This is the least scientific of his recommendations, but that gut feeling that a problem is critical and needs an answer shouldn’t be overlooked. After coming up with a cohort of aspiring founders (some successful, some not) and observing their various fates, Houston has devised a list to help new entrants choose their projects wisely: Dropbox was born out of a similar moment, when he simply got fed up with the lack of seamless storage solutions for his files.īut not every idea is bound to be a good one, or worth your time. “So I started hacking around on the game, and ended up telling the developers, ‘Hey guys, you have to do this and this…’ They responded, ‘Okay great, want to just do that for us?’” That’s how Houston landed his first engineering gig. When he ran out of things to do, he started poking around under the hood, and he discovered a bunch of security vulnerabilities. While he was still in college, Houston signed up to beta test an online game as it was being built. Prospective entrepreneurs are primed to find problems. Looking back, he recommends six strategies that helped him cut through the fear, drown out the noise, and make it happen. This hasn’t been a piece of cake, but Houston’s rocky start did teach him to forge ahead and throw out assumptions that discourage many would-be founders. Today, he’s led Dropbox to nearly 200 million users - and the company’s growing faster than ever before. Soon after he thought it was all over, Houston teamed with fellow-MIT alum Arash Ferdowsi and made it into YC. The good news is, early founders can turn things around. So imagine having your two minutes with the dean of admissions and them coming away thinking you’re an asshole. “Getting into Y Combinator is like getting into a great school. “It wasn't a great experience, coming in unannounced,” Houston recently told students in an exclusive Dorm Room Fund interview at MIT. On a friend’s advice, he walked into Y Combinator’s offices unsolicited to talk to Paul Graham about finding the right person. In 2007, Drew Houston flew to San Francisco determined to find a co-founder for Dropbox.
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