In 2005, along with colleagues Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter, Sam Schillace created a browser-based web processor called Writely. A Silicon Valley darling, it was eventually acquired by Google and became the basis for Google Docs. Now the SVP of engineering at Box, a cloud storage and file sharing service, Schillace says that despite today's ubiquity of cloud-based computing, Writely was at first considered a bad idea and a waste of time.

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