Dropbox founder Drew Houston

BI Chinese station reported on May 6

Many people know the story of NBA legend Michael Jordan, who once declined to school basketball in high school, actually had a similar encounter with Dropbox founder Drew Houston in Silicon Valley. He started Dropbox's current valuation of $ 10 billion, but he was twice rejected by Silicon Valley investors when he first started business.

In 2005, Houston was studying at MIT and was keen to enter Y Combinator, then the prestigious startup accelerator. Two years later he took his Dropbox venture into his Y Combinator.

Until then, he had tried to propose two business ideas, but were rejected because the company he wanted to start is not optimistic.

At that time, Y Combinator's manager was co-founder of the project Paul Graham. Sam Altman, who currently replaces Graham's managing Y Combinator, spoke about Houston's rejection of the same year in an interview in New York today.

According to Altman, Houston proposed an entrepreneurial idea about the American college entrance exam. He declined to say that Houston seemed clever, but he should be able to establish a company that is better than the American college prep.

In the ensuing years, Houston had been thinking about solving tougher problems, culminating in his idea of ​​building a cloud storage company.

The company now has a valuation of 10 billion U.S. dollars and is one of the two most successful startups supported by the YC project. Another successful startup is Airbnb.

According to Forbes statistics, only 30-year-old Houston is now one of the youngest billionaires in Silicon Valley. (Lin Jingdong)