This is a story of how Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi built Dropbox. In the mid-2000s, file storage looked boring and solved. USB drives, email attachments, FTP servers, and shared folders already existed. Investors believed the space was commoditized, technically uninteresting, and impossible to differentiate. Even worse, the problem felt invisible. People were used to losing files, emailing versions back and forth, and dealing with broken syncs. Pain existed, but it had been normalized. Dropb