Drew Houston: Should You Worry About Competition?

Question is how do you fend off competitors especially when they're the largest internet companies in the world? We think about that from time to time. Another sort of bias is you always kind of overestimate competition, not that it should be underestimated, but For companies like ours, and you think about any company that has gotten to sort of— there are plenty of stories of companies where they got a really great head start and then somehow things went south, Netscape or MySpace, there's a bunch of companies that you could say fall in this category and When you talk to people in those companies, there is a very clear trend, which is that suicide is a much more common cause of death than homicide, meaning often companies are getting built faster than ever like in the history of the world. And so along with that kind of hypergrowth are all these different cancers that you can get. Things are going to go wrong, you know, my favorite analogy on this was Marc Andreessen, he's like, okay, it's like trying to build a— like bake a cake in 5 minutes, like no matter how good you are, you're going to have egg on the ceiling, there's going to be stuff on the walls, you know, you just pray when you pull the cake out maybe it's a little bit lopsided and you can like squish it back, but like if you forget the eggs or you forget the sugar you can't like sprinkle them on later. So how do you figure out the stuff, or how do you figure out what stuff you can't fix later? And I'll come back to the competition thing in a second, sorry for such a tangent. And so often what happens at those companies that screwed up, if you talk to people inside them, they're like, well, we just— we lost our focus or we hired people that weren't as good and then the talented people we got in the beginning looked around, they're like I'm tired of fixing this person's bugs or that they don't work as hard or all this stuff and life is short, I'm a talented person, I want to go find a place that has a lot of talented people, so actually the point about hiring the very best people is something we spend a ton of time on, because that's again, that's the thing you can't sprinkle on later, if you ever lose it, it's gone. And then the other is really distraction. Some pretty heartbreaking stories out there of of companies that were really promising, but then either started trying to do too many things or Friendster, the founder complaining that his board was trying to get him to chase all these deals with MTV and all these like shiny objects when he is like, guys, the site won't even load, it like takes like 10 seconds for the webpage to show up. And so the power of focus is— focus is really powerful. And again, you try to figure out those elements as you sort of start from like just coding to like designing and designing systems of code and algorithms to designing systems of people, you know, figuring out the things that other companies have learned about that along the way. And so while it's something that's really important to keep track of, you know, most of this, if you actually look at all the data points, it's really more often the problems begin at home, not because of some competition. And so how— the way we'll respond to— the way we are responding to competition is actually very little is changing, like nothing in our roadmap actually changed, maybe there are a couple of things that got reordered, but we just focus on maximizing the number of happy Dropbox users and figuring out problems, more problems that people don't even know they have and solving them, right? So lots of— we're never going to run out of examples of that, right? You look at your iPhone, and you're like, wow, this has like a whatever megapixel camera and it takes HD video, but then how do I see that on my Samsung TV? Or why is it that, oh my God, this is— I just discovered I left my iPhone in a cab and now like all my newborn kid's pictures are like gone forever, like that's a problem you never had to worry about before. And so we think a lot about what kinds of problems that people don't even know they have and think about solving them, and we think we're the only people that are really thinking about it this way. Keeping our users happy and hiring the best people, those are the two main things, and you can screw up all kinds of other stuff if you get those two right.