It started with one clunky screenshot.

It started with something dumb. My girlfriend was sitting a few feet away on her own laptop, and I wanted her to see a couple of pictures on my screen. Walking over would've taken ten seconds, sure, but that still felt like more interruption than the moment deserved. So I looked at my actual options: opening WhatsApp Web or Discord just to send two pictures, or emailing myself a screenshot like it's 2004. None of them were built for something this small. It worked. It also felt a little ridiculous every single time.

So I built a way to snip anything on my screen, or drop a local file, straight into my own Drive without ever leaving the tab, then hand her access in a couple of clicks. All that's left is glancing over and telling her they're there, which, with her sitting three feet away, was never the part that took any effort.

It also kept showing up in different outfits. I'd have my talking points open in a Google Doc during a client call, and the second I switched tabs to pull something else up, they were gone. I'd have to hunt back through my own tabs just to find them again.

So I patched the tool to handle this too: click a file open from Draivu and it floats as its own sticky note, on top of whatever page I'm on, following me from tab to tab the moment it opens, instead of disappearing the second I looked away.

Both were two-minute problems, really. Neither felt like it justified building a whole tool on its own. But two minutes, six times a day, for months, stops feeling like a couple of small annoyances and starts feeling like everything around it was just clunky.

I went looking for something that already did this. The honest answer is nothing quite did.

Both fixes ended up living in the same place: not a company, not a launch plan, just a lightweight browser extension that could sit on top of whatever I was already doing. 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 isn't cheap and has to be renewed every 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.