Andrew Houston

Co-Founder, Interim President, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman, Dropbox

Search every verified Andrew Houston interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a July 2026 episode of the podcast "How I Built This," Drew Houston recounted the origin of Dropbox, describing how he began writing the code for the service on a bus ride from Boston to New York in 2006 after realizing he had left his thumb drive at home. He discussed the early days of the company with co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, including their time in the Y Combinator program, where they worked long hours coding in a dorm-like environment. Houston noted that he later received a Facebook message from Mark Zuckerberg about a potential acquisition, and though that did not happen, he was invited to join Facebook's board. In a 2014 interview, Houston commented on the value of formal education for engineers, stating that studying computer science made him a better engineer and judge of talent. He also described fundraising as a "game" with random elements of momentum, while the fundamentals of the business remain predictable.