Dropbox’s CEO Taps Mark Zuckerberg For Advice on Growing His Billion-Dollar Company

July 1, 2015

When Dropbox CEO Drew Houston needs business advice, he turns to friend and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Dropbox, worth an estimated $10 billion, is a global online file-storage business with more than 400 million users and roughly 100,000 business customers. One of the fastest growing tech startups to have ever been launched, the company competes with tech giants like Google and Amazon, both of whom offer similar online storing features for free or close to nothing.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, Houston briefly touched on the ways Zuckerberg continues to positively influence his decision-making and how his words have had a lasting impact on Dropbox as a global company.

“[Zuckerberg’s] given me a lot of advice just on company scaling, how do you organize people, how do you set up these systems.

At scale, you have to be a lot more thoughtful about, how do you compensate people, how do you think about mundane things like their titles or how people advance, how do you decide where to place bets, because you have early stage things, you have more mature products, you have this whole portfolio, how do you keep that running, when the challenges are so different at either end of the spectrum. It’s a lot of things like that.”

Zuckerberg isn’t the only billionaire mentor in Houston’s contact list, which includes Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and former Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside.

Zuckerberg has grown Facebook to 1.4 billion monthly active users since 2004 and acquired over 1 billion additional users with the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Clearly, Zuckerberg knows a few things about growing big business and so it should be no surprise that Houston is grateful for every ounce of help Zuckerberg offers.

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