I'm like, Now, all of those books, like, all that material is now obsolete because the test is new.

• 14:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And there's not really a great way to do this online. So what if we teamed up and did that? And, you know, we met in a Chili's in Westford and were, you know, hashing out, trying to figure out how do you incorporate a company and all these? And then that really began the entrepreneurial journey. So I basically took a leave of absence my junior year. It was important that I come back and finish my degree, so I did that. And then I got a job at a network security company called Bit9, which, um, so anyway, I was working during the day at that startup and I was moonlighting on my, on Acolyte.

• 14:43Guy Raz?

  On Acolyte.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  The SAT prep startup.

• 14:44Guy Raz?

  So this is important because a lot, because, you know, you hear a lot of people say, oh, you know, this is my fifth startup or my sixth startup. And I think a lot of people have this idea that, oh, you know, all engines are go and you need startup and you raise a lot of money and you come up with a product. But actually, a startup can just be two people working on their computers and, and the business might be a file folder. And that might be the startup. By the way, is the company still around?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 15:09Guy Raz?

  It's not, okay. So did the idea just kind of, did it just kind of fizzle out?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Well, we had constraints, like, right, so he was not going to leave his teaching job. And neither of us were really ready to kind of throw in completely. And we got it reasonably far along and we had customers, we had income, we had at least the rudiments of a working product. But, um, I mean, it was a nice, good kind of side income, but it's seasonal, right? So there's only a couple of months a year where you're really going and then it's hard to keep momentum. And so I started getting really distracted. And then another one of my friends, Adam Smith, his, he started, um, he runs a company called Kite now. He started a company called Zobney.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  But, uh, he got into YC and it was just this amazing experience. And I actually-

• 16:01Guy Raz?

  Because of the, because of the support and the resources of Y Combinator?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it just felt like they were just getting to escape velocity a lot faster. Just kind of doing it the right way.

• 16:13Guy Raz?

  And as the SAT prep idea kind of started to fizzle out, were you- Thinking about other things you could do is because it doesn't sound like you really wanted to stay as a, as a, you know, a programmer or a tech person, software engineer for Bit9. Like, it doesn't sound like that's really what you wanted to do. You were just kind of, you were biding your time, earning a paycheck.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Well, I loved the work and I was learning a lot. So what ended up happening was with Accolade is I had to work across a bunch of different computers. It was this huge pain to, to move around. I'd use a thumb drive, but it was slow and I kept almost putting it in the washing machine and, but I was really frustrated by that problem. Like, why can't I just have my stuff everywhere?

• 16:57Guy Raz?

  I read that around this time in 2006, you were taking the bus a lot from Boston to New York. Why were you doing that?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  I had a lot of friends who had moved to New York. You know, every month or two, I'd try to get out there and see them. So I would take the Fenghua, the Chinatown bus that's now defunct. And so on one of those rides, I was like, I have a few hours each way to get work done. So I'm like, okay, so, and I opened up my laptop as the bus had pulled out of the station. I realized I'd left my thumb drive back at home. And I'm like, now I can't do any, like, all right, well, I can't get any work done. And then I'm like, well, now I, I'm just sitting there being like, I just never want to have this problem again.

• 17:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  And so I started coding.

• 17:40Guy Raz?

  You started coding where?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  On the bus.

• 17:42Guy Raz?

  On the bus. Coding code for what?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm just gonna have this thing that like watches this folder and just keeps everything in sync. Didn't have a name.

• 17:52Guy Raz?

  And by the way, is that easy to do? Like, just for yourself? Does that take like, can you do that on a three hour bus ride?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  You certainly can't finish it, but you can certainly start. The programming is relatively, it's really easy to make something that kind of works. It's very, very hard to make something that works in a bulletproof way.

• 18:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  And so I just became obsessed with this problem.

• 18:15Guy Raz?

  All right, so you are, so this is late, I think it's late, late 2006.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yep, it's around Thanksgiving.

• 18:21Guy Raz?

  Around Thanksgiving, and you start to tinker with this idea. But you're still working, you're still an employee of this cybersecurity company.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:30Guy Raz?

