Drew Houston

“Whenever there's a new technology, people extrapolate very quickly,”

“It really felt like something only I was super interested in as far as file syncing, and focusing on one customer, which was myself.”

“They just totally nuked our business model ... [It was] even worse because it was so easily anticipated,”

“Steve Jobs was on stage in 2011 announcing iCloud, calling out Dropbox by name as something that will be viewed as archaic. And similarly, we always felt like we were in the shadow of the hammer of Google launching Google Drive.”

“Every time you move up a league, your reward is a stronger and better opponent and potentially a more unlevel playing field,”

“So this became a very public and personal embarrassment for me. How could we not have predicted that, or been out in front of that?”

“The key question is: How do we retain all the things that are great about working remotely, but bring back the things that are good about the in-person experience?”

“When you think more broadly about the effects of the shift to distributed work, it will be felt well beyond when we go back to the office. So we’ve gone through a one-way door. This is maybe one of the biggest changes to knowledge work since that term was invented in 1959,”

“I never wanted to have the problem again, so having nothing else to do... I started writing some code [to find a solution], having no idea what it would become.”

“It was like getting an email from the dean of admissions to your favourite college, but the application deadline was in the next couple of weeks, and you need to get married in that time, not just find a date,”

“We met in the student centre for an hour or two, then Arash dropped out of school the next week.”

“This is an acquired skill set, and, furthermore, it's one that you learn on the job. So everyone is a first-time CEO by definition at some point.”