You Only Have to Be Right Once Read Online Free PDF Page B

USB memory stick, leaving him with a laptop and no code to mess with. Frustrated, he immediately started building technology to synch files over the Web. Four months later he flew to San Francisco to pitch his idea to Paul Graham of incubator Y Combinator.
    But Graham insisted he have a cofounder before even submitting his application. Houston had two weeks to find the right person. A friend referred him to Ferdowsi, the only son of Iranian refugees, who was studying computer science at MIT. They talked for two hours back in Boston and “got married on the second date,” as Houston describes it. Ferdowsi dropped out of school with just six months to go.
    Dropbox landed $15,000 from Y Combinator, enough to rent an apartment and buy a Mac. Keen to make Dropbox work on every computer, he spent twenty hours a day trying to reverse-engineer the guts of it.
    Dropbox answered a new, vexing problem for a world where people carry a phone or two, and perhaps a tablet, but have files and photos stuck on multiple PCs, laptops, and mobiles. “Devices are getting smarter—your television, your car—and that means more data spread around,” said Houston. “There needs to be a fabric that connects all these devices. That’s what we do.”
    After one simple download of the Dropbox app someone could store any file instantly “in the cloud.” Once it’s there they can access that file from any other device and invite others to see it, too. An update to the file on one machine shows up on another.
    Months later the duo presented Dropbox at a Y Combinator event. Immediately after, a slick-looking guy started chatting up Ferdowsi in Farsi. Pejman Nozad got his start as an investor during the dot-com era by exchanging commercial real estate for stakes in startups, notably PayPal. He operates out of a rug store (“I thought it was a joke,” says Houston), and entertained the pair with Persian tea in the back. Within days he had Houston and Ferdowsi in front of Sequoia, the firm that backed Google and Yahoo, claiming, falsely, Dropbox was fielding multiple VC offers. “Basically he was our pimp,” said Houston.
    Sequoia’s senior partner, Michael Moritz, showed up at Houston and Ferdowsi’s apartment the following Saturday morning. “They were bleary-eyed,” recalled Moritz. Pizza boxes climbed the walls and blankets cluttered the corners. He told his partners to do the deal, and Dropbox landed $1.2 million. “I’ve seen a variety of companies attacking parts of his problem, like Plaxo,” said Moritz. “Big companies would go after this, I knew. I was betting they have the intellect and stamina to beat everyone else.”
    Houston and Ferdowsi spent the next year pulling all-nighters. They were perfectionists. One time Houston had to track down a copy of Windows XP for Sweden because it had a unique coding quirk that was stalling Dropbox slightly. Ferdowsi had a designer spend hours tweaking the shade of Dropbox’s button inside the file system on a Mac. It was a touch darker than the Apple buttons, and it drove him “crazy” for weeks. “I am the gatekeeper here,” said Ferdowsi. “Everything has to be just so.”
    Dropbox stayed lean, which enabled it to sail through the meltdown. In 2008 it had nine employees and 200,000 customers. Two and a half years later it had added five workers. Users rose tenfold.
    Houston and Ferdowsi moved offices again and often just slept at work. They were getting every customer service e-mail and ignoring messages from their VCs. They toyed with advertising. “That’s what you’re supposed to do: hire a marketing guy, buy Google AdWords,” said Houston. “We sucked at it.” It was costing them $300 to hook one sign-up. Their challenge was marketing a product to solve a problem people didn’t realize they had and weren’t searching for. Ferdowsi from the start