  And I want to get a sense of where your head was. Were you like, this is it? This is the thing that I am gonna do? Or did that was a slow burn? Did it take longer for you to get there?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Well, I could feel that sense of lift off in terms of my passion for what it was. Because I'm like, this is totally in my strike zone. I'd love to get into Y Combinator. The next application deadline's in April. But I'm like, you know, this is doable. Like, I could probably find, at least make it exist. And then maybe it's a business, maybe not. But I wasn't really thinking about that. I'm like, I just want to build this thing. And I need it. And if I could just like not have to carry my thumb drive around and I have one customer, me, like, great.

• 19:11Guy Raz?

  And do you, does it kind of consume you pretty quickly after? Like, do you start to spend nights and weekends just like trying to build this thing for yourself?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, totally obsessed. And it came together really quickly.

• 19:24Guy Raz?

  How quickly?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  If that was kind of around Thanksgiving, then I had a conversation in January with my boss at Bitnine. And I'm like, hey, you know, I'm really gonna go for it and start a company and get into Y Combinator. And but it was pretty clear early on that I'm like, yeah, this is gonna get going. And I just remember trying to think through the name. This was me, so that was Christmas 2006. I'm just on IM with one of my high school buddies. And we would have these LAN parties back in high school. Everybody bring their computers to someone's house and you play video games together on a local network.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  But anyway, so one thing we would always do is everybody would set up a shared folder called a Dropbox. On their computer. So I'm like, maybe I should just call it Dropbox. And that was, it's really that I am conversation where, where I settled on the name and I'm just like photoshopping the logo.

• 20:21Guy Raz?

  So, so the basically the logo for Dropbox today is what you kind of designed and

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:26Guy Raz?

  Like on your computer?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yep. And since then, our, the pros have taken over and simplified it a lot.

• 20:31Guy Raz?

  Right. Okay. So got a name and now it's 2007 and you've got a prototype that you kind of like created.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:39Guy Raz?

  And you had this goal, which was to get into Y Combinator.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:44Guy Raz?

  All right. So what'd you do?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  So I started working it. I had so many friends who had, Adam had shipped out to California at this point. And so I'd gotten to know a lot of the other Y Combinator founders socially. So I'd go out and visit them in San Francisco, or I went to like one of the social events at Y Combinator. And I'm literally like walking around this party with my laptop, like trying to demo Dropbox to anyone who will pay attention. But one thing that was very clear from the Y Combinator guidelines is that you need a co-founder. They don't just fund single founder.

• 21:21Guy Raz?

  They said to you, if you wanted, if you want us to consider you, you need a co-founder.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  You need a co-founder.

• 21:26Guy Raz?

  And, and this is like Paul Graham's thing, like Paul Graham is, is one of the co-founders and partners of the Y Combinator program.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:34Guy Raz?

  I'm like, this is his, one of his main criteria for investing is, is, is a co-founder.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Cause Yeah.

• 21:39Guy Raz?

  Because as anyone who listens to the show knows that, that starting a business can be really tough, right? And there are moments where you want to give up and quit, but, but the, the thinking is that with a co-founder, you kind of increase your chances of, of not giving up because when you might be low, the co-founder might be at a different mental or emotional place. And, and so I'm assuming that's probably why they wanted you to find a partner.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the, then I'm trying to find a co-founder, you know, if it's March and the application deadline is like April Fool's Day. Got like a few weeks to get married to someone and I'm not even dating. So I started shaking the trees, but my search hadn't really turned up anyone yet. So my friend, Aaron, he was a classmate of mine at MIT. Aaron's like, I just, I love Dropbox. It seems really interesting. If Paul Graham is interested. Then I'll do it.

• 22:33Guy Raz?

  But you needed him to be interested.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:36Guy Raz?

  And you couldn't wait to be formally admitted to this thing?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  No. So I'm like, well, I'm gonna drop by the YC office and see what I can do. You know, I'd show up on my laptop and then I knew Jessica, who was one of the partners and...

• 22:49Guy Raz?

  You knew her from where?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I had attended a couple Y Combinator dinners and just been kinda in the mix. So I was like, hey Jessica, hey, do you mind if I... Is Paul busy? I just wanted to show him something. And she's like, oh, no, he's not busy. Yeah, go on in. And so I kinda take a deep breath and like go walk over and crack the door open a little bit like, Paul, hey, you know, I'm really sorry to bother you, so just take a minute. And he cuts me off. He's like, no, I do not want to see your demo. The whole reason we have an application process is so we don't have like random people coming by and pitching us on stuff. So absolutely not. And I'm like, oh my God, cuz I'm just like total failure.

