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Masters of Scale

Take on Goliath — and win, w/Dropbox's Drew Houston

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups, Business, Management, Entrepreneurship, Mindset, Reid Hoffman

4.64.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2019

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When Drew Houston founded Dropbox, he knew he faced some fierce competition (hello, Google, Apple and Microsoft). But he didn’t back down. Why? Because he believed in his product, and he knew he had an advantage those big, cumbersome competitors could never exploit: Dropbox was lean, focused and fast. Hear how he outmaneuvered the big dogs – and what's next for Dropbox.

Drew Houston's reading list! Books mentioned in this episode:

Competing Against Luck, by Clay Christensen and Karen Dillon

The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz

Becoming Steve Jobs, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, by James Wallace and Jim Erickson

Founders at Work, by Jessica Livingston

High Output Management, by Andy Grove

Music: "Exciting Trailer" by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Read a transcript of this interview at: https://mastersofscale.com/drew-houston-how-to-take-on-goliaths-and-win/

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,

0:07.8

with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.

0:17.0

We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.

0:24.8

So search for rapid response in your podcast player

0:28.0

and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.

0:31.2

I'll see you on the other side.

0:36.0

We had a number of early traditions in the beginning years of Dropbox.

0:40.0

To blow up steam at night night we've always had a tradition of having musical instruments

0:46.5

of guitars and drums in the office but then during the day we couldn't play the real

0:50.6

instruments so we would play rock band. That's Drew Houston, Dropbox co-founder and CEO.

0:56.2

In case you're not familiar with rock band, it's a video game that lets you play along

1:01.0

to popular songs with virtual instruments.

1:04.0

We were pretty competitive as we were with a lot of things and so we've routinely found ourselves playing a song

1:15.9

the four of us and we'd be like number seven globally for that song. With stats like that

1:21.4

during his team were confident that they could outrock anyone in Silicon Valley.

1:27.0

And then Mozy, the backup company, gave us a call out on YouTube, like they record a video challenging us to a duel.

1:35.2

We're like, oh man.

1:37.2

They seem serious, they made like this like cinematic throwdown video unprompted.

1:46.0

Yeah, these little guys, they can do what they want. They can pick up Rockman if they want, but they're following in our shoes.

1:54.0

And we're like, do they know what they're getting into?

1:56.7

And so we have this polite negotiation

1:59.0

where I'm trying to feel them out because I'm like,

...

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