Drew Houston on handling negativity and criticism

August 19, 2023

When Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston posted his demo video on Hacker News, he received an infamous comment telling him why Dropbox wouldn’t work: ”For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially”

“You still need to carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems.”

“It does not seem very ‘viral’ or income-generating.”

And as he explains in the clip below, he got a lot of pushback from investors too:

“Google is going to do this”

“Online storage is a commodity”

Drew’s response to these investors was:

“Yes, all of those things are true, and there are 50 other products in this space, but do you use any of them?”

They’d say “No”, and Drew would reply: “Isn’t that interesting?”

Today, Dropbox’s market cap is $9.3 billion.

As Drew points out: if you’re doing something interesting and new, you will always face criticism. His advice is as follows:

“You simultaneously have to have thick skin and be able to tune negativity like that out. But you also have to have thin skin if your customers or team aren’t happy and respond to it… it’s a weird dynamic that you’re going to have to handle, but I think it starts with getting some perspective that you will always face negativity and criticism from some people.”