“There are a lot of valuable things that I learned during my years at college. First and foremost, I had been programming since I was a kid, but really studying computer science formally and becoming a good engineer was really valuable because it brings you to a whole new level of craft and lets you solve problems that you couldn’t solve before. It also teaches you ways of thinking that are applicable to all kinds of situations – so the academic part was really important for me. The second thing [involved] the people I met at school. I met my co-founder at MIT. The majority of our first dozen employees were our friends from school. So bringing them over from MIT, having that pool of people and knowing what good looks like, was really valuable.
“The third thing was a little unexpected. I pledged a fraternity in college, and I learned in some ways as much through that experience as I did through class. Especially, if you start out purely technical as I did, a lot of the hard part of building a company is really around people -- trying to get a bunch of people to do anything is not easy. In college, you're thrown in the deep end with a bunch of random, different people from all these different backgrounds and you have to figure out how to get along. So if you're paying attention, you can learn a lot about what makes people tick and effective ways of dealing with people and conflict. When I took on social chair, there's this problem on your shoulders of how to find a really awesome pledge class, which turns out to be just like the challenge of how do you build a really awesome team for your company. I wouldn’t have predicted that, but whether it's a fraternity or any other student organization, there are a lot of unexpected parallels between that and running a business, which are now obvious to me.”
--Drew Houston, CEO and co-founder of Dropbox, on the lessons he learned in college that helped him to create a successful startup company.
Houston has led Dropbox’s growth from a simple idea to a service used by millions around the world. Before founding Dropbox, Houston received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2006. After graduating, he was endlessly frustrated by carrying USB drives and emailing himself files. In early 2007, he teamed up with fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi and the two began working on the project that would eventually become Dropbox. Houston has been named one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40," and in early 2014 Houston and Ferdowsi were named TechCrunch’s “Founders of the Year.”
Houston took part in a "fireside chat"-style conversation with Dr. Andrew Sears, incoming dean of the College of Information Sciences and Technology, during the "Silicon Valley Speaker Finale" presentation as part of IST Startup Week, a week-long celebration showcasing talented young entrepreneurs from around the country, including alumni from the College of IST and Penn State. Recorded sessions of the speaker talks can be viewed at http://startupweek.weebly.com/live-streams.html.