“Kansas welcomed my family and gave me the confidence to succeed in ways my parents could never have dreamed of,” Ferdowsi told Kayhan Life. This $100,000 grant awarded by Iranian-American entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar goes to “celebrate and inspire Iranian culture and entrepreneurship.” He went on to become the first ever recipient of the 2014 Cyrus Prize. “We ordered the pieces for him and he assembled the hard drive.” “I think he was 9 or 10 when he put his own computer together,” his father Gholam recalls to The Kansas City Star. Together, they nurtured his passions and listened to his opinions. His parents married while both were students in the United States. “Of all the things he’s done for Dropbox, I know this is his proudest and most enduring contribution.” Arash Ferdowsi has an innate gift for computersįerdowsi comes from an Iranian background. “Because of Arash, making work human will always be at the heart of our culture,” wrote Houston in a blog post thanking Ferdowsi for his 13 years at Dropbox. This makes him one of the world’s youngest billionaires. Over the past 14 years, Dropbox has acquired more than 500 million users.įerdowsi, who left the company in 2020, currently has a net worth of about $1 billion, according to Forbes. In fact, it had a waiting list of 75,000 people just a few hours after the first instructional video went up. “We only spent like five hours together before we decided to do Dropbox.”ĭropbox gained immediate popularity. “Drew calls it a shotgun marriage,” Ferdowsi told The Kansas City Star. Once introduced to Ferdowsi, the partnership clicked right away. First, Houston realized there must be a better way to store information than easily forgettable USB drives. The two were introduced by a mutual friend. Instead, he devoted himself to Dropbox full-time with his co-founder Drew Houston.

The Dropbox co-founders pioneered new technology after a forgotten flash driveįerdowsi, like many other tech entrepreneurs, dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. Though Dropbox’s co-inventor Arash Ferdowsi recently said goodbye to the company, his contribution has changed the way we study and work. In response, platforms and services like Dropbox rise to the new challenges. Amidst a pandemic, millions of professionals have moved online for remote work.

Dropbox founder net worth