Jobs went on to float an eventual acquisition by Apple, but Houston said he did not name a price, at least not at the time. Even though he was generally gracious, Houston said, Jobs expressed that he felt Dropbox was more of a feature than a product or business and gave him a “bit of a hard time” about that. Houston said about the get-together that Jobs had heard of them and asked to meet with him.
They just want a great experience and they're the ones at the foundation of the business we're building so we need to stay focused on keeping our customers happy and building the best products.In a conversation with WIRED UK’s David Rowan on stage at the DLD Conference in Germany, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that he did in fact have a “great meeting” with the late Steve Jobs in 2009. That's outside of our control so what I really make sure that the team stays focused on is that our customers don't really care if we're public or private. This will be a normal, everyday occurrence and so whatever the price is today it'll be something different tomorrow. Houston: Again we're really proud of the business we've built and one thing I tell the team is get used to the stock going up and down. Today how do you feel now that, I think it was up, the stock was up some 40 odd percent, approximately up to $12 billion valuation. Kovach: Going into today, your IPO day, there was a little bit of worry about your valuation, how it seemed like you might be IPOing at a price under the valuation you were at a few years ago which is reportedly $10 billion. We certainly want - we share a lot of users between Dropbox and any major product and so those integrations are really valuable and we want to make sure that our shared experience is good. Houston: Well when you open an Office document in Dropbox you can then open it in the native apps on the phone and vice versa, and then Dropbox is a place where you can put all of your information. Kovach: What does that partnership look like when you partner with an Apple or you partner with a Google, what does that look like to me, as a user? And they turn to us and they're like, "Hey, can someone build a cloud to sync my clouds?" And so we provide a real, that's our strength, that we help tie everything together and we've found that while there's overlap with the larger companies, folks like Microsoft and Google have become partners over the years. And they've got products from everyone, right? They have Dropbox, they've got all the Google products, they've got all the Microsoft products. Houston: Well we stay close to our customers and when I sit in round tables with customers they show me their phones. How do you compete in that environment where there's so much power influence in just a handful of players? How do you stay afloat?
Speaking of Apple, though, and these other giants, this industry is dominated by four or five big players and it seems like everyone else is kind of fighting over whatever is left. Just feeling really excited and really grateful. It's sort of the culmination of a lot of hard work by many people.
I mean we're really proud of the business that we've built and I'm just really proud of the team. How does that feel to you? Do you feel vindicated by that at all? Kovach: Right, so the legend goes he said, not so subtly, well we're just gonna have to crush you guys and put you out of business.
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