Drew Houston Quotes
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The happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them.
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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.
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There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I'm almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable. Every day, we're writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that's made all the difference.
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I actually don't think it matters how early or late you are as long as you hit critical mass.
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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.
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A lot of really great, innovative things have happened when people just didn't know it wasn't supposed to be possible.
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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.
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You become the average of the five people you hang out with.
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Dropbox is useful to anyone with a phone. That's, like, two billion people.
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What scares me the most is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.
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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.
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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.
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With something like Dropbox, it was immediately like, 'Wow, this is literally something that anyone with an Internet connection could use.' Everyone needs something like this; they just don't realize it yet.
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No one is born a CEO, but no one tells you that. The magazine stories make it sound like Mark Zuckerberg woke up one day and wanted to redefine how the world communicates [by creating] a billion-dollar company. He didn't.
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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.
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Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.
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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.
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You must maximize the probability that someone shows up at front door of your store or website and ends up with a solved problem.
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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.
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The only way to learn on a zero dollar budget is to talk to people.
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You think about who needs Dropbox, and it's just about anybody with a pulse.
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One misconception is that entrepreneurs love risk. Actually, we all want things to go as we expect. What you need is a blind optimism and a tolerance for uncertainty.
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If you start your own thing, you can learn a lot really fast from doing things wrong.
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The hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun.