Drew Houston

Drew Houston is the founder and chief executive officer of Dropbox, a file sharing and storage company and FWD.us, a lobbying group advocating prison reform, education improvements and amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Andrew Houston was born in Acton, Massachusetts on 4 March 1983. He is the son of Cecily and Ken Houston. He went to Acton-Boxborough Regional High School. He took Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and graduated in 2006.

Before working on Dropbox, Houston co-founded Accolade, an online SAT prep company and worked there from April 2004 to August 2007. He was a software engineer at Bit9, Inc. , a cybersecurity company from January 2006 to May 2007.

In 2006, he came up with the idea of Dropbox, a remote storage that can be accessed online. After four months of building and testing he flew to San Francisco to pitch his idea to Paul Graham of Y Combinator. After a not so successful meeting, Graham insisted that he have a cofounder before pitching the idea. Drew was under pressure, he had only two weeks to find someone he trusted enough to start his company with. He went back to MIT. Moving very quickly Mr Houston managed - after a chat lasting just two hours - to persuade a 22-year-old student called Arash Ferdowsi to quit university and join him. Mr Ferdowsi was a friend of a friend, but he and Mr Houston had never met before.

They launched Dropbox in 2008 and had thousands of users within few days and 500 million registered users as of July 2018. Dropbox ranked 4th on the Y Combinator Top Companies List as of October 2018.

Along with Mark Zuckerberg and Joe Green they founded FWD.us, a lobbying group that advocates prison reform, education improvements and amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the United States. Their goal with FWD.us is to organize and engage the technology community in the issues where they can contribute to the national debate.

Drew Houston was ranked #18 in America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 in 2016. He landed 302nd on the Forbes 400 in 2018 . He is #1008 on Forbes Billionaires List of 2019 with a net worth as of $2.3 Billion as of April 2019.