Dropbox has evolved from merely storing files to facilitating team collaboration, highlighting the importance of sharing over just storage. It started as a file-sharing service, but I recognized early on that the role of files in people's lives was changing, especially with the rise of platforms like iTunes and Netflix.

At Dropbox, we needed to foster what was unique to our culture, which was 'sweating the details' to ensure that users wouldn't lose important files, like wedding pictures or PhD theses. Quality was crucial at Dropbox, leading us to move slower than Facebook because the last 10% of polish took about 50% of our engineering time.

Dropbox synchronizes files across your or your team's computers, presenting a refreshing and straightforward description without pretense, which helps investors connect with the idea.

To accelerate progress at Dropbox, I realized the fastest way was to grow the team size, as we started with only 30 engineers who were spread too thin across various platforms.

When Dropbox was growing rapidly, we focused on user activation and retention, realizing that many users signed up but didn't engage with the product effectively.

The early challenges for Dropbox included maintaining growth and transitioning from a prototype to a fully functioning company after our initial success with the demo video. We need to focus on acquiring users daily to grow our product.

My first reaction at Dropbox was the need to move and launch faster, as I couldn't understand why we only released the desktop client every couple of months, unlike the daily releases at Facebook.

I realized that values like 'move fast and break things' didn't apply to Dropbox as they did at Facebook, where the focus was on connecting people rather than building reliable software.

After a year of working on Cove, I learned the most because it was acquired by Dropbox, which provided a bigger stage for us to build at scale and make a significant impact.