Dropbox founder Drew Houston “Nobody is born a CEO You learn it ” 1

Your job as CEO changes every six months, every year, every couple years. Just nobody tells you that. In fact, some of the things that made you good at the prior stage become a hindrance for the next stage. So, for example, I wrote most of the first version of Dropbox, but there just became too much stuff to do, and I had to stop coding. First of all, nobody's born a CEO. You learn it, and the challenge is you just don't know what your blind spots are. The chessboard is a lot bigger than just building a good product, and you have to be able to make smart and fast decisions about what markets do we go into, our business models, competition strategy, how do you build a team? How do you run a team? That's pretty tough when you've never done any of it before. How did you learn those things? Probably one of the most useful questions that I like to ask myself and still do is one year from now, two years from now, five years from now, when I look back on today, what will I wish I had been learning? Did you mostly figure this out yourself, or did you ask people, what will I wish I had done in a year? A little of everything. So reading was probably the single most valuable thing that I did. Anything you'd recommend other people read? Yeah. So I think my favorite book on management is High up in Management by Andy Grove, which is the bible of how do you scale an organization. The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker is really good, but basically what you're talking about is you need to have good judgment about a lot of different things. What that really is saying is, how do you gain wisdom very quickly? Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger is probably the best book on that that I've read, which is really about how do you build a bunch of mental models to sort of break down the complexity of the world and know when to use each. But reading is part of it. But then also having friends that are one step ahead, two steps ahead, five years ahead, and just sort of looking at the deltas between them.