Opening Dropbox
If you walk the halls at MIT, you may notice a lot of students wearing T-shirts bearing the Dropbox logo. It’s a simple design — an opened box — but one that carries outsize significance at the Institute: Alumnus Drew Houston ’05 grew Dropbox from conception to a multibillion-dollar business. Houston, now the company’s CEO, conceived of Dropbox about a year after graduating from MIT: After repeatedly losing his flash drives, he developed a computer program to store his personal files. Soon, however, he realized the program’s commercial potential, so he co-founded Dropbox with former classmate Arash Ferdowsi, who is now Dropbox’s chief technology officer. In 2007, they set up shop in the Y-Combinator — a startup incubator then housed in Cambridge — to further develop the technology and company, eventually moving operations to San Francisco. Six years later, the company is worth an estimated $4 billion, with more than...