i is a line ofrted with code, traveling from boston to new york. that is now the foundation for dropbox, a cloud-based file sharing service that allows you to file in access any file from any device anywhere. at $10ropbox is valued billion, 400 million users in 200 countries around the world. joining me today, cofounder and ceo of drop next, through houston. -- drew houston.

>> my life is stored on dropbox. is a lot? >> that's pretty good. isthe criticism is that it so simple that other countries can do it to. microsoft, apple. how do you compete with that? for our users, i think it is a couple things. one is that the product is easy to use. most popular service of its kind in the world. if you share things, it is much more likely if i share something with you, that you already have it. has four hundred million users. who are they, where are they? table used dropbox not just for storage but for sharing that

-- that is the heart of how we grow. >> where did you get into computers? >> it started in a living room when i was maybe three. my dad had just taken this big thing out of a box, and it was a ibm pc junior. , trying toures of me sit in the chair and get the keyboard. i think i was mesmerized by an early age by this glowing screen. my dad showed me how to write my first lines of code when i was little. >> your mom resisted this, right? >> she was puzzled. are kids supposed to be playing with legos and going outside? surehey urged me to make that i had that kind of balance. >> you went on to m.i.t.. tell me about this founding

story comes this line of code? a trip to new york and forgot my thumb drive. this was before the iphone. i am so disorganized, i hate myself. why does this keep happening? i i had a bunch of time opened up the editor and started writing some code, having no idea what this would turn into. >> why is dropbox worth $10 million -- $10 billion?

>> you hear entrepreneurs talk about staring into the abyss of death. swallowing shards of broken glass. what was it like for you? times ii add up all the forgot my thumb drive or deal with all these problems, days of my life that were just wasted. so that was a motivator.

drop box, the technical and design challenges -- buildingbilling something of that scale are exciting for an engineer. that 1300 today is up from 500 the beginning of last year. engineering the ,roducts, the designed the user people involved in marketing. we have a dedicated security team. probably a couple dozen are --icated across different all these different facets of security. more broadly, you think about -- for the reliability of the service.

>> what does the office of the future look like? >> a lot more freedom. in the old days, you would show up at work and they would issue you a laptop and a found and say you must use these things. now, we have a lot of choice. people are using all kinds of different devices. that's become a basic expectation anybody at work once to have choice. we support all the different platforms. people expect to work on their own terms. a don't want to be tied down to any one environment, people love that they can be free to work from anywhere. moremeans there's a lot fragmentation, stop on your calendar, e-mail, dropbox. the big thing we think about is how can we tie together all these different things that you use. the expectation of freedom is something that is really

important, and a big area of our forecasts -- focus. >> how many of those users are paying customers? product forthe free. if you need more space you can buy more. it is in 8 million businesses, up from 4 million a year and a half ago. 100,000 paying business customers. >> who are the biggest fortune 500 companies? >> the majority are using that in some capacity. hotels, every quarter we are adding new customers. >> what has been the biggest challenge in terms of penetrating the enterprise? , every technology goes through this curve where in the beginning, people are unsure about it. in the last couple of years people are realizing that it is

safer to have information and services like dropbox in the cloud. that we put our cash under our mattresses, the banks do a pretty good job of taking care of that. over --?oose dropbox >> anybody can provide storage. my stuff will live in the cloud, organize it for me. have me share with other people. storage is just in a gradient. is mailbox for e-mail, carousel for photos. each of those is a new kind of adventure. >> how many users -- >> we want to make sure the product is right before we spread it through a network. >> why is dropbox were $10

billion? >> the orders of magnitude, more than that. there is room for us to grow. there are still billions of people on the internet. you look at how valuable that is. the things that people put in a dropbox are their most important possessions. if your house were burning down, you would go get these things. for a company making their team productive, having a safe place for their information, this is valuable problems that we saw. we ship on samsung phones, we just partnered with microsoft last year. on, and a lot going investors see the potential. >> dropbox is a standalone company. do you have that same production today that you have two years ago, eight years ago? >> yes.

it is important we are being independent. it allows us to support the different platforms. as the other companies try to move the, they try to favor their native platform at the expense of the others. that switzerland approach is less valuable to our customers. we have been able to do a lot in the private markets. thatre able to raise money we haven't even needed. >> why get it if you don't need it? for infrastructure, acquisitions, having a stronger balance sheet gives us flexibility to make big long-term investments. >> do you have the cash rich are long-term goals? >> yes.