• 23:32Guy Raz?

  Well, and you probably, I mean, cuz you were pretty young at the time, 25 maybe?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Twenty, yeah, 24.

• 23:40Guy Raz?

  Probably thinking, I screwed this up.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Oh, it was a disaster cuz I'm like, that failed and now I've like torpedoed my chances of like getting YC funding at all.

• 23:49Guy Raz?

  So, so what happened next? Like, what did you do to, to like make up for that and eventually get into the program?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  So I'm like, alright, well, my application needs a hook. Like, I need some way of kinda standing out. So I thought about what might get Paul's attention. And I figured like, well, what is he doing in his office then? He's probably doing what I do every day, just like browsing Hacker News and just keep hitting refresh on that.

• 24:19Guy Raz?

  What's Hacker News, for people that don't know?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  So Hacker News is basically startup news that, it's a startup news site, kinda like Reddit.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  But focused on technology and startups for the most part. So I'm like, I wonder how I could get something on Hacker News that could draw some attention. I'll make a demo video of what I'm doing. And it wasn't just for Paul, it was really just to see if this is a viable concept.

• 24:44Guy Raz?

  And what was the video? What did it look like?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  It was, it was called a screencast, so, which is just to say like it's a video of your screen and then I'm narrating.

• 24:52Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  I'm like, here's Dropbox, if you have multiple computers, da, da, da, da, da. And it's very kind of, it's still on YouTube somewhere.

• 24:58Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  But I make this two, three minute video, stay up all night doing it, you know, the night before the application deadline. Finish the application. I'm like, I don't have a co-founder working on it. We'll hopefully get there before interviews. And then I posted my demo video to Hacker News and it hit the top of Hacker News for like two days.

• 25:20Guy Raz?

  What was so, I'm just curious, what was the thing about it that was such a big deal among that community? And was it, because there were ways to save information and data in the cloud at that point. Not, not great stuff, but what was the thing? Why was there so much interest in this video?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  I think it was just kind of getting your files on multiple computers is kind of a niche problem. Like, most people had one computer, right? You didn't have a smartphone. But this audience, very technical audience, like they're the early adopters, virtually all of those people were carrying around a thumb drive. The title of my post, I think, was like, "Throw away, you know, Dropbox, throw away your thumb drive."

• 26:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  What goes into a clickbaity title?

• 26:03Guy Raz?

  That's a good title, "Throw away your thumb drive."

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, I think it just, it made sense. It was just simple. It was in, like, a lot of the, that community had struggled with the same problem.

• 26:13Guy Raz?

  All right. So you make this video, you get attention on Hacker News, you put your application in, but you still needed a co-founder.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yep. And I get a one-line email from Paul Graham.

• 26:24Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Saying they liked the idea, certainly liked your software, but you need a co-founder. I'm like, "Thanks, Paul."

• 26:31Guy Raz?

  Right. Okay. That's good. That's a good sign.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  It's progress. And so, then I'm trying to work these different leads on co-founders, and then I met, had met this kid, Kyle, who had been in the Entrepreneurs Club with me at MIT. And so Kyle's like, "Hey, you should talk to my friend Arash." Arash sent me an email saying, "Hey, I saw your screencast on Hacker News. Looks pretty interesting." And he's still in school, right? So we get together in the student center and just start hashing it out.

• 27:02Guy Raz?

  At MIT?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  At MIT.

• 27:04Guy Raz?

  And what do you know about Arash at that point?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Virtually nothing.

• 27:08Guy Raz?

  Just a recommendation from somebody else is like, hey, this guy, he might be a good co-founder.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:14Guy Raz?

  Like, he's smart, he's a good engineer.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And he had been the director of the computer science programming competition at MIT, had been one of the finalists, and I had done that too. So I'm like, okay, that's a pretty good filter, that's a starting filter. And we just hit it off. I mean, as a practical matter, I'm like, yeah, I need a co-founder. You know, usually these co-founder stories start with like, hey, we played, we're on the same T-ball team.

