Houston had aspired to be an entrepreneur before he was old enough to shave. As a computer science major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he hacked for fun, building an online poker bot that could automatically play and win multiple hands. Even when Houston was solving math problems in high school, he would do it his own way. His dad taught him to program when he was 5.

Reared in suburban Boston, Houston began playing with computers when he was 3. “I’m a Windows guy anyway,” Houston said with a smile.

Dropbox engineers even hacked their way into Apple’s file system to make the Dropbox icon appear on users’ menu bars, a bold feat that blew away Apple’s cloud team and caught the attention of none other than Jobs. That’s the kind of obsessive-compulsive attention to detail that Houston and his team needed to pull off a technical tour de force: making Dropbox work on any device, with any operating system, on any browser and in any country. He rarely shows up at his apartment except to shower and sleep, instead embedding himself in his Aeron chair at the Dropbox office. It took him 15 months to replace the driver’s license he lost at Burning Man, forcing him to carry his passport as ID to get served in bars. His former roommates say that maniacal focus on Dropbox meant Houston never paid the rent on time. His desk is blanketed in a flurry of resumes an inch thick and his attention constantly darts between four 24-inch monitors. At Dropbox’s San Francisco headquarters, Houston (pronounced like the Manhattan street, not the city in Texas) sits in a sea of engineers under a neon sign that reads “ITJUSTWORKS” with “just work” flashing in blue.

Who owns dropbox company