D rew Houston is an American technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, the popular cloud storage and file synchronization service. A computer science graduate from MIT, Houston famously conceived the idea for Dropbox on a bus trip from Boston to New York after realizing he had forgotten his USB flash drive. Frustrated by the problem of keeping files in sync across different devices, he started writing the code for a solution.
In 2007, he co-founded Dropbox with his fellow MIT student, Arash Ferdowsi. They created a simple, elegant product that made it easy for anyone to store files in the cloud and access them from anywhere. The company grew virally through a freemium business model and a clever referral program. As CEO, Houston has guided the company from a Y Combinator-backed startup into a major publicly traded software company. He has also steered the company's evolution from a simple consumer file storage service into a collaborative workplace platform for teams.
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