In a conversation with WIRED UK’s David Rowan on stage at the DLD Conference in Germany, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that he did in fact have a “great meeting” with the late Steve Jobs in 2009.
Houston said about the get-together that Jobs had heard of them and asked to meet with him. Even though he was generally gracious, Houston said, Jobs expressed that he felt Dropbox was more of a feature than a product or business and gave him a “bit of a hard time” about that.
Jobs went on to float an eventual acquisition by Apple, but Houston said he did not name a price, at least not at the time. Forbes reported earlier that Dropbox ended up turning down a “nine-digit acquisition offer” from Apple.
Dropbox now has 50 million+ users saving billions of files daily, and is valued at $4 billion.
Not bad for a company that one of the world’s most brilliant minds ever once called a feature.
Also check out our Founder Stories series featuring Houston:
On Pitching Dropbox: “Tom Cruise In Minority Report Is Not Carrying Around A Thumb Drive”
Drew Houston: “Dropbox Users Save A Billion Files Every Three Days”
How Dropbox Got Its First 10 Million Users
Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere”
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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