the important thing for us is generating cash and investing. >> could you go public without that? raising this money means we are not forced to go in any direction and can be focused on building >>. what are your plans to go public? >> we don't have any right now. that's what we get with the flexibility of raising this money. happy we have our approach. our sales force 100 millions of people means we do not have to spend that kind of money that others do on marketing. >> are you profitable? >> we don't break that out right now. well. have been going our focus is not on profitability right now, it is on investing and growing. , whatn rates and founders

is your view on that? with yourto start business model. our modeltunate that hasn't changed that much sense 2008. we have been largely funded by our users. >> how do you balance between the fancy office and company perks and make sure you are being responsible? >> we have great office space. we invest in things that make our employees lives easier. you will not see super expensive paintings. , one dangerlent companies, onto is giving everybody the impression we have made it. we have tried to be balanced. >> this is just word on the street that dropbox is losing some talented engineers. how hard is it to keep good people? no, certainly, circle of

life. people never expect to stay at a place where entire lives. our recruiting efforts have been better than ever. how many engineers are joining, we don't break that out. a thing about building a great engineering team. they all have friends and people they work for, to get a core of really great people, it makes it easier to recruit the next round of people. there, theytting are building this amazing roster of people makes it exciting for those that consider joining us. full.nds are pretty

companies like google has done with public information we are trying to do for the private information. , airbnb isving cars going into cuba. >> carousel for instance. back, ok i have this problem. my photos are in 100 different places. in the future, you should be able to have every photo taking with you wherever you are in your pocket. when you multiply that towards hundreds of millions of people, this is one of the largest question -- collections of memories. we want to reimagine how people remember their lives. those will keep us busy for a long time. >> how much do you think about building your own server? >> we invested time in our own

infrastructure. we also rent a bunch of infrastructure from amazon. of our infrastructure, we can get a lot out of commodity servers. there may be additional gains by trying to bring in something else, but we do a good job of that. >>

you are 32 years in young. what is the hardest lesson you have learned sec eeo? >> i think the hardest challenges are with people. putting people together and get them all pointing in the same direction.

there will be people that are and happy. -- unhappy. >> i know you are friends with mark zuckerberg. what kind of vice has he given you? on companies scaling. how do you organize people, how do you set up, scale you have to be a lot more thoughtful about how you compensate people. monday things like their titles or how people advance. portfolio --ole how do you keep it running when the challenges are so different? read it wasunder, i like married at first sight. you got along famously. how has his room -- your relationship with him changed? >> i think it has been pretty steady.

we have kind of grown up together, doing this. our values have been shaped by going through this experience together. >> i know you pitched polygram earlier -- paul graham. >> no one wanted to offer us a million dollars. >> it was good that you didn't get that offer. >> what really motivates us is building something that people love. >> meeting steve jobs. how did that happen? > >> apple became aware of drop box early on. we had some conversations with the team because they were curious about how we managed to put the green icons on the

files. it turns out, to do that was actually a tough technical challenge. do this open heart surgery on the finder, on code we did not write. their team understood that this was pretty crazy acrobatics. steveally it ended up reached out and wanted to talk to us. we repeatedly said look we are not interested in selling the company. but if you want to hang out, sure. it was wild. oneup in the morning, infinitely, it's art in the phone. we talked, the formal part of the meeting was 15 minutes.

it was pretty clear they were interested in buying the company. but we were not interested in selling it. i didn't talk about -- far to try to get -- go too down that path. we spent the rest of the time talking about a lot of questions he he came back to apple, had different advice for us. he spent a lot more time than he needed to with us. that wepretty clear were going to sell the company. he was -- how did that work out for them? >> the product solved a different problems. what people like about dropbox is it is so much easier to use.

had a huge problem, people's passwords were hacked. how do you make sure that doesn't happen with dropbox? >> what can we do, even if you are kind of sloppy with your passwords, we try to proactively identify suspicious behavior. we go at it from a bunch of different angles. >> how has your personal life changed that you are rich and famous? >> it's not that different. i still spend most of my waking hours thinking about dropbox. you have been on silicon valley, the hbo show. it's fun. i look at all this as a new whole series of interesting experiences. >> what's next for drew houston? what do you want your place in silicon valley history to be?

the two things we really care about our one, we want to care -- create a great company, a place can people -- where people can do their best work. we admired the other companies, we have our own distinctive culture. we want to preserve that. for me, we are at a pretty big scale now. we solve a lot of problems for people today. what are ways we can go even further? and build this kind of treasure. this home for everybody's most important stuff matters to people. >> have you ever regretted not selling to steve jobs? >> no. there are good times and there are hard times. it's all part of the adventure. >> thank you so much for joining us. it is great to have you here.

emily: it is the iconic venture capital firm. kleiner perkins caufield byers made its name investing early in google, amazon, and genentech, but many begin to wonder if the glory days for this company are over. then, the firm was rocked by the most closely watched trial in the industry. ellen pao sued the firm for gender discrimination. sparking debate worldwide. joining me today, general partners john doerr and beth seidenberg. thank you for doinis