• 27:37Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  But definitely not here. And we kind of just went for it. That was, was what was so crazy. I was just like, you gotta drop out of school to do this. And he's like, yeah.

• 27:50Guy Raz?

  Wait, this was based on one conversation?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  No, it was a series of conversations, you know? But, but not a lot, you know, it was like the equivalent of a few days.

• 27:59Guy Raz?

  Few days, okay.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  If you're, you know, a few coffee dates, basically. And I'm like, all right, I'm expecting to have to talk to the parents and like do all this stuff. And he just bounces. A couple of days later, he had just dropped out of school.

• 28:11Guy Raz?

  He just says, all right, I'm good, I'm out.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm like, respect, okay.

• 28:17Guy Raz?

  All right, so he joins you and Y Combinator gives you the green light. There, you're in.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:23Guy Raz?

  And that comes with a lot of support and, and introductions, but also $15,000, which I imagine was not nothing in 2007, which got you, what? What did $15,000 get you?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Uh, some desktops, some Ikea furniture, a couple of months of rent.

• 28:39Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  So we get into YC, you know, April, May, and then the summer program for YC is in Boston. So we, we spent the summer together. He was living in his dorm. You know, we'd just be in the trenches, like we'd wake up at noon and I'd pick him up from his dorm. We'd code till four, five in the morning.

• 28:57Guy Raz?

  Eating pizza and stuff like that.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Do it again. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of very.

• 29:02Guy Raz?

  Just very unhealthy.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, dorm kind of experience, just the prototypical startup experience. But we're just like in working every day coding. But yeah, Boston, doing my combinators, like we really found our element. There were like 50 other founders, roughly 20 companies. We really got put on the rails and then we move out to California together into this, you know, to splitting this two bedroom, like kind of corporate like furnished apartment. Anyway, we finish, every company gets, I think we got seven minutes. They're a lot shorter now. You know, they put, they take a room of investors, they take the companies.

• 29:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  About seven minutes for our demo. YC ends with Demo Day and then all the investor conversations kind of pick up where that leaves off. So we had to go start raising money.

• 29:51Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Drew and Arash's little business started to attract big attention from some of the biggest tech entrepreneurs in the valley. And how that attention turned Drew into an enemy of none other than Steve Jobs. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 30:26Guy Raz?

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• 31:05Guy Raz?

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• 32:56Guy Raz?

  And one more thing. The New York Times bestselling book, How I Built This, is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with tons of stories you haven't heard about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect started out at the very bottom. Check out How I Built This, the book, available wherever you buy your books.

• 33:35Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's mid 2007, and Drew and his co-founder, Arash, finish up at Y Combinator. They're living in San Francisco and gearing up to raise money and trying to figure out how to convince investors that their idea is a risk worth betting on.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  When I first talked to investors, particularly in Boston, they were like, no one's really ever made this work before. This is a commodity. Google, Microsoft, you name it, was gonna do this and eat our lunch.

• 34:10Guy Raz?

  And that's what people would say. They'd say, look, these big companies are gonna do this. You know, it's just gonna make what you're doing irrelevant or obsolete.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I totally agreed. I was like, yeah, obviously.

• 34:23Guy Raz?

  So how did you get beyond that feeling of agreeing with the doubters?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Well, the fact remained, though, that no one had really done this properly. And at this point, I hadn't-- you only need one or two investors to really be into it. And so by the time we got to-- through Demo Day, we had come up with a pretty compelling pitch.

• 34:47Guy Raz?

  Can you explain something to me? What was-- I mean, I don't know if it's possible to explain this in a simple way, but let's try it.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:55Guy Raz?

  The idea here was to enable people to share files seamlessly across different-- their computer, their laptop, and this is when iPhones just started to come out.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:06Guy Raz?

  Smartphone revolution is about to begin. What was so complicated about it? Why was this so hard?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Well, people had bitten off little pieces of the problem, but we were trying to do something bigger. And what was really challenging was how do you basically build a hard drive large enough to be everybody's hard drive? So there's a whole server and infrastructure component of it that's very complicated. There's a--

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Algorithmic component, which is hard, meaning how do you make it so that you can verify the correctness of the system? So how do you design something that doesn't stomp on people's baby photos or tax returns? Getting under the hood, that's a pretty hard engineering problem. So same, for a lot of the same kinds of reasons that a Google search, it's like you type words into a text box and you get links to webpages. How hard can it possibly be? It's actually pretty hard. So it's that kind of problem. And then there was a design element of how do you make this really simple and accessible for normal people? And then we wanted to work with all platforms.

