 Okay, we're back here live at the Stanford Symposium, the Excel Stanford Symposium 17th annual symposium with all the geeks and industry comes together. This is a really Excel partners part of even the relationship with Stanford. This is Silicon Angle theCUBE, we're a flagship program, we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, it's our fourth year and we're kind of making our way back at the Silicon Valley, we've been doing a lot of enterprise, a lot of disruptive technologies, first blog to cover cloud, mobile and social. So we've also been watching all the moves that Excel's been making, certainly on the consumer side, but on the enterprise side, very impressive of late and we have Adiyah Agawala, VP of engineering and Dropbox and Sameer at Excel partners who's going to share with us just some commentary, we'll shoot the breeze on, obviously your business is great. Thank you. We're big fans of what you guys have done, obviously a success story. Long way to go, long way to go. Great culture you have inside the company from what we haven't reported yet but we can talk about that later. But really the trend that you guys are really riding is this idea of getting out in the marketplace with a really good product, classic example of using open source software, putting a product out there and then scaling it up very, very rapidly and then also just iterating and building faster and stronger products. So I want to ask you one, give us an update on what you've done that made Dropbox so successful and then we'll talk about what you guys are doing right now. Sure, I mean I think that every company at a high level, the big thing that we have done is that we have managed to hire the best. I think that every Silicon Valley company says this which is that we only want to hire the 10X engineers, only want to hire the best but I think at Dropbox that philosophy is just so ingrained. And here's an example. Our co-founder Arash interviews almost everybody who ends up joining the company just because that combination of intelligence and culture fit is so important to us. So I just think we have hired really, really well and it's been difficult. Obviously the toughest part in hiring well is when you're in hyper growth mode which is when you want to double the company every year, how do you make sure you don't need the quality go down and I think we have managed to do that. So tell us the story when you guys hit that tipping point, it's like okay, wow, we got to get serious and then how did Excel enter the mix? Well, you know, I think the Excel investment was before I joined so I'll let Sameera answer that. Sameera, talk about that. When did that hit? Yeah, we invested in the company in 2008 and I've been working with Drew and Arash even prior to that. It was one of these companies where we knew that eventually someone would solve the problem about how to move information to the cloud, data to the cloud and they had just a very thoughtful approach to it that was much more consumer centric and made it a type of service that would be very easy to adopt by consumers so they wouldn't have to think differently, act differently, they could work in their normal way but all of a sudden they would start to be able to take advantage of having their food. But it wasn't like this home run enterprise play right out of the box. It was not, it was very much of a consumer story and it was designed for the consumer and even the early adoption was all about getting consumers to put their stuff, as we still call it today, their stuff in the cloud and what we found and this is one of the most powerful concepts of it which is that as people started to use it they brought it to work and started using it for personal use and for work use and from the very bottom levels of organizations at the very grassroots level, they started bringing it into companies and now today through that method, literally with no sales people, no marketing, you have a couple million businesses that run on Dropbox. So Dropbox for all the initiated is basically in cloud file sharing stores and beyond more. Obviously it started as a consumer thing, hey I want to start some files, you send it, it was out there at the time, kind of still on some older tech, you guys had a cloud version. But I want to talk to you a little bit different than that and that is that the big trend that we talk about on SiliconANGLE and Wikibon is how shadow IT has become a legitimate processor and we're covering the Amazon Web Summit right now and then we're going to be at the re-invent. So that's a big, Amazon has a legitimized IT going around the normal IT gatekeepers to go in the cloud. You guys obviously took advantage of that and so did Box.net but you guys more than Box, although Box claims to have as many more customers from what we see is that okay I got to store some stuff but then it becomes okay I'm storing some stuff in the cloud and then it's like okay, process improvement, how do I integrate that? So that shadow IT, working in the shadows now a legitimate innovation ground for enterprises. So can you guys comment about what you guys are seeing in that area and what some of the key trends are around enterprises and IT saying hey, I want to use more drop-offs. Maybe it's security, data protection, stuff. I think the way I think of it is that the reason why a lot of people kind of have made this transition from using Dropbox for their personal data and like work data is because it improves productivity. It makes your life simpler. It's like you don't have to worry about where your stuff is, losing your stuff and that applies across different contexts. Now as we move into the enterprise, you rightly pointed out having, giving IT administrators control, visibility, giving them confidence about our security. These are clearly things that we need to build out and not just build out but do an amazing job of. Like the same experience we bought to consumers in terms of like the simplest solution that just works. I believe we can provide that to IT administrators and I will say this is the first time I'm hearing the term shadow IT but if I understand it correctly I basically, the way I think of it is that we can actually make the lives of IT administrators around the world with the two million businesses that we have on Dropbox way, way simpler and we can do all of this while providing the same amazing user experience across like your work and your personal stuff. I think it's a pretty special opportunity. Yeah, so shadow IT should contact the Wikibon guys because one of the things that we're fleshing out is IT is very much a lot of rules, right? A lot of governance issues, it's just sovereign software, all these compliance and speed and productivity is really the pressure. The business units who are the customer of IT aren't being surfaced in them. So what you're seeing is the shadows and underground IT economy, because you can go to the cloud, guys are smart, they put their credit card down, they'll go to Amazon, spin up an app, they've got to store some data, make it five approvals and six months later or go to Dropbox and get instant approval. So that's the trend, right? So that's more of a buzzword. Sameer, what are you seeing now? So you're looking at a lot of portfolio companies, you know, securities and issue, all these things are out there. Do you agree with the shadow IT trend and will you have any commentary there? Yeah, I think it's, you know, I'm glad you came up with a new moniker for it. We've always called it the consumerization of IT and the idea behind that is that, you know, there's needs that users and enterprises have and they aren't always very quickly or appropriately addressed by internal IT and there's phenomenal cloud services that exist, consumer cloud services in the case of Dropbox, that serve a great purpose for business. So people bring it in and we look actually for other companies that follow that same kind of model that's very low friction adoption in enterprises, you know, literally zero touch or low touch sales and then over time, we feel like we can then go to those companies and say your users are already using this, they're effective, they're productive. Let's talk about enterprise solutions and enterprise deal after the fact. Adia, I want you to talk about the engineering side. Obviously you're scaling up, you're on the panel here on the symposium talking about scaling up SaaS. I'm sure, I mean I didn't listen but I'm sure it was kind of, you know, leveled up a little bit, not going deep in the least but I want you to be specific about some of the things that you guys are doing on the cloud and from an engineering standpoint because, you know, you have to build in the off side of it to make it easier to perform productive for users. What are you guys doing engineering wise that you'd like to share with the folks out there? Is it your proprietary stack? I'm asking Facebook builds their own stuff but uses open source software and commodity scale out open source. So you guys in the same boat, can you just share? We use a combination. We obviously are heavy users of AWS and we're super happy with like the performance and the security that they provide but we also run a large installation of our own machines to basically like essentially manage the file system. I think in terms of what we are doing. It's all scale out open source, right? All open source? We use a lot of open source but we also write a bunch of proprietary services and code on top of open source. But you're not buying software. You write your own, right? We write our own software. We don't buy software, yes. I think that's our- Commercial software. Commercial software. Oracle. The way I think of it is that my job is to create the proper emphasis within the company, within engineering, like kind of like a respect and emphasis on providing the most scaled out, like the highly scalable as well, highly secure like engineering practices, right? And I think that you know, often people are looking for a magic bullet like a silver bullet, a magic solution. I don't think that there is one except that you actually care about it and you keep on like essentially like baking that into the culture of your organization. So that's the way I think of it. And so from a discipline standpoint when you're hiring, you're looking for guys who know open source or anything specific, any new areas you're looking at, any cool projects that you're kicking the tires at, you can talk about. Not in particular. We don't have like particular open source projects that we go and monitor for people. What I'm really looking for is a dedication to excellence and essentially like having the ability to sweat the small details. One of the really interesting things is that if you do have a history of being an open source contributor, we can go look at all the code that you wrote over the years. And I think it paints a like pretty good picture of like your character and your profile as an engineer or the coder, right? And I think we are looking for- It's your digital DNA. It's your work product. Yeah, and we're looking for somebody who, who like takes pride in building something that is correct in the last two or three percent because the space that we are in, we can't like, you know, be right three nines at a time. Like, you know, like if your hard drive didn't work once every thousand times, you feel your computer was broken. And that's kind of the level that we hold ourselves to. Okay, Sumire, talk about some of the investment trends that Excel is investing in right now. Honestly, Cloud, Enterprise Cloud is interesting. We're going to have Rich Wong on about mobile. What are you seeing? Obviously spent a lot of time in some of the most innovative consumer and web services out there. But, you know, historically, and in recent times have always spent a significant amount of energy thinking about next generation products and services for enterprises. And so today, what we're particularly interested in, we have a big data fund that is all oriented around investing in early stage companies that are really refreshing to hold data analytics and data management stack. And we have a series of investments from seed, you know, through later stage investments that follow that theme. We're also very interested in sort of the next generation of enterprise SaaS. And I have a number of investments in enterprise companies that are delivering applications to enterprise, you know, via the cloud. And then I think this third area is really around the idea of consumerized services for enterprises like Dropbox, like Prezi, you know, very consumer-like services that get adopted through very organic means at enterprises. And we think that there's a variety of different areas in companies where the consumerization of IT still has yet to happen. And we're very excited about companies like that as well. Certainly we're tracking that, consumerization of IT. Final question, Adia, what do you see, what do you want people to know about Dropbox in the next year? Looking back, when we come back to the next symposium or next time we see you on theCUBE, what do you want to do in the next year? What's your major goals in the college to look back and say, hey, it was a successful year. Our team did one, two, and three. It's a really good question. I think that the first thing I want to do is to be able to make sure that we provide a great experience for IT administrators. And we have said this a couple of times, like clearly like Dropbox is a product that seems to have resonated with people at work, right? But I know we have a lot to build for IT administrators. We've started building a lot of it around control and visibility. But again, the bar I want to set for myself is not to think of this as shadow IT or something like that. I want an IT administrator to go up there and be like, this has made handling all the data in my organization so much easier, so much more secure than it ever was, right? That's the kind of bar that we set for our product. The second thing is, I really want to make sure that we continue to provide an amazing experience on mobile. I think that the world is clearly shifting to mobile. I think we want to iterate and prototype on our product a lot quicker to see what are the kinds of things that we could provide in a mobile-centric world that would make people's lives simpler and easier. So those are the two big criteria for success. Well, congratulations to all your success. Dropbox, obviously, continuing doing well. You guys had, you know, every startup has speed bumps, but hit cruising altitude. You guys are now servicing the IT market. Well, it all depends on how big you think the market is. I want to get to 3 billion users. So I feel as though we're still a long way from that. Yeah, and you know what, it's just the beginning. Yeah, it's very much the beginning. We are less than 1% done in my mind. I love the attitude. That's tech athlete here on theCUBE. We'd love it. We'd love to hear that Mojo Dropbox is just the beginning of their journey. This is still going to angle exclusive coverage. Stanford Excel is formed right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you. Yeah, man, pleasure. Thanks, John. All right.