One former employee who was unhappy with the pace of innovation pointed us to this early Dropbox pitch video from Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, which was uploaded to YouTube in 2008. Whatever the reason, it does appear that the core product hasn't changed much since the company's inception. Baesman worked at VMware for over a decade, including five years in product management, according to his LinkedIn profile, so he has more experience in that field than Fushman, who was in business development and venture capital before taking on the product role at Dropbox. Our source said Dropbox had been looking for a product VP for years.įushman's transition has actually been under way for some time, and he has been working closely with the new product lead, Rob Baesman, for the past year, another source close to the company told us. Product lead Ilya Fushman on Wednesday morning announced his departure from the company to take a role at Index Ventures. Several people close to the company insist that DfB growth is 'on plan' and that they're happy with its progress. 'People are very focused on hitting their quotas now,' this former employee said.Īs a result, DfB has signed up some large enterprise customers, including Under Armour, News Corp, Hyatt, and Yahoo, and some of them have bought thousands of seats. It has also added a more structured sales process, which made sales quotas higher and the pressure heavier. Almost all of the company's resources in its overseas offices, which grew to 10 from three in the past 12 months, are purely allocated to DfB. In the last quarter of 2013, Dropbox hired almost 200 new people, with a heavy focus on DfB. It was only a little over a year ago that Dropbox finally made DfB a priority, even though it was clear before then that it needed that extra push from business customers, according to a former employee. Big companies with other strong businesses such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are not afraid of losing money up front to gain market share. Cloud storage in general is headed toward a so-called race to zero, where companies keep cutting their prices while increasing storage limits. Dropbox says DfB has already signed up more than 100,000 paying businesses, including company-wide deployments at Spotify, MIT, and National Geographic.ĭropbox COO Dennis Woodside has called it 'the ultra-high growth of our business going forward.”Ĭan DfB get the company ready to go public as a $10 billion company? We spoke to several insiders who harbored doubts about the product and the company's pace of innovation as a whole - as well as a couple who think that although the entire market is in a tough place, Dropbox is in as good a position as anyone to win it.ĭropbox operates in a brutally competitive business. With DfB, businesses pay $15 per user per month, or $150 per user per year for unlimited storage and extra features such as better security and admin controls. The highest multiple for any public internet-software company is Xero's, at 15 times revenue.ĭropbox for Business is Dropbox's best chance to grow its paid user base. Box, which is Dropbox's closest competitor in the enterprise, set its IPO value at $1.67 billion, a little less than eight times its 2014 revenue of $216 million. That's probably not enough to go public at a $10 billion valuation.

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