Today DropBox decided to officially announce its $250 million series B round (which actually closed in Sepetember and we called last summer, and filled in with follow up reports). I took a break from the Web 2.0 Summit to drop by the DropBox offices down the street in San Francisco to talk to CEO and founder Drew Houston about what may be the largest series B funding round ever. (Actually, Better Place topped it with a $350 million series B in 2010).
In the exclusive TCTV video interview above, I ask Houston about the round and what he plans to do with all that money. After all, he just raised more money than many companies do when they go public. How much did the founders and existing shareholders take off the table? “It’s all going into the company,” he tells me. “Nobody sold any stock.”
Houston believes he is on pace to triple the number of DropBox’s users this year from 45 million. DropBox is in a very good spot. But now it faces competition from Apple, which just launched iCloud, Google, and others. In the clip below I ask Houston about the threat from Apple and whether he really turned down a $1 billion offer from Steve Jobs. Watch below to hear him describe that meeting.
Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a...
Drew Houston is CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, and has led Dropbox’s growth from a simple idea to a service relied upon by millions around the world. Drew leads Dropbox’s activities, and is actively involved in its business and product decisions. Before founding Dropbox, Drew attended MIT where he studied computer science. He took a quick leave from school to form Accolade, an online SAT prep startup, and also worked as a software engineer for Bit9. After graduating from...
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