In the vast San Francisco loft that Dropbox calls home, there’s a Lego room, a life-size plastic shark, and a Golden Gate Bridge mosaic made from disassembled Rubik’s Cubes. Chipper millennials who may or may not be worth millions of dollars zip by on scooters and Ripstiks. Coders dress in sneakers, untucked shirts, and ties, just to show how deeply they’re submerged in their latest project. And if you wander into the cafeteria, you’ll find a chef who once worked at Apple and Google.

There’s even a music room, a glassed-in space that looks an awful lot like a recording studio. Ostensibly for “jamming” after a tough day of work, the room has long been a part of the Dropbox universe, and according to CEO Drew Houston, it gets upgraded each time the company moves offices, beefed up with real amps and instruments.

Houston is himself a musician, and he has an engineer’s affection for musical hardware. “When I first got into guitar, I was terrible because I was just learning,” he says. “But I had all the pedals.”

And yet, since starting Dropbox in 2007, Houston and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi have taken the opposite approach to running their company. The pair set out to solve a simple, irritating problem and never got distracted. They didn’t concern themselves with bells and whistles — or the equivalent of effects pedals. They focused on finding the most elegant way to sync files across devices, so you wouldn’t have to email them to yourself. Instead of letting groovy digital stompboxes dazzle them, they practiced their scales and chords until they laid a seemingly unshakable foundation in the fundamentals.

The result is a product used by 175 million people — and a company valued at billions of dollars.

But after all that single-mindedness, Houston and Ferdowsi now want to let their baby sing. Today, at Dropbox’s first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company’s co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own.

For the first five or so years of its existence, Dropbox was synonymous with its “magic folder.” Save your files in the Dropbox folder on your computer, and they “magically” reappear in your Dropbox apps on your phone and tablet and in your Dropbox account on the web. Now, if developers take to the company’s new tools, the service will escape the confines of this folder, fusing with third-party apps running on practically every computer and smartphone operating system.

Houston wants Dropbox to become the “spiritual successor to the hard drive.” He says the hard drive needs to be replaced because so many of us are doing so much computing on devices that don’t fit the traditional paradigm for working with files. Users don’t interact with files on iOS, Android, or the web the way they do on PCs. Apps don’t have “open” or “save” options that launch a separate window where you tap through a folder tree.

With its new Chooser and Saver options — the first of a planned family of features the company calls Drop-ins — developers can make Dropbox the “open” and “save” windows in their apps. (For now, the Chooser is available for iOS, Android, web, and mobile web. The Saver is just available for the web and mobile web to start, with other platforms to follow).