At age 24, he made a website out of pure 'frustration'—now, it’s worth $9 billion

• 分类: Clippings
• 创建: 2025-01-28
• 标签: Drew_Houston, Dropbox, 云存储, 商业模式, 竞争, 企业家精神, 技术创新

At age 24, he made a website out of pure 'frustration'—now, it’s worth $9 billion

摘要 (Summary)

德鲁·休斯顿（Drew Houston）在麻省理工学院学习时，因频繁丢失USB驱动器而创建了云存储平台Dropbox。尽管Dropbox成功，市值达到96.2亿美元，但随着竞争对手如苹果、微软和谷歌的崛起，Houston面临着商业模式的挑战。他通过专注于可控因素，关闭了损失较大的产品，并推出了新系统Magic Pocket，以应对竞争。他认为挑战是改善的机会，推动了公司的成长。

要点 (Key Facts)

1. Drew Houston创建Dropbox的初衷是解决自己频繁丢失USB驱动器的问题。
2. Dropbox的市值为96.2亿美元，用户超过7亿，来自180个国家。
3. Dropbox曾面临来自苹果、微软和谷歌的竞争，影响其商业模式。
4. Houston通过阅读商业书籍和专注于可控因素来应对挑战。
5. 2015年，Dropbox推出了Magic Pocket以增强其竞争力。

正文 (Content)

Drew Houston’s company was born from a very millennial problem.
德鲁·休斯顿（Drew Houston）的公司出生于一个非常千禧一代的问题。

As a student at MIT, Houston repeatedly lost USB drives with important information on them, he told “Lenny’s Podcast” in an episode that aired earlier this month. In 2007, at age 24, he got fed up and created a cloud storage platform for his own personal use. Later, he built it out into the file-hosting company Dropbox — which has a $9.62 billion market cap, as of Thursday afternoon.
作为麻省理工学院的一名学生，休斯顿在本月初播出的一集播出的一集中对“ Lenny’s Podcast”一再丢失了USB驱动器，并在上面说了“ Lenny’s Podcast”。在2007年，他24岁时就受够了，并创建了一个云存储平台，以供自己个人使用。后来，他将其建立到了文件托管公司Dropbox中，该公司的市值为96.2亿美元，截至周四下午。

“I started Dropbox more out of just personal frustration,” said Houston, now 41. “It really felt like something only I was super interested in as far as file syncing, and focusing on one customer, which was myself.”
现年41岁的休斯顿说：“我从个人的挫败感中开始了更多的东西。这真是我对文件同步而言非常感兴趣，并专注于一个客户，这是我自己。”

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This wasn’t Houston’s first entrepreneurial foray: He’d launched an SAT prep company called Accolade in 2004. The gig was “ramen profitable, so to speak, but more importantly a great introduction to the wild world of starting companies,” he writes on his LinkedIn profile.
这不是休斯顿的第一次企业家尝试：他在2004年成立了一家名为Accolade的SAT预备公司。这场演出“可以这么说，这是拉面盈利，但更重要的是，他对野生世界的狂野世界的介绍很重要”，他写道。在他的LinkedIn个人资料上。

Dropbox’s success, in contrast, gave Houston a net worth of of $2.3 billion, according to Forbes. He remains the company’s CEO today, overseeing more than 700 million users from 180 different countries on the platform.
根据福布斯的说法，相比之下，Dropbox的成功使休斯顿的净资产为23亿美元。他今天仍然是该公司的首席执行官，负责该平台上180个不同国家 /地区的7亿用户。

But Dropbox’s growth didn’t happen overnight.
但是Dropbox的增长并非一夜之间发生。

‘They just totally nuked our business model’

“他们只是完全削弱了我们的商业模式”

Popularizing cloud storage was a double-edged sword, Houston said: As Dropbox became popular, it increasingly had to survive competition from giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google.
休斯顿说，普遍的云存储是一把双刃剑：随着Dropbox的流行，它越来越不得不在苹果，微软和Google等巨人那里生存。

“All of them launched competing products in one form or another,” said Houston. “Steve Jobs was on stage in 2011 announcing iCloud, calling out Dropbox by name as something that will be viewed as archaic. And similarly, we always felt like we were in the shadow of the hammer of Google launching Google Drive.”
休斯顿说：“他们所有人都以一种或另一种形式推出了竞争产品。” “史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）在2011年宣布iCloud舞台上，称Dropbox的名字将被视为古老的东西。同样，我们始终感到自己正处于Google启动Google Drive的锤子的阴影中。”

Dropbox was relatively large itself by that point, with a reported $4 billion valuation in 2011. Over the next few years, it acquired an email app called Mailbox and launched a photo management app called Carousel.
到那时，Dropbox本身就相对较大，据报道， 2011年的估值为40亿美元。在接下来的几年中，它获得了一个名为Mailbox的电子邮件应用程序，并启动了一个名为Carousel的照片管理应用程序。

But new product lines couldn’t solve a bigger problem: By 2015, platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram were providing some of Dropbox’s core file-sharing services for free.
但是新产品线无法解决一个更大的问题：到2015年，Facebook，Snapchat和Instagram等平台免费提供Dropbox的一些核心文件共享服务。

“They just totally nuked our business model ... [It was] even worse because it was so easily anticipated,” Houston said. “So this became a very public and personal embarrassment for me. How could we not have predicted that, or been out in front of that?”
休斯顿说：“他们只是完全掩盖了我们的商业模式……这甚至更糟，因为它是如此容易预期。” “因此，这对我来说是一个非常公众和个人的尴尬。我们怎么能不能预测它，或者在那前面？”

‘All you can control is how you respond’

“您所能控制的就是您的回应方式”

Houston read business books to help him strategize, including “Playing to Win” by ex-Proctor and Gamble head Alan G. Lafley, he said. His takeaway: Focus on what you can control and do well, instead of what your competitors are doing.
他说，休斯顿阅读了商业书籍，以帮助他制定策略，包括前选手和赌博负责人艾伦·G·拉夫利（Alan G. Lafley）的“赢得胜利”。他的收获：专注于您可以控制和做得好的事情，而不是竞争对手所做的事情。

Dropbox shuttered Carousel and Mailbox, cutting an undisclosed amount of staff. It launched Magic Pocket in 2015, an “in-house multi-exabyte storage system” that allowed Dropbox users to handle bigger file uploads and store files at a larger scale — a new competitive edge, said Houston.
Dropbox关闭的轮播和邮箱，削减了未公开的人员。休斯顿说，它于2015年推出了Magic Pocket，这是一种“内部多范围存储系统”，允许Dropbox用户处理更大的文件上传和更大规模的文件存储文件 - 一种新的竞争优势。

The lesson, he said, is to view challenges as opportunities to improve: Without the strong competition, Dropbox might never have pushed itself to grow.
他说，这堂课是将挑战视为改善的机会：如果没有激烈的竞争，Dropbox可能永远不会推动自己成长。

“Every time you move up a league, your reward is a stronger and better opponent and potentially a more unlevel playing field,” said Houston. “That’s just the way it is. You can’t control that. All you can control is how you respond.”
休斯顿说：“每次您提升联盟时，您的奖励都是一个更强大，更好的对手，并且可能是一个更加不平衡的比赛。” “就是这样。您无法控制。您所能控制的只是您的响应方式。”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Dropbox has more than 700 million users from 180 different countries, according to its website.
更正：根据其网站，该故事已经更新了，以反映Dropbox拥有来自180个不同国家 /地区的7亿用户。

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