Drew Houston: Motivated to Solve a Problem

In late 2006, early 2007, cloud storage or online storage startups were kind of the thing that is like the startup cliche, basically. And so on TechCrunch, you'd have these roundups of like, okay, here are the next hundred online storage companies that have launched. And it was just kind of a joke. But at the same time, I had all these problems with this because I had this company and all of our crown jewels, I had on this little thumb drive, and I was always like, one stupid mistake away from disaster. I would carry it in my shorts and I'd pull it out and the connector would be bent, and I'd pray that I could bend it back softly but firmly enough so that I would keep working. And I would. I mean, just all the things that people would do, I'd still be emailing myself stuff. I'd still be carrying this thing around my little leash. And it just drove me nuts. And I went through Michael Arrington's articles and I tried all 100 of the things and I found something interesting where none of them really solved the problem for me, even though there were a lot of them. And in particular, you had to get one thing, one service that was like website you could upload your stuff to. And then you had to get another app that would sync things across your computers and you'd get another app to back up your computer. And I'm like, as we would later tell investors, I'm like, I mean, I can't really imagine Tom Cruise in Minority Report logging into his Gmail to pick up the attachment he sent himself that morning, or forgetting his thumb drive. He's just up over here and your stuff follows you around. And that's the whole point. Someone else takes care of it. And we had a glimpse of that at school. And I'm sure you guys have something similar. We have this system called Athena where you sit down at any of the tens of thousands of computers across campus. All your stuff's in front of you. You don't think about it. And it's not a very. It's not a consumer kind of typical environment. It's very kind of UNIX focused and things like that. But still, you're not sprinting back across campus to pick up your paper. You're not worried about backing it up because again, someone else is just taking care of it. And nobody had really built that for the rest of the world. And this was pre iPhone and iPad and all the amazing things that have happened in the last five years. And it wasn't actually a very mainstream use case. I mean, people were not syncing things across, like, six Linux PCs even then. Most people just had one computer. But anyway, this drove me nuts enough where the kind of last straw was I was in Boston South Station at the Chinatown bus terminal. And if any of you have had the pleasure of riding the Chinatown bus, it costs like 10 or 15 bucks and it takes you from Boston to New York and is famous for such things as, like, tipping over or things like that. So fortunately, that wasn't part of the story. And I got to New York okay, but there was a problem, which is I had been making this mental checklist of, like, all these great things that I was going to get done because I had had four hours in front of me where nobody was going to bother me, and. And here are all the great things I was going to accomplish. And I excitedly sit down and I open up my, I guess, ThinkPad at the time. I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach, which I'm sure many of you have experienced at one time or another, where it's like, start feeling around in my pockets and I just get this vivid picture in my head of my thumb drive sitting on my desk at home, and I'm like, shit. And then I'm like, okay, instead of getting all these wonderful things done, now I'm just going to think about what an idiot I am for the next four hours, but sulked for 10 or 15 minutes, but then actually opened up the editor and started writing some code, having absolutely no idea what this turned into. But I'm like, I was so frustrated that nobody had really solved this problem.