It started with one clunky screenshot.

I was on a call, trying to walk a client through a doc, flipping between tabs to find my own notes, when it hit me that I'd been solving tiny versions of the same annoying problem for months and had just never called it that.

It started with something dumb. I wanted a friend to see what was on my screen. My options were opening Discord, or WhatsApp, or Telegram (apps that had nothing to do with what we were actually doing), or just emailing myself a screenshot like it's 2004. It worked. It also felt a little ridiculous every single time.

Then I noticed it kept showing up in different outfits. I'd keep my talking points for a client call in a Google Doc, and mid-call I'd need to glance at them, except the second I switched tabs to pull something else up, they were gone. Someone would share a file with me on Drive and I'd have no idea it existed until I happened to go digging through "Shared with me," which first meant opening an entirely new tab just to arrive at Drive at all. I'd be mid-research, find something worth sending someone, and the fastest path was still: stop, open another app, find the file, attach it, send it.

Every one of these was a two-minute problem. None of them felt worth "fixing" on their own. But two minutes, six times a day, for months, stops feeling like a series of small annoyances and starts feeling like everything around it was just clunky, clunky, clunky.

So I went looking for something that already did this. The honest answer is nothing quite did. There were heavyweight desktop apps that wanted permanent space on my machine just to tell me a file existed. There were chat apps that could move a file around but had nothing to do with Drive. There were sticky-note tools that could float on my screen but knew nothing about my Drive files. Everything was either the wrong shape, too heavy, or solving one-sixth of the actual problem. I wasn't missing a feature. I was missing a place where all of it quietly lived together, and it just didn't exist yet.

So I built the smallest version of it for myself. Not a company, not a launch plan, just a lightweight browser extension that could sit on top of whatever I was already doing: pin a file, pop open a sticky note, notice the moment something new landed in my Drive, send something in one click without ever leaving the tab. I made one decision early that I never reconsidered: it had to be serverless. No backend of mine sitting between me and my files, no logs, nothing to leak, because there was nothing collecting it in the first place. Just a lens between my browser and my own Drive.

What actually convinced me it was worth finishing wasn't a pitch-deck moment, it was quieter than that. Five months of days and some very late nights went into making it feel like it took no effort at all to use, which, it turns out, is its own kind of hard work: the easier something feels to open, the more invisible effort usually went into making it feel that way. It was still the thing I reached for every single day, not because I'd built it and felt obligated, but because going back to the clunky way, even for one day, felt noticeably worse. That's a strange kind of proof, but it's the only kind I've ever fully trusted: if I'd stopped using my own tool at any point in those five months, that would have told me everything. I never did.

Funny enough, the easy version of this would've gone the opposite direction: pull your entire Drive into the extension the second you install it, every file you've ever owned, visible without you lifting a finger. Google will happily let you ask for that level of access. It also means signing up for a security audit that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year, for a one-person extension with no funding behind it. So, no thanks. You import what you actually need, on purpose, and neither of us has to find out what that invoice looks like.

So that's what Draivu is. Not a reinvention of Google Drive, just the missing layer I kept needing between my browser and my files, now built for anyone who's felt the same small frictions I did.