2/24/2018 S-1 Table of Contents Our Sales and Marketing Approach As users share content and collaborate on our platform, they introduce and invite new users, driving viral growth. We generate 90% of our revenue from self­serve channels, which reduces customer acquisition costs. We’ve developed an efficient marketing function that’s focused on building brand awareness and reinforcing our self­serve model. Our goal is to rapidly demonstrate the value of our platform to our users in order to convert them to paying users and upgrade them to our premium offerings. We reach them through in­product prompts and notifications, time­limited trials of paid subscription plans, email, and lifecycle marketing. During the fourth quarter of 2017, hundreds of millions of devices—including computers, phones, and tablets—were actively connected to the Dropbox platform, representing a large number of touchpoints to communicate with our users. We complement our self­serve strategy with a focused outbound sales effort targeted at organizations with existing organic adoption of Dropbox. Once prospects are identified, our sales team works to broaden adoption of our platform into wider­scale deployments. We also acquire some users through paid marketing and distribution partnerships in which hardware manufacturers pre­install our software on their devices. Our Technology Infrastructure and Operations Our users trust us with their most important content, and we focus on providing them with a secure and easy­to­use platform. More than 90% of our users’ data is stored on our own custom­built infrastructure, which has been designed from the ground up to be reliable and secure, and to provide annual data durability of at least 99.999999999%. We have datacenter co­location facilities in California, Texas, and Virginia. We also utilize Amazon Web Services, or AWS, for the remainder of our users’ storage needs and to help deliver our services. These AWS datacenters are located in the United States and Europe, which allows us to localize where content is stored. Our technology infrastructure, combined with select use of AWS resources, provides us with a distributed and scalable architecture on a global scale. We designed our platform with multiple layers of redundancy to guard against data loss and deliver high availability. Incremental backups are performed hourly and full backups are performed daily. In addition, as a default, redundant copies of content are stored independently in at least two separate geographic regions and replicated reliably within each region. Our Research and Development Approach We invest substantial resources in research and development to enhance our platform, develop new products and features, and improve our infrastructure. Our research and development organization consists of world­class engineering, product, and design teams. As of December 31, 2017, we had more than 870 professionals across these teams, representing approximately 47% of our full­time employees. They have a diverse set of skills and industry experience, including expertise in massively distributed systems and user­centric application engineering. Our engineering, product, and design teams work together to bring our products to life, from conception and validation to implementation. We continually improve our existing products, update them to work with the latest platforms and technologies, and launch new and innovative products and features. 120 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518055809/d451946ds1.htm 128/235