To keep our company hungry, we focus on the competition with giants like Adobe and Salesforce, which prevents us from getting complacent.

David's approach to media was aggressive; he believed in attacking competitors relentlessly, which turned against me after he took over as CEO.

We started with bloggers to gain initial press coverage, which eventually led to national media attention, helping us gain traction despite being in debt.

We launched our product at a startup demo conference, despite initial skepticism from others about our idea, and faced challenges in recruiting a PR firm due to the prevailing negative sentiment. We decided to handle marketing ourselves instead of hiring a marketing person, and we had a memorable audition experience with two computers, one as a backup.

After being told to leave the team twice, I leveraged my connections in the industry to gain support for building Google Photos, and ultimately, we got the green light to proceed.

We stood out to investors because we weren't like everyone else; we had a straightforward business model and were addressing a real pain point in a fragmented market dominated by big incumbents.

To validate the need for Dropbox, I created a demo video that gained significant traction on Hacker News, which helped us get into Y Combinator.

We brought in customers early to test our product, which helped change the minds of skeptical team members when they saw real-time reactions from users.

I didn't sell my story well to investors, which led to challenges in raising funds, but eventually, we built a strong case that made it hard for them to ignore us.