Following the Dropbox tenth anniverary in May, CEO Drew Houston sat down with reporters from Bloomberg Business Week, Business Insider, and Inc. Magazine to put it all in context.
Drew tells Inc. in a “Notes to My Younger Self” video that he was relieved Steve Jobs thought he and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi had “built a great product," but says it “would have been a pretty big financial mistake” to sell the young company to Apple in 2008. Instead, Dropbox went on to become the fastest SaaS company to achieve $1 billion in revenue run rate and build its own infrastructure. Now, he says, "we want to move up the stack, move beyond storage.” Paper, the new collaboration app, is an example of this. Drew tells Bloomberg that in the "fragmented experience" of today's digital workplace, "the most important thing is keeping a team on the same page.”
From his early days with Arash at Y Combinator, to meeting their first investor in a rug shop, learning from mentors like Marc Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg, and growing personally as a CEO, Drew talks candidly in a Business Insider “Success! How I Did It” podcast. The job of a CEO is to ask, “How do I make sure that we have the absolute best people on the team, how do we make sure they’re working well together?”
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