• 36:11Guy Raz?

  And when did you have a beta version ready to go? Like that was up and running?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  By the fall of 2007, we started opening up the beta a little bit.

• 36:19Guy Raz?

  And so it's around this time where you start to attract potential investors and you get the attention of Sequoia.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:29Guy Raz?

  Which is a huge deal. And Michael Moritz, I guess, who's a big deal, one of their senior partners. From what I understand, he comes to your apartment in San Francisco a couple of days after you meet him.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:41Guy Raz?

  Basically wanting to make a deal. Do you remember him arriving in your apartment?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a whirlwind because we had just had our first meeting with Sequoia on a Friday. And I wasn't super familiar with how these things work. But yeah, Mike, we do the pitch and then on Saturday morning, yeah, Mike Moritz shows up at our little apartment, Dropbox World HQ. And we walk him through it, doesn't say a lot, has a couple of questions about competition in Google, but then leaves with little fanfare. He's like, come by on Monday to pitch the whole partnership, which is kind of like the final boss.

• 37:19Guy Raz?

  And during that pitch meeting, were the partners throwing like tough skeptical questions or did it seem like they really wanted to do this?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I'd say it was, they all had kind of a poker face. I think they were interested. But you do your pitch, you leave, don't get a lot of feedback initially, and then get a happy phone call or a sad phone call. And we got a happy phone call saying, hey, come to dinner. We want to hammer this out.

• 37:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  And we had a handshake deal that night. So one business day turnaround.

• 37:48Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Which we were not expecting.

• 37:51Guy Raz?

  And all of a sudden, you guys have a million bucks in the bank to work with.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:55Guy Raz?

  What were some of the things you did at that point? Like, did you start to hire other engineers? Did you get office space? Or did you just continue you and Arash working out of your apartment with that million dollars?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  So there was a lot to do. Once you have a deal coming, you need a lawyer. Then you have money in the bank, you need an accountant. Then you have money, you need employees. So we started recruiting the smartest people we knew from MIT as engineers. And so we would do these recruiting trips out there. Arash and I would go meet people in their dorms and pitched our first few engineers that way.

• 38:29Guy Raz?

  So you start to build it out. And what does that mean? I mean, are you guys... Because you and Arash had already been pulling all-nighters for like months and months and months to get to this phase. Now, does it slow down a little bit? Or does it actually accelerate?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  It accelerates because at every point, you just have this expanding circle of things you need to take care of. Because you have, from a product standpoint, you have this prototype, but then you need it to get it ready for primetime. You need users. And so we kept doing all of these unconventional things to try to get attention based on what had already worked before. So the same kind of video that I put together to put on Hacker News, we did another one that was a little more oriented around a broader audience that we put on Reddit and Dig in March 2008. And so we were placing bets on how many people we were going to get on here. And I think the high watermark was maybe 10,000 people.

• 39:24Guy Raz?

  So... One of the things that I guess you've said is that Dropbox actually took longer to launch than other startups at the time. Like, it took you almost a year from the time that you moved from San Francisco to launching it. Why did it take so long? Why couldn't you just put something out there in like January of 2008 that was good enough?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  We knew early on that we would not have a lot of margin for error. And so, you know, move fast and break things was not going to work for us.

• 39:51Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Because if you, once you lose people's trust, it's very hard to get it back. It didn't have to be perfect, but it had to be very good, right? So you can't kind of bait, it's hard to beta test a pacemaker. And we knew, if there's a spectrum from like little website you can kind of throw up in a day to pacemaker, like, we were much closer to that end of the continuum.

• 40:12Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  And so, the other thing is, this only became a mainstream need after the iPhone. Because most people had one computer at home, but then suddenly with a smartphone, everybody's got two. And for the first time, you need to get stuff back and forth very easily. And the only way to do that is through the cloud. Suddenly, this went from a problem that the propeller hats had to a problem that every mainstream iPhone user had.

• 40:39Guy Raz?

