Just announced yesterday, Citrix has chosen to expand its facilities in downtown Raleigh! Our new 130,000 square-foot facility, located in the warehouse district, will retain the essence of the original warehouse environment. The space will also include amenities for employees to inspire creativity and healthy lifestyles, such as a rooftop yoga studio, indoor/outdoor dining and a garden. Pretty exciting!

Since its launch in 2005, ShareFile has grown from one employee to 165. Interested in learning more about the ShareFile story? Check out this Q&A with Jesse Lipson:

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Jesse. Let’s start with some context about you, ShareFile, and your acquisition by Citrix.

Jesse Lipson: I’m the founder of ShareFile, and I am a software developer. I built and launched the product in November 2005. We were a bootstrapped company. We grew without any funding and grew organically over time. We were acquired by Citrix in October 2011. At that time, we’d scaled up to about 80 employees. We operate in the business file sharing space.

SM: When you started ShareFile in 2005, what was the landscape like? Would you talk about what you saw when you started this company?

JL: Prior to this company, I had a website design and development company. We did services work. The idea for ShareFile came out of the fact that we had multiple clients who were asking us to build pretty much the same thing, which was a password-protected area where they could set up folders and exchange business files with their clients. At the time, there were a couple solutions out there. There was a company called Xdrive. There was another one called Streamload. But this was still before the big trend of cloud computing. If you look at Googletrends for the term “cloud computing,” it wasn’t until late 2007 that the term was really being searched for and used. We were about 18 to 24 months ahead of when cloud computing became a popular buzzword that was used in commercials and all that kind of stuff.