Drew Houston is an American Internet Entrepreneur, who co-founded Dropbox and owns 25% of the company’s interests. He holds the largest individual shares of Dropbox. He serves as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Dropbox, an online backup and storage service.
He held 24.4% voting power in the company before filling for IPO in February 2018. As of May 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth of $2.2 billion.
###Personal Life:—
Drew was born in Acton, Massachusetts in 1983. He was born to Ken and Cecily Houston. He currently resides in San Francisco, California. He learnt coding when he was just 5 years old.
He worked at a industrial robotics startup at the tender age of 15. He has endorsed Hillary Clinton at the 2016 United States presidential election.
### Education:—
Drew pursued his elementary studies from Acton-Boxborough Regional High School in the 1990s. In January 2006, he completed Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he has been a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and Entrepreneurs Club.
###Professional Life:—
Drew founded Accolade, a SAT prep company while studying in MIT. He took a year off in his junior year, for employment and finished a term early. He also met Adam and Arash Ferdowsi at MIT, who later helped him in establishing Dropbox.
Prior to the establishment of Dropbox, he worked on a number of other startups including, Bit9 and Hubspot. He worked as a Software Engineer at Bit9, Inc. from January 2006 to May 2007.
He was the technical lead for a wreath of interesting Windows internals-related projects for Bit9’s application whitelisting product.
At age 24, he founded Dropbox with Arash Ferdowsi in January, 2007. He also joined the Board of Directors of Facebook in February 2020, by replacing Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who left the position in May 2019.
He is the Co-founder of technology lobbying organization FWD.us., launched in April 2013. It aimed at campaigning for immigration reforms and improvements to education.
###Founder of Accolade:—
Drew founded Accolade, a bootstrapped online SAT prep company while studying in college. He asserted it as swiftly profitable but, most importantly, it was a great introduction                  into the world of startups. He founded the company on 1 May, 2004 and served until August 2007.
He established the company with the help of his former MIT teacher, Andrew Crick. The firm aimed at working on the field of e-learning, education and tutoring. However, he closed the company on January 2008 to work for Bit9 and eventually to establish Dropbox.
### CEO of Dropbox:—
Drew is the Co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. He founded the company in 2007 with his MIT batch-mate, Arash Ferdowsi, who is today the Co-founder and CTO of Dropbox. It is the fastest growing online storage company, with a valuation of $8 billion with 200 million users.
They established their startup firm with initial funding from seed               accelerator Y Combinator. Dropbox is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage, personal cloud, file synchronization and client software.
The application software of Dropbox is blocked in China since 2014. There have been controversies for issues including security breaches and privacy concerns.
###Business Idea:—
Drew is reminiscent of when and how his mind struck to offer cloud and back up services through Dropbox. It was when he left his thumb drive on a bus and was frustrated with the incident. He started thinking of a solution              by variably writing down a code with no idea of what he was going to build.
He struggled a lot while explaining the investors the concept of Dropbox. He then thought of creating a video that would explain the work of Dropbox. Thus, a 3-minute demonstration video was released             which thoroughly explained its structure and work within few minutes.
Dropbox was publicly launched in 2008 and grew very fast with 100,000 users that resulted with their great marketing tactics like viral demonstration videos and referral programs.
In 2011, Steve Jobs offered him to buy Dropbox. Though Steve was his inspiration, still he refused the offer. Steve then asserted that Apple would come after their market and push them out.
Honors & Awards:—-
Business Week named him as one of the “most promising players aged 30 and under”
His company, Dropbox has been touted as Y Combinator’s most successful investment till date.
He was named among the top 30 under-30 entrepreneurs by inc.com
Dropbox was declared as one of the 20 best startups of Silicon Valley.
Courtesy:— Startup Talky