  And how did people find out about it?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Well, I had read this book, Crossing the Chasm, which talks about how technology's adopted, starts with early adopters, and then moves to kind of an early mainstream, and so on. And so, this is technology adoption lifecycle. And we're like, we started with the early adopters intentionally. We're like, who are the people that are like actively looking for something like this? They tend to be the kinds of people that hang out on the Y Combinator startup news site, or Reddit, or sites like that. So we seeded the audience with there. And then it was viral, because sharing is a really important part of the Dropbox experience. And then if I share something with you, you have to become a Dropbox user

• 41:19Speaker 01

  if it's a shared folder. And so, the virality was a critical part of our distribution strategy. Because, and we'd studied that, because things like Facebook and Facebook Platform were exploding and growing super fast. And it's pretty hard to build a big consumer service without having some kind of viral growth element.

• 41:40Guy Raz?

  I think, you know, within two years or something, you had like 15, 20 million users. It was a huge number of people. Clearly, this is resonating. I mean, clearly, this was something that was working. I mean, it's kind of crazy. Within two and a half years, your valuation went up to $4 billion.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like, we were very careful to get the product right through the beta. And then at public launch, we turned on the paid version and we sort of became accidentally cash flow positive after that because it was just growing so quickly.

• 42:15Guy Raz?

  I mean, this is what's amazing to me is I think by 2011, you had 50 million users.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:21Guy Raz?

  And your revenue was like almost a quarter of a billion dollars. But only 4% of users were paying you. The rest of the 96% were using the free version, which only gave you 2 gigabytes or whatever of storage space. So all that money was just coming from 4% of the users.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:41Guy Raz?

  Paying like 10 bucks a month or something.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:44Guy Raz?

  And was that, had you modeled that out? Did you know that that's all you needed? You just needed like a tiny percentage of people to pay?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there was this new business model that had been popularized around then called freemium, where you know, you start with a free version and then there's a premium version if you need, if you need that.

• 43:02Guy Raz?

  By the way, I should mention, I read that Mark Zuckerberg like sent you a Facebook message in like 2009 saying, hey, I'm interested in learning more about your company. And you thought it was like a prank.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  It was wild. I mean, we got on his radar because we were recruiting some of his alumni.

• 43:20Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, you'd have Facebook open in a tab all day at work and suddenly you're like, wait, what?

• 43:27Guy Raz?

  So, but was he interested in maybe acquiring you or just wanted to meet?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  He was interested potentially in acquiring Dropbox. We were still building, so we weren't really interested in that. And then we stayed in touch and then we became friends.

• 43:42Guy Raz?

  And, and I guess also that year in 2009, I read that Apple was interested in Dropbox too.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:50Guy Raz?

  And that you even had a meeting with Steve Jobs. Is that, is that right? What's, what's the story?

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Well, it was surreal. We weren't expecting that. And it was, there was, I was meeting with one of the VPs who reported to Steve and he's like, Steve would like to meet you. And so I was pretty intimidated because then I started talking to my friends and like the stories about Steve meetings were very

• 44:16Guy Raz?

  Scary.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah. This guy said Steve wants to meet with you, not today, but at a future time.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's like, well, we'll get something set up.

• 44:25Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  I'm like, I guess I'm not going to say no. Yeah, sure.

• 44:28Guy Raz?

  You can't say no. Yeah, it's Steve Jobs.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So get there. We're like, uh, we're here to see Steve Jobs.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  They're like, okay, have a seat. And then Arash and I are like, oh, man, maybe he hasn't seen the product. We have to do our kind of get our demo ritual ready. So we're furiously trying to set that up. And a few minutes later, Steve comes in and I think the first thing he said is you guys have built a great product. So, you know, on my little bucket list under the table, I'm like, okay, check. Good. I guess we might be getting a happy Steve story, not an angry Steve story, but we'll see. And he was basically saying like, you know, you should really throw in with us because we're like a startup with infinite resources and

• 45:13Guy Raz?

  Were you, was it clear to you when you were going to meet him that this is what was going to happen? He was going to make an offer to buy you out?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Probably. I was hoping he wouldn't get into numbers. Right?

• 45:24Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I thought about goals for the meeting before that. I was like, what am I trying to accomplish here? I think the primary goal from that, from my meeting with him was just don't piss him off.

• 45:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Did he? So he's, he's telling you all the great things about being part of Apple and

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:39Guy Raz?

  And then does he, does he throw out a number?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  No. He's like, we'd love for you to, to really consider this. I think it'd be great. And then, you know, sort of like, I'm like, well, look, we admire everything you and Apple do and have done. Love to find a way to work more closely together for sure, but we want to build this company and think it has a bright future. And that's what we're focused on. Like I'm, and want to stay independent. Like I'm sure you understand.

• 46:05Guy Raz?

  And he said, of course I do. I was an entrepreneur myself. Fair enough.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Sort of. He was like, all right, well, in so many words, he's like, you all, you guys are a feature, not a product. You know, we're going to have to build our competitor and I guess we'll have to get to work on, you know, in so many words, killing you guys.

• 46:23Guy Raz?

  Wait, he was saying to you, hey, if you're not going to work with me, then we're just going to crush you. We're going to build our own thing and we're just going to take you down.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yep. And here are your problems. You don't have the operating system. You need like partnerships for distribution, like all these things. And so, because I was like, in my head, disagreeing with a bunch of what he was saying. But, you know, and I'm just like, again, don't piss him off. So I'm just like, all right, agree to disagree. But yeah, I mean, the, you know, that part of the conversation was over pretty quickly. And he just kind of stuck around. He's like, so, you know, where are you guys, where are you guys from? And, you know, he started just talking about the, the history of, of sort of the second coming of Apple. And so I think we were lucky in that we got kind of a happy Steve meeting. But yeah, he stuck around for another, you know, 30, 40 minutes. But that was the last time we talked.

• 47:15Guy Raz?

  Wow. I mean, well, he passed away in 2011. But before he passed away, he did make good on his promise. I think it was his last keynote where he unveiled iCloud.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:27Guy Raz?

  And, and he, he name checks Dropbox.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:31Guy Raz?

  And you probably saw that keynote.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And so did my entire team.

• 47:35Guy Raz?

  And was your heart pounding watching that keynote?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. But before that, it was clear that there was definitely kind of a winter is coming reckoning that was going to happen at some point.

• 47:48Guy Raz?

  For Dropbox?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I would say that from the moment we founded the company, we were kind of always living in the shadow of whatever Google's thing would be, or Apple's thing, or, you know, and then we'd hear a rumor and the tremors of that would kind of reverberate through our psyche.

• 48:04Guy Raz?

  You knew that there were a lot of big businesses in the Bay Area that, that went down, right?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:12Guy Raz?

  Yahoo, Netscape.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Netscape.

• 48:13Guy Raz?

  MySpace. A party must have been thinking, where next?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Well, we'd show those like tombstones, very literally, you know, on a slide in front of the company.

• 48:24Guy Raz?

  You, oh, you, you communicated this idea to your own employees?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because, hey, we need to focus. We need to execute. There are a lot of dead companies that were once great. It wasn't so much about Apple as much as just the whole kind of constellation of competing products. So.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  We use those moments as a galvanizing force to get us to really focus and execute quickly and motivate the team.

• 48:46Guy Raz?

  And how would you do that? I mean, I guess one of the ways to make sure that you wouldn't be buried would be to build, very quickly, build partnerships, like be everywhere, be the go-to, right?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was clear that we were going to be moving into a new, at some point, there would be a new act. So we were spreading our wings. We started building new products. We acquired a company called Mailbox, built a photo sharing product called Carousel. And I think we were, you know, all that is to say, this was sort of, these were the years where I kind of had to shift from being like a founder to really being a CEO and getting good at the game.

• 49:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  So I remember going home for 4th of July and I reread the book, Only the Paranoid Survive. And so the book talks about this concept of a strategic inflection point where sort of the business is doing well, but things seem off and everybody has this moment where they recognize that things have really changed. So for us, what that meant was we have to really understand what are we, what's the value are we, that we're providing to our customers? And our happiest and most profitable customers were using Dropbox at work. And so we decided to go all in on, for all intents and purposes, getting out of the consumer business.

• 50:00Guy Raz?

