Dropbox CTO found success after push into deep end

How Mark Zuckerberg prepared Aditya Agarwal to lead.

Aditya Agarwal, 34, is the chief technology officer of online file storage company Dropbox. He leads hundreds of software engineers in building tools used by Dropbox’s half a billion registered users. With a multibillion-dollar valuation, the privately held company is considered a heavyweight in the personal and business data storage industries.

Computer kid

Born in India to a father who was a chemical engineer and mother who was a homemaker, Agarwal moved homes a lot with his family, with stints in Cameroon, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, before later settling in the United States. One of the constants in his life, though, was his love for computers.

“My dad got us a computer when I was 11 or 12 years old and I was always fascinated by the ability to program stuff,” he said. “I mean, it’s kind of a crazy thing, right? You’re sitting in your office or bedroom and you can build stuff that can do stuff. There’s something really intoxicating and powerful about that.”

Agarwal used books to teach himself to code, and later took programming classes in Indonesia. When it came time for college, he ventured to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to study computer science.

Being creative at

Carnegie Mellon

One of the misconceptions about software engineering, Agarwal said, is that people tend to think of it as a mechanical job. He prefers to think of coding as a creative job.

“Writing a beautiful computer program is like building a work of art,” he said. “The best engineers are the ones who are able to reduce a problem to its simplest possible artifact. The ones