Index4INDEX Card 208: Drew Houston 1

@magnacarta 67

over 1 year ago

Liketu

Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once.

-- Drew Houston

// For more about Drew Houston, keep reading.... //

About the Quote

No one wants to be wrong, and no one wants to fail. We always want to be right, and we all want to succeed.

However, one success can more than make up for a multitude of failures.

Consider a goal scorer (in whatever sport uses goals to keep score). The leading goal scorer over a season may have attempted to score 250 times and converted 50 of those shots to goals. 50 out of 250 comes out to a 20% conversion rate (or 0.200). This goal scorer succeeded 1 time every 5 shots. In most professions, 20% is embarrasing or cringe-worthy. In some sports, it can lead to a large contract.

Thomas Edison is known for-- among many things-- perfecting the incandescent light bulb. It took him 10,000 tries before he found the right combination of materials, quantities, and process to repeatedly produce a working light bulb. The rest is history.

Venture capitalists invest money in lots of companies with the expectations of getting a massive return on investment. For roughly every 10 investments of VC money, 8 of them end up being stinkers. However, the ROI they get for the 2 winning investments more than makes up for the total failures of the 8 stinkers.

Success doesn't require being right all the time. It doesn't even require being right half the time. Success requires just enough opportunities for it to happen. Then that success can wipe out all the failures which came before.

Some Information about Drew Houston

Andrew Houston was born in Acton, Massachusetts, US on 1983-March-4.

Known publicly as Drew Houston, he is an Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, the backup and online storage service.

Drew Houston began to read as early as 18 months old. At around 30 months old, he was playing games on the family's IBM PC. By the time he was 8-- 1991-- he was not only using bulletin board systems, making games, and reverse-engineering apps.

Once he became a teenager, Drew Houston said he wanted to be the next Bill Gates. At this time he wanted to learn how to incorporate a company, so his father took him to the County Clerk. This was also the time when he began to beta test his new computer games. After discovering security errors in those games he would contact the designers of the games. One such designer wanted to hire him.

During his teenage years, Drew Houston learned how to program using the BASIC computer language. Although he was technically too young to work for pay, he was involved with start-up companies such as Accolade, Bit9, and HubSpot. At 15 he worked for an MIT professor's industrial robotics start-up company. There he converted Linux coding, and this helped the develeopment teamm save thousands of dollars.

-- Source

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