Drew Houston describes how he met Arash (his future Dropbox co-founder) via a mutual MIT contact, Kyle Vogt, shortly before a Y Combinator application deadline. They met for a few hours, quickly decided to partner, and Arash dropped out of school the next day to join—illustrating rapid decision-making, mutual connections, and startup urgency.
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Usually these co founder stories start with, oh, we played T ball together. No, Arash and I probably knew each other for maybe two or three hours before. Wow, we threw in together.
How did you. What gave you the confidence to be okay with doing that?
Well, it was funny. So I applied as a single founder to yc and I got an email from Paul saying, hey, idea seems interesting, but you really need to come find a co founder. Only problem was application deadline was like three weeks away. So that's like saying, oh, you need to get married in the next three weeks. So what happened was Kyle Vogt, who's one of the founders of Justin tv, which turned into Twitch and then started.
Cruise, so far the only YC funder with 2 billion plus X's.
Yeah, so Kyle and I knew each other from MIT and we were both in the entrepreneurs club together. And then he knew Arash. They were floor mates in East Campus at mit. They were both from Kansas. And Arash was having a pretty similar experience to one that I was having, which is we had friends who had moved from Boston, who dropped out of school, moved from Boston, settled in San Francisco. Suddenly their companies are raising millions of dollars, taking off. And so I think both of us had a little bit of cabin fever.
It's frustrating to watch that happen to the audience.
Yeah, it's motivating.
It is. So literally two or three hours you guys spent together.
So we got introduced. Kyle sent or just told. I was complaining to Kyle. Is there anyone great that you know who could be a potential co founder? Because all my friends or the folks I was closer to, just for whatever reason, timing wasn't right, weren't ready to make the jump, whatever it was. And then Kyle suggested Arash. And so I probably have the email somewhere where Arash just said, hey, let's meet up. And we hung out in the student center for a couple hours, and he dropped out of school the next day. It was pretty, pretty wild.
I have to add this to Kyle's list of special services to yc. I didn't even know this. So you guys just started working on it immediately, talked about the equity and went forward Pretty much.
So we met up in the student center at mit. He was already pretty excited about the concept of, of starting a company, of doing yc, and we hit it off. And I wish I could say that, oh yeah, here are the 17 things I was looking for. And on this seven point scale, but no, we just. He's like, this kid's clearly smart, little quiet, but very thoughtful. And over time it became clear that this was a really good.
