Product lead Ashraf Alkarmi is taking over as CEO, handing his role to Chrome’s Mike Torres.
File storage platform Dropbox founder Drew Houston is stepping down as CEO after 19 years in the role, handing over the reigns to company senior vice-president of core products Ashraf Alkarmi.
Houston and Alkarmi will head the company as co-CEOs for a transitionary period, following which Houston will take up the role of executive chairperson, and Alkarmi, the sole CEO.
“Our business is in a stronger position than it’s been in years, and a lot of that is because of Ashraf,” Houston said, explaining the company’s decision behind the move.
Dropbox announced the transition on 21 May in a security filing with the US government. Shares at the company fell nearly 3.5pc at market close yesterday (26 May), following a wider announcement.
Alkarmi, a Harvard graduate, previously led the products segment in companies including Motorola, Nokia, Meta, Amazon and Brightcove.
Prior to joining Dropbox in 2024, he spent a number of years as Vimeo’s chief product officer, as well as the general manager for Amazon’s Freevee. Alkarmi also founded audience engagement platform PresAsk in 2013.
For his new role, Alkarmi will be receiving an annual base salary of $825,000 in addition to bonuses and stock options.
The outgoing SVP of core products is handing his role to Chrome’s VP of product Mike Torres, effective 7 July. Torres has spent more than a decade each at Amazon and Microsoft in executive roles.
Dropbox, with more than 700m registered users, announced a revenue of $629.5m in the quarter past, marking a marginal growth of less than 1pc quarter to quarter. The company plans to shut down FormSwift, a platform for generating legal documents, later this year.
The file storage platform cut 20pc of its workforce in 2024, amounting to more than 500 employees. The layoffs followed a previous round a year prior that led to 500 job losses.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login