The Navigator
Judgement in the fog, money, risk and the call others cannot make.
Drew Houston fits The Navigator archetype because his leadership at Dropbox has been defined by steering a focused company through waters dominated by giants. He co-founded Dropbox out of Y Combinator in 2007 and kept it independent despite famous acquisition interest, guiding it to a 2018 IPO while Google, Apple, and Microsoft bundled competing storage into their platforms.
“Yes. So Paul Graham is best known as one of the founders of Y Combinator. So they are, which is an incubator for startups, and they were our first investors, and they also invested in a lot of great companies, including Airbnb, Stripe, a lot of them.”
“And so I'm just thinking of like, I'm like, what the hell are we going to do about this? Our investors think we're idiots for not changing the name. We're doing all these pointless branding exercises that Did not go well to try to find an alternate name. So I'm just like, oh my God, what are we going to do?”
“Something like that. It's like, how do you do that when you have no money? And so there are the tactic of putting a video on Hacker News or creating a viral video is... That was a seed that was planted by Reading Gorilla Marketing.”
“And I was like, oh my God, this has just nonfiction, but it spelled out something that was, I just didn't know you could kind of break down in a logical way. And suddenly I have this understanding about the world that I didn't have before.”
Foundr : “How I Started Dropbox | Billion Dollar CEO Drew Houston Interview”
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