  Being focused on business clients?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, being focused on business clients and just addressing the work use cases. It did mean that, a pretty embarrassing moment where I'm like, oh my God, all the stuff that, you know, I was on stage saying is the future of the company, like Carousel and Mailbox and all these other things, like we're just going to have to shoot, I'm going to have to shoot all of them.

• 50:22Guy Raz?

  You're just going to shut these things down to focus on?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Just shut them down. And like so many things that I had proclaimed were the future of the company were like, not going to be the future of the company.

• 50:32Guy Raz?

  I mean, it is amazing that your product was kind of made for these times.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:38Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's designed for people to share and collaborate and they don't, you don't have to be there in person. So I have to imagine you're in, you're one of these strange positions where COVID, the pandemic's actually been good for your business.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, folks have been turning to Dropbox for distributed work since the beginning. And in fact, I was, I built it not to back up my photos, I built it to be able to work from anywhere. So yeah, there's a through line from the beginning here, but we're thinking about, okay, now we're painting on a much bigger canvas. For example, the big, one of the big problems we all have is that our stuff is everywhere.

• 51:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Right? A lot of our work happens in cloud tools of various forms and our content is scattered in 15 different places. And we live in a world where it's easier to search all of human knowledge than my company's knowledge.

• 51:26Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  So there are these big opportunities hidden in plain sight that for reasons that are very similar to like, why the problem for Dropbox in the first place was unsolved. Like, there are huge challenges that are right in front of us. The landscape is always shifting and so there's always new opportunity.

• 51:46Guy Raz?

  Let me, let me shift and ask you a more personal question. Your, your company is now, the market cap is about $8 billion.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:52Guy Raz?

  And you are on, not just on paper, but in reality, a billionaire. What does that mean to you? I mean, does it like?

• 52:01Speaker 01

  It's kind of, yeah, it's definitely not what I had in mind when, you know, when I was at any point in my life.

• 52:07Guy Raz?

  Well, that's the thing. Most of the people on the show don't set out to become billionaires. They set out to solve a problem. They know they're gonna, if they're, if it works out, they'll make money. But the problem you wanted to solve was how to seamlessly integrate files and from one pressure to the next. But you weren't thinking, oh, you know, I'm gonna live in a gilded palace and sit in a vault full of gold coins and throw them up in the air all day.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was always, I just remember early on, the idea of like scaling a company was so scary. That on the money front, I was just like, look, as soon as the company's worth a million dollars, that would be unbelievable. Then we started getting venture money and things like that. Like, okay, if I have a hundred million dollars after taxes, like, then I'm good. I'm done. Beach.

• 52:52Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Happily ever after. And then in the process of talking to some of our angel investors, you know, one of them had a really successful exit. And he's like, the day I sold the company was like, one of the unhappiest days of my life. And so getting back in touch with like, why you do what you do is a really challenging and important conversation to have with yourself. And for me, it was like, I love reverse engineering things. I love building things. I love, I will never get tired of seeing like, a Dropbox icon over someone's shoulder in a coffee shop.

• 53:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  I know, I will always look.

• 53:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  You know, I never get tired of that. And so, that sense of purpose is really important.

• 53:39Guy Raz?

  When you think about your story and your success, do you think that it has to do with how hard you worked and your skill and your intelligence? Or do you put more of it in luck? Or how do you, what Dropbox folders do you put all those things into?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think you need, you need both. So I think about it like surfing, like, that waves will come. And in our case, like, we had, we caught this tidal wave. You know, we're just sort of sitting there on our board, and then, oh my god, you know, suddenly we're 50 feet off the ground. But inevitably, that wave like slows down, and then it's like about catching another one, and another one, and another one. So I think there's luck in terms of when and how any given wave shows up, and where you are on your board. But then there's a lot of skill in staying on and finding the right wave. That matters a lot.

• 54:31Guy Raz?

  That's Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. And by the way, remember how in the early days of Dropbox, Drew got a Facebook message from Mark Zuckerberg, who was potentially interested in acquiring the company? Well, while that didn't happen, the two stayed friends. And earlier this year, Drew was invited to become a member of Facebook's board.

• 54:56Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis or at Guy Raz. And my Instagram is at guy dot raz. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Candace Lim, Neva Grant, Sarah Sarason, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Vera Safari. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 55:40Guy Raz?

  This is NPR.