DREW HOUSTON

What scares me the most is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.

Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.

To the casual observer, the Dropbox demo video looked like a normal product demonstration, but we put in about a dozen Easter eggs that were tailored for the Digg audience. References to Tay Zonday and 'Chocolate Rain' and allusions to 'Office Space' and 'XKCD.' It was a tongue-in-cheek nod to that crowd, and it kicked off a chain reaction.

When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing; it's getting too comfortable.

If you start your own thing, you can learn a lot really fast from doing things wrong.

Devices are getting smarter - your television, your car - and that means more data spread around. There needs to be a fabric that connects all these devices. That's what we do.

You're not going to become a great manager overnight. You're not going to become a great public speaker or figure out how to raise money. These are the things you want to start the clock on as early as possible.

Dropbox is useful to anyone with a phone. That's, like, two billion people.

Where you live matters. Whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don't settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle, too - follow them. If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.

There's this joy that comes from sitting down to solve a problem and standing up when it's done and good. Building a company or managing people is never just done.

If you're going to go to the moon, you don't shoot the rocket right at the moon. You have to go at it obliquely.

Our users are trapeze artists, high school football coaches - I got cornered by a couple of theoretical physicists who said Dropbox lets them collaborate across the world and share their experiments' results. They were raving about how it's driving their research.

A lot of really great, innovative things have happened when people just didn't know it wasn't supposed to be possible.

You think about who needs Dropbox, and it's just about anybody with a pulse.

No one is born a CEO, but no one tells you that.

One of the great things about moving to Silicon Valley is that you're surrounded by all these people who've done it before. This place is an assembly line that takes a couple of twenty-somethings and walks you through everything you need to learn.

With something like Dropbox, it was immediately like, 'Wow, this is literally something that anyone with an Internet connection could use.' Everyone needs something like this; they just don't realize it yet.

People make basic assumptions based on what they have now. But you have to ask yourself, 'Is this really what people are going to be doing in five years?' Very few people ask themselves what they would actually want instead if they could wave a magic wand.

There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I'm almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable. Every day, we're writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that's made all the difference.

If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.

When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: Their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way.

Dropbox is my life.

Reading a book about management isn't going to make you a good manager any more than a book about guitar will make you a good guitarist, but it can get you thinking about the most important concepts.

You only have to be right once.

One misconception is that entrepreneurs love risk. Actually, we all want things to go as we expect. What you need is a blind optimism and a tolerance for uncertainty.