Drew Houston Quotes

Dropbox is my life.

Devices are getting smarter - your television, your car - and that means more data spread around. There needs to be a fabric that connects all these devices. That's what we do.

Where you live matters. Whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don't settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle, too - follow them. If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.

You're not going to become a great manager overnight. You're not going to become a great public speaker or figure out how to raise money. These are the things you want to start the clock on as early as possible.

Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.

One of the great things about moving to Silicon Valley is that you're surrounded by all these people who've done it before. This place is an assembly line that takes a couple of twenty-somethings and walks you through everything you need to learn.

There's this joy that comes from sitting down to solve a problem and standing up when it's done and good. Building a company or managing people is never just done.

You can't focus on what everyone else is doing - it has to be about what's really broken and what you can do to fix it.

A lot of really great, innovative things have happened when people just didn't know it wasn't supposed to be possible.

Reading a book about management isn't going to make you a good manager any more than a book about guitar will make you a good guitarist, but it can get you thinking about the most important concepts.

Where you live matters: there's only one MIT. And there's only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn't a coincidence: for whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don't settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too - follow them.

You only have to be right once.

The only way to learn on a zero dollar budget is to talk to people

People make basic assumptions based on what they have now. But you have to ask yourself, 'Is this really what people are going to be doing in five years?' Very few people ask themselves what they would actually want instead if they could wave a magic wand.

To the casual observer, the Dropbox demo video looked like a normal product demonstration, but we put in about a dozen Easter eggs that were tailored for the Digg audience. References to Tay Zonday and 'Chocolate Rain' and allusions to 'Office Space' and 'XKCD.' It was a tongue-in-cheek nod to that crowd, and it kicked off a chain reaction.

Even if it doesn't work out, the experience is so valuable to so many employers that your worst case scenario is, 'Ok, so that was a bust, I'll get a six-figure job at whatever company.' Risk is this outmoded idea - your parents might not understand that, but taking these types of risks doesn't have a downside.

If you start your own thing, you can learn a lot really fast from doing things wrong.

People do not choose Dropbox because it has this much space or gigabytes. They choose it for the experience.

Dropbox is useful to anyone with a phone. That's, like, two billion people.

I actually don't think it matters how early or late you are as long as you hit critical mass.

You have to adopt a mindset that says, 'Okay, in three months, I'll need to know all this stuff, and then in six months there's going to be a whole other set of things to know - again in a year, in five years.' The tools will change, the knowledge will change, the worries will change.

You think about who needs Dropbox, and it's just about anybody with a pulse.

Software touches all of these different things you use, and tech companies are revolutionizing all different areas of the world ... from how we shop to how farming works, all these things that aren't technical are being turned upside down by software. So being able to play in that universe really makes a difference.

If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.

The hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun.

If you're going to go to the moon, you don't shoot the rocket right at the moon. You have to go at it obliquely.

You become the average of the five people you hang out with.