Don't worry about failure; 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.

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.

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.

People do not choose Dropbox because it has this much space or gigabytes. They choose it for the experience.

No one is born a CEO, but no one tells you that. The magazine stories make it sound like Mark Zuckerberg woke up one day and wanted to redefine how the world communicates by creating a billion-dollar company. He didn't.

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.

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

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

You have to adopt a mindset that says, 'Okay, in three months, I'll need to know all this stuff, and then in six months there's going to be a whole other set of things to know -- again in a year, in five years.' The tools will change, the knowledge will change, the worries will change.

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

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.

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.

Reading a book about management isnt 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.

The happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You need that hunger no matter what, because eventually the honeymoon period wears off. Somewhere between printing your business cards that say 'founder' on them and everything else you have to do, you realize, 'Oh, actually this is a ton of work.'