Dropbox and Drew Houston’s Green Thumb

Say you’re at home, working on a file, but you won’t finish before you need to leave… and not only is your laptop completely dead, but you can’t find a single USB drive. How can you finish your work somewhere else? You could email the file to yourself, assuming you know that exact situation is going arise. But what if you forget? In 2007, Drew Houston left home without his USB drive and decided to write the code for what would become Dropbox.

Dropbox is a free file-syncing, cloud-based service that eliminates the need to send files to yourself, to remember USB drives, or any other awkward work-around. It began as a simple cloud service, and now boasts more than forty-five million users worldwide with different types of Dropboxes for different uses. Its key to success lies in the way Houston navigated the problems he saw in competing file-hosting services — slow servers, complicated interfaces, and errors when they tried to handle large files. His vision for the company is to keep it lean – free from features that distract from the goal of a speedy, reliable service.

Houston’s success with Dropbox drew the eagle eye of Steve Jobs in 2009, who saw both that the cloud-based service was key to the future of computing and that Dropbox was number one in the arena. Houston and his Dropbox partner, Arash Ferdowsi, turned Jobs down; they wanted to build a big company, not to be beholden to another, Houston said.

With a huge number of users signing up every day, Dropbox has arguably already attained “big company” status. And even though ninety-six percent of users are signed up for free plans — which allow up to two Gigabytes of storage a month — they often surpass the storage limit and sign up for paid plans. Dropbox’s business model means that even if no new users join in 2012, sales will still double what they were in 2011.

But Drew Houston is confident Dropbox will continue to see remarkable user growth, especially given its current numbers are up three-fold over 2010’s and only continue to climb. All thanks to a misplaced USB drive.