Meet the Man Who Sold a Month-Old App to Dropbox for $100M

When Mailbox sold itself to Dropbox for a reported $100 million or so this March, the month-old iPhone app wasn’t even available to the public. People could download the email organizer, but using it required joining a mailing list that stretched to nearly 800,000 names at one point.

Mailbox was popular because it provided innovative new ways to organize and clear an inbox. Users can swipe a message to the left to “snooze” it, a command that instructs Mailbox to resurface the email after a set period of time. Other swipes — hard left, right, or hard right — archive, delete, or file messages.

Today, Mailbox is releasing its first new product from within Dropbox, an iPad version of its flagship iPhone app. Future releases will bring Mailbox to Android and enable support for Yahoo mail and other services beyond Gmail.

We sat down with Mailbox CEO and co-founder Gentry Underwood to ask about his app’s incredibly rapid success and its future within Dropbox.