![]() In February 2020, Houston joined the board of directors of Facebook, replacing Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who left in May 2019. Houston currently is CEO and 25% owner of Dropbox. Houston and Ferdowsi co-founded Dropbox in 2007. It was there that he met Arash Ferdowsi who would later go on to be co-founder and CTO of Dropbox.ĭuring his time in college, Houston co-founded a SAT prep company. He later graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. ![]() He attended Acton-Boxborough Regional High School in the 1990s. “We’re kind of in the phase where, like, we’ve put our pick in the ground, and all this oil is coming up, and we’ve got to get it together here," he says.Houston was born in Acton, Massachusetts in 1983. Still, Houston remains cautiously optimistic-after all, Dropbox’s revenue grew more than 50% last year. Like Box, “Dropbox has been around a long time now," and it’s past due to figure out a business model, says Ben Thompson, an analyst at consultant Stratechery. Its total 2014 revenue was about 60% of Dropbox’s, according to IDC, but its market value is now only one-fifth of Dropbox’s private valuation, suggesting that the office cloud market may not grow fast enough to bridge the gap between investor fantasy and reality. Woodside hasn’t been able to hire an overall head of product management, the person who’d be trying to match the security and other features in place at Microsoft and Box.īox, which went public in January, is something of a cautionary tale for Houston and Woodside. The company’s head of design, Gentry Underwood, has stepped down, too, though he remains with Dropbox in an unspecified capacity. Ilya Fushman, the head of product for Dropbox for Business, became a venture capitalist in June. Stability may be in short supply in the company’s executive ranks. Woodside says sales have been too volatile, and he’s trying to add a degree of stability. That’s up from 50,000 a year ago, the company says, but it wouldn’t provide more details of its sales during Woodside’s tenure. More than 100,000 companies have signed contracts to use Dropbox for Business, which costs $150 a year per employee. ![]() “We’re all growing a large cloud-computing platform together." “The ideal scenario is that Dropbox is an integrated partner with Google in a whole bunch of areas," Schmidt says. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who’s previously worked closely with Woodside, says he’s interested in making Dropbox compatible with Google’s business software, too, even though his company is, like Microsoft, one of Dropbox’s primary rivals. Meanwhile, Microsoft has hedged its bets on its own service by making Dropbox compatible with online and mobile versions of Office. Under Woodside, Dropbox has struck partnerships with telecommunications companies Vodafone Group plc and SoftBank Corp. “That creates some tension now and then" with Houston, he adds. “My view is: Speed is what is going to win," Woodside says, and having a bunch of empty chairs in the conference room means you’re losing. In the past year one of his biggest achievements has been to accelerate a hiring process that Houston says had been “ponderous." He filled empty senior positions (head of marketing, head of Human Resource), opened five offices abroad to serve the 70% of Dropbox customers who aren’t in the US, and doubled the company’s head count to 1,200, mostly by beefing up the sales team. was selling Motorola to Lenovo, made his name running Google’s foreign sales divisions. Woodside, who jumped to Dropbox while Google Inc. ![]() “One of the things Dennis did early on was establish a belief system around revenue as the oxygen that allows this company to continue breathing, to continue to see another day," says Marc Leibowitz, a Woodside Petroleum Ltd lieutenant who heads partnerships. Both men say much of that process has required an adjustment period among Dropbox staffers, including the coders who thought in terms of products and rarely spared a thought for selling them. A year ago, Houston hired Woodside, then the CEO of Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc., to craft a more detailed business plan that could turn a company with more than $400 million in annualized revenue into one that makes billions. Dennis Woodside, Dropbox’s first chief operating officer, is leading those efforts. ![]()
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