INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightDropboxImage caption
Drew Houston (left) had never met Arash Ferdowsi before they launched Dropbox
together
The TheIndianSubcontinent's weekly The Boss series profiles a different business leader from around the world
This week we spoke to Drew Houston, founder and chief executive of US cloud storage company Dropbox.Drew Houston says it felt as if he had
just two weeks to find a complete stranger to marry.Back in 2007 the then 24-year-old was desperate to secure funding to get his idea for a
cloud storage business up and running.One of Silicon Valley's most prestigious backers of new start-ups - Y Combinator - were prepared to
take a gamble on Mr Houston and Dropbox, but there was one catch - they demanded that he get a business partner.Their argument is that new
companies are far more likely to succeed if they have more than one founder, more than one person to make decisions and cope with the
workload.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Mr Houston came up for the idea for Dropbox while on a bus between
Boston and New York
Mr Houston's problem was that he was a one man band at the time, and for various reasons none of his
friends were able to join the business
So he had just two weeks to find a complete stranger to become his co-founder."It was like getting an email from the dean of admissions to
your favourite college, but the application deadline was in the next couple of weeks, and you need to get married in that time, not just
find a date," he says.Moving very quickly Mr Houston managed - after a chat lasting just two hours - to persuade a 22-year-old student
called Arash Ferdowsi to quit university and join him
Mr Ferdowsi was a friend of a friend, but he and Mr Houston had never met before.That was 11 years ago
while Mr Houston's net worth is calculated at $3bn, and Mr Ferdowsi's at $1.3bn.Not bad at all for a company that many said would never be
successful, and one that Apple's late Steve Jobs is widely reported to have said he would destroy.Image copyrightMartin KlimekImage caption
Drew Houston is worth more than $3bn
Inspiration for a new business can come from anywhere, and for Mr
Houston it was on a bus between Boston and New York in late 2006.As a recent computer science graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology [MIT) he was intending to use the six or so hours long journey to work on some earlier business ideas
But as he sat down in his seat, Mr Houston realised that he had forgotten the memory stick that contained all the files."I was so frustrated
because I felt like this kept happening," he says
"I never wanted to have the problem again, so having nothing else to do I started writing some code [to find a solution], having no idea
what it would become."What Mr Houston came up with was the idea for Dropbox - remote storage that users can access online wherever they may
Within two weeks he had created the prototype, and come up with the name.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Mr
Houston (left) is a friend of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg
Just a few months later Y Combinator expressed an interest, and
Mr Houston went back to MIT to meet Mr Ferdowsi, who was studying electrical engineering and computer science at his old university.Mr
Houston, who is now 35, says: "We met in the student centre for an hour or two, then Arash dropped out of school the next week."In
retrospect this was pretty crazy I'm sure his parents had a different plan for him, one that involved finishing college."But he was really
And I don't know if either of us knew quite what we were getting into."Moving into Y Combinator's base in Silicon Valley, Dropbox launched
in 2008.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
The late Steve Jobs was said to have been annoyed that he couldn't buy
Dropbox
To attract its first customers Dropbox made promotional videos that it put up on discussion websites such as Reddit
The aim was to get technology sector influencers to start using the service in the hope that they would speak positively about the product,
and user numbers would then grow thanks to this word of mouth.This indeed proved successful, and from 5,000 users on a waiting list, within
a few days Dropbox had 75,000 sign ups
Then it went from 100,000 users to 200,000 users "in something like 10 days".More The Boss features, which every week profile a different
business leader from around the world:User numbers rocketed even further and faster when Mr Houston and his team came up with an
incentivised referral scheme
This offered existing Dropbox customers more free storage space if they could get a friend to sign up
The other person would also get more free space, and so on.It attracted millions of new customers, and caught the attention of the late
Steve Jobs who made an offer for the business in 2011.While Mr Houston declined to talk about this, in numerous previous interviews he has
inferred that Jobs didn't take it well when he turned down the offer
Website Business Insider last year quoted Mr Houston saying that Jobs had threatened to "kill" Dropbox following the rejection.Apple
launched its own cloud storage service later in 2011, iCloud, but this didn't hold back Dropbox's growth.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage
caption
Mr Houston is also a friend of Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, who is a Dropbox investor
Today Dropbox
has more than 500 million registered users, of whom 11.5 million pay an annual subscription fee for more storage than you get for free
This includes more than 3,000 paying business customers.The company floated on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year, and its market
capitalisation - the total value of all its shares - currently stands at more than $12bn
Its annual revenues exceed $1bn, and it has a global workforce of more than 1,000 people.Technology analyst Ben Wood of research group CCS
Insight says there are numerous reasons for Dropbox's success, such as its overall ease of use and "very importantly the fact it allows
people to easily save and share photos, videos, and other big files that email servers are still unable to cope with".Mr Houston says that
he and Mr Ferdowsi, who remains on the senior management team, continue to work well together.Regarding his specific role as chief
executive, Mr Houston says his current main focus is making sure that staff ignore the success of the recent share flotation, and instead
"stay focused on why we are here - making customers happy".
