Here's how Dropbox founder Drew Houston grew his company from a two-person startup to a billion-dollar enterprise

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Here's how Dropbox founder Drew Houston grew his company from a two-person startup to a billion-dollar enterprise

Drew Houston

REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach

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Drew Houston is on top of the world.

His company, Dropbox, is a sprawling enterprise with more than a thousand employees. The cloud storage giant now provides services to more than 500 million people and generates a billion dollars in annual revenue.

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Better yet for Houston, it could soon go public. Earlier this month, Dropbox quietly filed the paperwork for its initial public offering, becoming the first major company in 2018 to set those wheels in motion.

But things weren't always easy for Houston or his company. He struggled with his initial entrepreneurial venture and faced several obstacles getting Dropbox off the ground. Dropbox started with just two people, and it's taken 10 years to get to the point it's at now.

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But Houston hung in there. Despite multiple opportunities to sell his company in its early stages - including a bid from Steve Jobs in 2009 - he held on.

Here's a rundown of Houston's journey from a precocious tech-loving kid to the CEO of a billion-dollar enterprise: