Story time.

Around 2005, I was hired by a company that was building software for USB drives, to build a porn site.

Turns out, they wanted me to build a poc for an authentication solution: some USB drives would have a fingerprint reader and they wanted to build this auth system based on that.

So I built that, but "perplexingly", they didn't get any finance or enough prospect customers, so the project got shelved.

Then, I was handed another project they had on the back burner, a sort of firewall for devices, meant to prevent exfiltration of company documents on unapproved USB drives.

I built the single user version, eg you had to be admin to allow devices and the product sold quite well, even winning some prizes iirc.

We started getting requests to have a centralized admin interface and a way to allow/disallow copying some file types. I started working on the centralized admin and the company hired a very talented engineer to build the file filtering thing. This last thing was based on a windows API that allowed for virtual file systems. Things were ticking along nicely and the company even hired a business manager to try to come up with other products we can build with our existing tech.

One afternoon, over a bunch of cold beers, to link with the hell on earth that happens right now in London, me and this person came up with a cunning plan! What if you sell an 1GB USB drive with an extra 1GB of space?

The plan was simple: plug in the device, you get a drive that's the regular USB drive, but also another drive, backed by the virtual file system thing and a version of my http auth thing, and you would read/write from a server on the Internet.

Big boss liked the idea and I started researching how to get servers and the like, while a third engineer was tasked to build the desktop app needed.

It all came crashing down, days later, when this engineer declared that is not possible to have a windows app minimize to sys tray and the project got cancelled. I left the company not long after that .

This was the story on how a small German-Romanian company could have beat Dropbox.