Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down after 19 years, becoming executive chairman

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." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After almost two decades at the top, Drew Houston is stepping down as the company’s CEO. However, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of building something new.

Dropbox's Drew Houston is set to step down from the CEO role after training new co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi.

  Drew Houston, the co-founder who built Dropbox from a Y Combinator demo into a company with more than 700 million registered users, is stepping down as chief executive. Ashraf Alkarmi, Dropbox’s current head of product, has been named co-CEO effective immediately. After a transition period, Houston will become executive chairman and Alkarmi will take […] This story continues at The Next Web

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, who started the cloud storage company when he was 24, plans to step down and assume the role of executive chairman.