In order to learn more about things like marketing and management, he needed to educate himself. This meant he was fully capable of coding the software for Dropbox, but much less confident about how to build and manage a billion-dollar company. Be Committed to Self Educationĭrew Huston is an MIT engineer.

The company has grown since then, but the story is just as fascinating. So, without much delay, he used that bus ride to break out the code editor and start designing the first version of Dropbox.įor entrepreneurs, this story has an important lesson: solving a pain can be a real opportunity for those willing to take action. By paying attention to the success and demonstrated demand for other online storage services, he saw the opportunity to improve the model through simplicity and more forgiving data requirements. If he was experiencing this kind of pain, he thought others might be as well. It was a painful experience realizing that he wouldn’t be able to access any of his course work, and wouldn’t get anything done on the bus trip.

He was about to board a bus from New York to Boston, and realized he had forgotten his USB flash drive – which, of course, had all of his important files on it….Ī vivid image of his USB flash drive back at his apartment went through his mind…. Here are a few lessons you can learn from their success: Find The Painĭrew Huston, Dropbox founder and CEO, tells the story of how he first came up with the idea for Dropbox… But are you really surprised?Īt the most recent count, Dropbox had 200 million users – that’s 10 times what they had in 2010.Īnd if you wanted to learn how to build a billion dollar company, then Dropbox is a great one to model… In January, Dropbox received financing from Blackrock valuing it at $10 billion.

Dropbox for small business