TL;DRDrew Houston is stepping down as Dropbox CEO after 19 years, with former Vimeo CPO Ashraf Alkarmi taking over. The company’s market cap has halved since its 2018 IPO as Google, Apple, and Microsoft squeezed its core storage business.
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 the role outright.
Dropbox shares fell roughly 2.4 per cent in premarket trading on the news. The company’s market capitalisation now sits just above $6 billion, down by half from the peak it reached on its first day of trading in March 2018.
Houston, who is 43, told CNBC that his next chapter will be entrepreneurial and AI-focused. He did not announce a specific venture but made clear that retirement, or sailing, is not the plan.
Alkarmi, 47, joined Dropbox in November 2024 as senior vice president and general manager of Dropbox Core. Before that he was chief product officer at Vimeo from 2022 to 2024 and held senior product leadership roles at Amazon from 2018 to 2022, where he ran Amazon Freevee. He also led product at Meta and founded PresAsk, an audience engagement platform. Houston credited Alkarmi with making the company “a lot more responsive to our customers” and said the new leader was “taking bigger swings on innovation.”
