Now if you’re currently running a large company, the challenge of middle management is probably all too familiar. So you talk to CIO, they compare a bunch of different products, they make a purchasing decision, they buy your thing, they deploy it to their employees. Drew Houston is an America based Internet entrepreneur who is best known to be the CEO and founder of Dropbox. It’s this really cumbersome experience. And then we’re like, “All right. I talked among my friends who had had their Steve encounters, and they fell squarely into two categories: you get like “chill Steve,” or… I’ll just call him “mean Steve.” And you never know which one you’re going to get.And so he’s finished his pitch of why we should join Apple. By : Drew knew that one of his advantages was his youth, his naivety, his fearlessness, the fact that he had very little to lose. I tried so many of them and was so disappointed by so many of them that I found this litmus test that was a little faster than downloading the app. Our playbook is very different from Microsoft or Google: Who’s our customer? At the time, online storage was the new big thing. — Drew Houston.
In 2007, Drew and his co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi, won funding from famed seed accelerator Y Combinator.
As long as you can see where it is, you can keep out of its way. It’s from 1983; it’s probably my single favorite book on management. He initially relied on a USB drive, but he wanted something that was less likely to end up in the laundry basket. Steve thinks our product is great.” And then in so many words, he’s like, “And you should really join us, because we are like a startup with infinite resources”– and, you know, goes through his pitch.Before this I was a little bit terrified. And oh God, we got our own thing, and I guess we’re going to have to build that and kill you,” and da da da da.
But you also need to understand where they are coming from. That’s a 180 degree difference from the conventional way of doing things. Your best people need to be in the trenches, your best people need to be close to your consumers and close to your engineers and designers and PMs.And your top managers, the top people in the company have to be in the details. The best way to get your fledgling company off to a flying start is to do something that no one else is doing. Blockbuster is long out of business and Netflix is one of the top brands in the world.Blockbuster said “no thanks” to Netflix for the wrong reasons. Finding out what people dislike about your competitors can point you toward their weakness.
They couldn’t simply revert to just being a cloud storage company.
And in the photo landscape, we were competing against Facebook, and Google, and Apple, and all of these extremely well-resourced companies. They just didn’t have the vision.
They have to be connected to your customers. : But Drew soon realized this strategy came with a huge cost. Dropbox is an online file sharing service which Drew launched in … Drew knew from his courses at MIT that building a good solution wasn’t as easy as it looked.I had some insight into why this looked easy but it was actually hard to do, and kind of just jumped in.
If you’re really unfortunate, you actually get the deal, and then you get spun around by this massive machine. I don’t see them anymore. One is you feel like you have to to scale because you can’t have 50 games reporting directly to one person. Below is the prepared text of the Commencement address by Drew Houston '05, the CEO of Dropbox, for MIT's 147th Commencement held June 7, 2013.
And at that point, it’s pretty fledgling.Even though it was early days in the Netflix story, Shellye could see the huge potential. What jobs are we doing for them?