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insisted Dropbox’s home page be a simple stick-figure video showing what the product does. No table of features and pricing; instead, a story about a guy who loses stuff and goes on a trip to Africa.
    So rather than advertise, they turned their small but loyal customer base into salespeople, giving away 250 megabytes of free storage in exchange for a referral. One-quarter of all new customers come to Dropbox this way. Within two and a half years the snowball had rolled into a $4 billion valuation.
    The opportunity in front of Drew Houston revealed itself again in the summer of 2011 during a booze-fueled lunch at VC Ron Conway’s Belvedere, California bayside villa. As Houston carefully explained what Dropbox did, he was cut off exactly as he had been by Steve Jobs so many years ago: “I know, I use it all the time.” Rather than a tech CEO, his drinking buddy was rapper Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who told Houston he used Dropbox to collaborate with producer David Guetta on the hit “I Gotta Feeling.”
    Such tipping-point anecdotes now pour in. After his laptop crashed during final exams, one law student wrote in: “Without Dropbox I would have failed out of law school and be living under a bridge.” A watch design firm just outside of Venice, Italian Soul, used Dropbox to create new pieces with a designer in Mendoza, Argentina, the hulking 3-D files living painlessly in the cloud. Haitian relief workers kept up-to-date records of the deceased and shared those names with Miami and other cities. Professional sports teams inventory videos of opponents’ plays, accessible wherever the team is playing. On Thanksgiving 2010, the shadowy Ferdowsi, donning a Dropbox hoodie, was mobbed by starstruck teens in an arcade in Kansas City, his hometown. “That’s when I knew we’d hit it,” said Ferdowsi.
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    HOUSTON BELIEVES DROPBOX IS ushering in a new wave of computing, where people are untethered from their files. “Your data follows you.”
    To pull this off Dropbox must manage incredible volume and stunning complexity—while making that all simply disappear to anyone using the service. As we talked with him in late 2011, 325 million files were saved daily to Dropbox (old files and newly created ones), which had to slide seamlessly onto any device. By early 2013, that number passed one billion. Houston and his geeks built tendrils into eighteen different operating systems, four browsers, and three mobile software systems. When even the smallest software update comes out, they have to make sure Dropbox still works. In June 2011 a password breach exposed up to sixty-eight accounts, underscoring the risk Houston faces as the company holding the keys to 50 million people’s digital attic. “I cannot express how deeply sorry I am,” he e-mailed the exposed users, appending his personal cell phone number. “Dropbox is my life.”
    There’s also the issue of competition. Houston rattled off the list: “Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon in a way, then there’s IDrive, YouSendIt, Box.net, dozens of startups, even e-mail . . . people sending themselves everything.” While he believes Dropbox will torpedo the backup industry within five years, he especially fears iCloud, which has pushed itself upon the hundreds of millions of people who’ve bought iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Google’s Drive product. But Apple has proved less monolithic since the passing of Houston’s hero, Steve Jobs; Dropbox remains the leader.
    Houston combatted an implosion by spending a lot of his war chest on ubiquity. He protected his flank against Google via a deal with phone maker HTC, which makes Dropbox the default cloud storage option on every one of its Android phones. Deals with other phone firms, plus PC and television makers came next. Houston hired a team to tailor Dropbox to businesses. Hundreds of outside