Drew Houston dismisses criticism of Dropbox, says it has ‘a long way to go’

SAN FRANCISCO — Drew Houston wants everyone to know that Dropbox isn’t worried about all the chatter that says it’s overvalued and is missing the boat. Rather, Dropbox’s chief executive says that the company is focused on its current mission of building a way for people to collaborate while also connecting with other people, companies, and ecosystems around the world.

Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Houston sought to assure the community that Dropbox is a viable business, contrary to recent reports that it’s overhyped. “This is a problem that everyone in the world has,” he said. “You have to have a huge market, team, and product that everyone loves.”

Originally started as a service that let users have a cloud-based home for all their stuff stored on different devices, Dropbox has gradually evolved to now tackle the issue of how to help people organize everything stored in multiple places on the cloud. It’s attempted to launch standalone applications to tackle this issue, including Carousel, which hasn’t fared that well.

Houston acknowledged the sluggish adoption of Carousel, saying that it still has a long way to go, but he remained adamant that all the problems that Dropbox is trying to solve are big problems. “We go after them because they’re big and important. If they’re easy to solve, someone would have done it already.”

Now Dropbox is going after the enterprise space, a market where Box has already established a beachhead. He shrugged off concerns. “It’s a huge market,” Houston reiterated. “We’re focused on how we can get 10 times bigger.”

When asked if Dropbox discussed internally the possibilities of an economic downturn and its impact on the company, Houston said that the company doesn’t talk about “the broader market environment.” Regardless of a good or bad economy, people will still have needs.

He acknowledged that his team is far from finished: “We have a long way to go.”

Pundits and investors have their eyes on Dropbox to see when the company will go public. It’s one of the few companies with a valuation over a billion dollars — in fact, it’s estimated to be over $10 billion. But Houston said that the company won’t be filing for its IPO anytime soon: “We’re really enjoying having the flexibility and now having to enjoy that universe. We’ve been heads down for the last several months recruiting and thinking about the next generation of products.”