As a quickly scaling company, they had to become “systematic” about their culture. Adding valuesĪs well as building a cracking team, Dropbox ensured early on that this team understood the company’s values. “I think the record for this was, we made someone an offer and it was, probably, between getting his first offer and finally accepting an offer from us was six years,” Houston revealed. Houston claims that every new recruit is asked to name the best people they have worked with, and Dropbox is keen in its pursuit of those recommendations, sometime spending years tempting them to join the company. “Every good person you want probably already has a good job, and they’re rarely looking,” said Houston. ‘Every good person you want probably already has a good job, and they’re rarely looking’ The problem is that every company wants to recruit the best. This process of pairing up with great, talented people – whether friendly and familiar with them or not – still informs the assembly of Dropbox’s workforce. Aditya Agarwal, now Dropbox CTO, was one of Facebook’s early hires. The pedigree of Dropbox’s leadership team is undeniable. “A lot of the earliest folks in the company were the smartest friends that we knew from there,” said Houston. Of course, hand-picking the best people is made that bit easier when you come from the talent pool of MIT. Throughout the evening, conversation constantly turned to the necessity of building a strong team. What they did know was that they were both talented coders who could build something useful. There’s no childhood friends backstory to these two founders and Houston admits that they hardly knew each other before starting the company. “I graduated, he dropped out, so we have that start-up checkbox done thanks to Arash,” he joked. Houston later teamed up with fellow MIT computer science student Arash Ferdowsi to develop this idea. “I opened up the editor and started writing some code, having no idea what it would become.” Team building
These were the days when, if you didn’t have anything to do, you really didn’t have anything to do,” he said.
“This 2006, when this happened, so this was before the iPhone.
MAKE A NEW WEEKLY TO DO PAPER DROPBOX CODE
“The first lines of code for Dropbox were written on a bus ride,” he revealed, recalling a situation familiar to many: when you have work to do but forget to bring the necessary files to do it.įacing a four-hour bus journey of “frustation and self-flagellation” for his forgetfulness, Houston’s active mind got to work. Like many great and practical tools, Houston said it was “born of frustration”. Today, Dropbox serves more than 500m users around the world. Start early, budding entrepreneurs! /w4TyiUCRnk co-founder Drew Houston started coding at the age of five.
I ended up getting stock options that were worth nothing – and that was the first of a few experiences like that too – but it was really fun,” he told the audience gathered at his company’s Dublin HQ. He offered to work remotely with the team in Colorado (he was in Boston), then asked if his dad could sign the paperwork as the young entrepreneur was not yet 18. Houston contacted the developers, who asked if he wanted to fix it himself. He was beta-testing a game and – bored and curious – discovered some security problems under the hood. As a teen, he aspired to be a game developer and signed up as an intern with an online game-maker. Named as one of MIT Technology Review’s top innovators under 35, Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston sat down with Ann O’Dea for an in-depth chat by a digital fireside.ĭropbox co-founder Drew Houston started coding at the age of five.
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