Drew Houston, who founded the cloud service Dropbox nearly two decades ago, is stepping down as CEO. He will move to the position of executive chairman, with Ashraf Alkarmi, who was promoted from head of product, taking over full operational leadership of the company.
Drew Houston, who founded the cloud service Dropbox nearly two decades ago, is stepping down as CEO. He will move to the position of executive chairman, with Ashraf Alkarmi, who was promoted from head of product, taking over full operational leadership of the company.
Houston himself plans to focus on creating new entrepreneurial projects in the field of artificial intelligence, the company’s co-founder said in an interview with CNBC.
The transition will be gradual, with Houston initially sharing the role of co-chair with Alcarmi, who joined the team in late 2024. In addition, Dropbox will be joined in July by new Chief Product Officer Mike Torres, who previously served as VP of Product for Google Chrome.
Houston said there was no specific reason for leaving at this time, but he feels ready for new challenges outside of Dropbox. He is particularly interested in the field of AI.
«Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of our lives, and I’m sure I’ll have no shortage of ideas and things to work on. There’s never been a more exciting time to create something new,» shared the entrepreneur, who has also been on the board of directors of Meta Corporation since 2020.
Houston is skeptical about talk of a so-called «SaaS apocalypse» — the threat posed by large language models to traditional subscription services. In his opinion, the integration of such technologies into real life is taking much longer than the market expects. He emphasized that he has not met users who would cancel their Dropbox subscription just because they started actively using ChatGPT. At the same time, the company is already implementing its own AI solutions, in particular the Dash smart search function.
Drew Houston founded Dropbox at the age of 24 out of personal frustration with constantly losing USB drives while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project became the first startup from the Y Combinator accelerator to go full-scale public in 2018. Dropbox currently has a market cap of just over $6 billion and more than 18 million paying customers.
