The Career Common Thread: Leah Culver Invests In Her Passion For Open Source

The Career Common Thread: Leah Culver Invests In Her Passion For Open Source

After founding Pownce, Convore, and building Grove.io, Leah Culver learned a few things. The first: you are the best alpha and beta tester of your own project. The second: don’t build it if you’re not passionate about it.

“Everyone has different passions and it’s important that you work on something you’re passionate about,” says Leah.

The common thread that led Leah through three companies and eventually to Dropbox, where she’s a Developer Advocate, is social communication. Pownce let friends microblog together, sending files, links and events to each other. Convore let users chat in real-time. Grove.io allowed devs to get a private IRC in an instant. Giving users open channels of communication is one thing, open source is quite another.

When Leah was deciding where she’d land after Grove.io was acquired, she knew to go with her gut. She wanted to find a place that valued open source technology, gave developers powerful tools to work with, and had a product that people genuinely enjoyed using. Dropbox was the answer.

“I was a Dropbox Pro user for 5 years before I interviewed,” says Leah. Now she works to deliver everyone from developers to non-technical folk that “aha” moment she loves about Dropbox. “When someone is downloading or uploading a file and they see it pop up in their Dropbox, it’s a great experience.”

You can catch  Leah’s talk “Working with web APIs in Swift” at Signal May 19th-20th in San Francisco.