“But sanding down the thousand rough edges to make something work 100 percent of the time is really, really hard. “It sounds like what we do is simple,” says Houston, who wrote the original code on a bus ride from Boston to New York and is now Dropbox’s CEO. Its ability to shield users from myriad mind-numbing details and housekeeping chores-“the acrobatics to support all these different situations,” as Houston puts it-is what made Dropbox a hit.

It integrates smoothly with different user interfaces: on a Mac, for example, the Finder displays a check mark in the Dropbox icon when files are in sync. Dropbox knows that while Linux file names are case-sensitive, Windows file names aren’t, so a Windows file called “ABC.doc” will overwrite one called “abc.doc.” It can keep antivirus software from interfering with its file-synching system. Houston and his team hammered out thousands of issues to create an easy system free of the typical annoyances. The files were stored on Dropbox’s servers and synched each time you saved a file, so that it would be available on any device running Dropbox.

People using any browser or operating system, on any kind of device, could drag any kind of file to Dropbox’s icon of an open blue box. Founded in 2007, Dropbox conferred iPhone-like ease and reliability on cloud-based file storage-something Apple itself hadn’t yet begun offering. Steve Jobs had invited them largely because he wanted to explore acquiring Houston’s fast-growing company, Dropbox. “And what do you say at that point? ‘We’re here to see Steve.’” “We went to the front desk,” Houston recalls. One day in 2009, Drew Houston and his business partner, Arash Ferdowsi, pulled their Zipcar into Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California.

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