Drew Houston is an American entrepreneur known as the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, a file hosting service that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, and client software.
Early years and education
Andrew Houston was born on March 4, 1983, in Acton, Massachusetts. He started computer programming at the age of 5. He already had ideas for startups as a teenager. In 1990s, he attended Acton-Boxborough Regional High School and then graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science in 2006. During college, he became a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity where he met Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder, and CTO of Dropbox.
Career
While attending college, from April 2004 – August 2007, Houston founded Accolade, an online SAT company which introduced him to the world of startups. The goal was to help students achieve perfect scores on the SAT college admissions test. After graduating, Houston hoped for Accolade to get into a startup accelerator, but he was not successful.
In January 2006 – May 2007, Houston worked at Bit9 Inc. as a software engineer where he led some Windows internals-related projects. After working at Bit9, Houston co-founded Dropbox in January 2007, which is believed to be Y Combinator’s most successful investment to date. It started as a two-person team that has now grown with more than a thousand employees. Dropbox now has more than 500 million users and generates billion dollars annual revenue.
Success didn’t come easy for Houston. It took 10 years for Dropbox to get to the point it’s at now. There were opportunities to sell Dropbox especially at its early stage, including a bid from Steve Jobs in 2009 – but Houston didn’t give in.
Dropbox
Dropbox was founded due to a technical problem that Houston encountered. He always forgets his thumb drive at home, which contains important files. He was so frustrated that he wanted to create a product that would solve this problem. As soon as the idea had been drafted, Houston went back to Y Combinator, but Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s co-founder, told him that he would need a co-founder. Houston only had two weeks to find a co-founder – and he found Arash Ferdowsi at MIT.
Funding
Ferdowsi was a student at the time but he agreed to drop out at MIT and work with Houston. With Ferdowski as his new co-founder, Houston went back to Y combinator and successfully entered. The initial funding of $1.2 million came from Sequoia Capital after Houston met with its chairman, Michael Moritz. Dropbox was publicly launched in 2008, a year after the company got its initial funding.
In 2009, Dropbox got the attention of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg when some Facebook alumni had gone on to join Dropbox. In 2014, Dropbox started creating features that would be useful for businesses. The company now provides services to more than 200,000 businesses.
Dropbox is now considered as one of Y Combinator’s most successful graduates and has also been recognized as one of Silicon Valley’s best start-ups. Dropbox is the first Y Combinator startup to file for an IPO.
Net Worth
Drew Houston’s net worth as of January 2019 is $2.1 billion.