We felt like we could raise money but we still would have the problem of scaling a good team, and obviously it's not just engineering and design there's also customer service and all the details of actually building an office and growing a team and building a culture. So being able to attract talent was an impetus for selling to Dropbox? We felt like we had stumbled into this really large market, this very big opportunity.

The supply /demand ratio is just completely out of whack, particularly in the Bay Area, for engineering - mobile engineering, in particular - and product design, mobile product design in particular. _What's the hiring environment like? _ This is the hardest it's ever been. Now that we're integrated into that and are beginning to interview candidates from engineering and design pipelines, we're seeing faster traction on new hiring. What we've really leaned into is the recruiting resources. The Dropbox resources have been useful to us around having a roof over our head - we were about to outgrow our space in Palo Alto and were in the process of looking for a new one - and getting a lot of the basics of keeping a business up and running taken care of. I'm guessing the Dropbox resources are partly why the waiting list is now gone. For every person using mailbox there needs to be a bit of dedicated infrastructure that's acting like a mail client on behalf of the cloud. But it's a massive technological challenge to pull that off. That allows us to create a fast experience even though we're only accessing the radio for a brief amount of time. When you set up a mailbox account, Mailbox begins checking your mail from the cloud, reformatting it, sending you push messages when there are new messages, and having this tiny little snapshot ready for you when you open up the phone that, as soon as you hit the network, we just hand it to you as quickly as possible. To deliver mail quickly when you open your device, we actually took a lot of infrastructure that historically has lived directly on the mail client and we moved it into the cloud. Mail itself is this very old protocol that generally is very slow. They require a massive technical investment.

Another reason that tool hadn't appeared is third-party mail apps are really hard to build well.

Dropbox founder net worth