Drew Houston Quotes
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You think about who needs Dropbox, and it's just about anybody with a pulse.
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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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When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: Their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way.
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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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The hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun.
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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.
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You need that hunger no matter what, because eventually the honeymoon period wears off. Somewhere between printing your business cards that say 'founder' on them and everything else you have to do, you realize, 'Oh, actually this is a ton of work.'
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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.
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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.
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Our users are trapeze artists, high school football coaches - I got cornered by a couple of theoretical physicists who said Dropbox lets them collaborate across the world and share their experiments' results. They were raving about how it's driving their research.
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I'd be like, alright, I don't know anything about sales. So I would search for sales on Amazon, get the three top-rated books and just go at it. I did that for marketing, finance, product, engineering. If there was one thing that was really important for me, that was it.
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When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing; it's getting too comfortable.
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Dropbox is my life.
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Surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard.
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We've had customers from the beginning. The reason people use Dropbox is because they really love it. We think more about who is going to be competing with what we are going to be doing, not with where we started.
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No one is born a CEO, but no one tells you that.
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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.
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Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once.
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Learn early, learn often.
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A lot of times it's an asset to not know everything about everything... 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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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. 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 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.