Dropbox CEO Drew Houston To Step Down After 19 Years (cnbc.com) 17
Dropbox founder Drew Houston is stepping down as CEO after 19 years and will become executive chairman, with product chief Ashraf Alkarmi set to take over after a co-CEO transition period. CNBC reports: Drew Houston founded Dropbox
nearly two decades ago at age 24, eventually becoming a household name in Silicon Valley and the first tech entrepreneur to take a company from the Y Combinator incubator program all the way to the public market. Now, at 43, Houston is ready to do something else. [...]
By almost any measure, Houston has had a great run at Dropbox, helping pioneer the cloud storage market, competing head-to-head with Google and Apple and building a net worth of more than $2 billion, thanks to substantial ownership in his company. But in the land of outsized expectations, Houston has overseen a company that peaked too soon and never became a generation-defining brand.
Dropbox's current market cap of just over $6 billion is down by half from the high price on its first day of trading in 2018, and is below the $10 billion valuation it was ascribed by private market investors in 2014. [...] In its latest quarterly earnings report, Dropbox said it has more than 18 million paying users, and the service remains popular with media professionals, graphic designers, architects, and others who share files and photos as part of their daily work. "Part of me has always thought, oh yeah, I'll be the CEO of Dropbox until my last gasp of my career," he said. "There's never a perfect time, there was no part of me where I was like, 'oh, this date is the date where it's going to happen.'"
Since Alkarmi joined Dropbox from Vimeo in late 2024, the company has "become a lot more responsive to our customers and is taking bigger swings on innovation," Houston said. "I trust the right leader," he said. "The company's in the right place."
By almost any measure, Houston has had a great run at Dropbox, helping pioneer the cloud storage market, competing head-to-head with Google and Apple and building a net worth of more than $2 billion, thanks to substantial ownership in his company. But in the land of outsized expectations, Houston has overseen a company that peaked too soon and never became a generation-defining brand.
Dropbox's current market cap of just over $6 billion is down by half from the high price on its first day of trading in 2018, and is below the $10 billion valuation it was ascribed by private market investors in 2014. [...] In its latest quarterly earnings report, Dropbox said it has more than 18 million paying users, and the service remains popular with media professionals, graphic designers, architects, and others who share files and photos as part of their daily work. "Part of me has always thought, oh yeah, I'll be the CEO of Dropbox until my last gasp of my career," he said. "There's never a perfect time, there was no part of me where I was like, 'oh, this date is the date where it's going to happen.'"
Since Alkarmi joined Dropbox from Vimeo in late 2024, the company has "become a lot more responsive to our customers and is taking bigger swings on innovation," Houston said. "I trust the right leader," he said. "The company's in the right place."
He drew what? (Score:5, Funny)
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Had to read that headline too many times to stop visualizing a CEO drawing the city of Houston.
I was thinking this dude sounds like he's right out of a cartoon, or a WWE match. "In this corner, Drew Houston, with his Texan Holdup and the Two-Step Leg-Drop."
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I stopped paying for a subscription to DropBox's 100GB option many years ago when they decided to break everyone's links to files. I knew right then I couldn't trust them. I used a free account about 6 months ago after all this time to share a file with someone. The UI has become an absolute trash pit.
Dropbox is a plague (Score:3, Interesting)
It does seem like something that Y Combinator incubator would produce, which is a pretty big insult in my world.
Dropbox is a rather useful tool. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a big commentor on this site but I just had to counter this. I like Dropbox and have several reasons why.
I've been a Dropbox user for probably more than 10 years, not even sure. I have it on Windows, on two linux machines (fedora), and my iPhone, and my iPad.. I haven't seen a crash since.... ever. I love dropping a file into a directory on one machine, and 5 seconds later it's on the other machine. I take pictures on my phone and they appear on my PCs seconds later; I keep my KeePass database there, which is automatically sync'd to the iPhone too; and I recently started using Dropbox Fax because it sucks that we're in the future and there are still services that mandate fax machines. And I use it for encrypted backups of project data.
There are other solutions out there, I'm sure. But Dropbox has been rock solid stable from the day I installed it, so now you know a few reasons why someone might like it.
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The pricing started out as extremely low, but now there is plenty of competition once hyperscalers came around and drive prices dropped at colos. But why it's in business isn't just the basic service, but also the array of business focused products.
There are no heroes in document management or sharing systems, SharePoint/OneDrive or G Suite/Drive leave gaps in document sharing and management which leads to a big market. Throw in some other features eSigning and Fax and there's a huge market of equally flawe
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was always a complete non-starter
Was always? I mean I remember a time when it was completely free, had an open source driver, and existed in a world where cloud services weren't a major thing yet.
I recommend not going full hyperbole. They have little point today, but they were once a very good free service. And no it didn't make an immediate beeline to enshitification, that's not possible since the act of enshitification relies on having a degree of customer lock-in in the first place. They locked customers in quite well over many years wi
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The biggest risk with any cloud storage is that it goes away without notice.
"That never happens" but it does. If they flag and shut down your account(s) they can, and have, hung people/small businesses out to dry that either didn't have a proper backup-to-the-backup solution or needed too long to restore the data and transition to another platform.
Your data is not private on DropBox and there's no option for Zero Knowledge Encryption/BYOK. 3rd party tools exist (ugh Vera) but they make the experience even
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I totally get how, if yo
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Perhaps because you are just an idiot? /FACEPALM
The base price is: zero.
And it mounts on your computer like an ordinary drive.
DropBox is .... ok .... (Score:2)
I used to work for a company that used the "Dropbox for Business" product. (I think they renamed it along the way, so that may be its former or current product name?) Anyway, my memory of it is that it generally did what you paid for it to do -- but was horribly costly when existing contracts ran out and went up for renewal.
They seemed to use the business model that once you invested in using the platform and they had your data captive in it, they could crank up the prices because it was cheaper to keep i
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This was back in the 2012-2015 time frame ... so "buy them bigger drives" wasn't always a reasonable solution. A lot of them were using Macbook Airs that were great for their needs EXCEPT for the SSDs not being as big as one might prefer.
When MS started AI, That was it for me (Score:2)