Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to Step Down After 19 Years
Original: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
Why This Matters
Leadership transition at a cloud storage pioneer that helped define the market
Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston will transition to executive chairman after 19 years leading the cloud storage company. Product chief Ashraf Alkarmi will be promoted to co-CEO and eventually take over as sole CEO.
Drew Houston, who founded Dropbox at age 24, announced his transition from CEO to executive chairman after nearly two decades at the helm. Ashraf Alkarmi, currently product chief, will be promoted to co-CEO and serve alongside Houston before eventually taking sole control. Houston founded Dropbox due to personal frustration with losing USB sticks in college at MIT, becoming the first Y Combinator graduate to take a company public. Despite building a $2 billion personal net worth, Dropbox's market cap of $6 billion is half its 2018 IPO peak and below its 2014 private valuation of $10 billion. The company helped pioneer cloud storage but faces intense competition from Google and Apple.