Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

Dropbox 首席执行官 Drew Houston 即将卸任

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, who founded the cloud storage company when he was 24, plans to step down and assume the role of executive chairman. Ashraf Alkarmi is being promoted from product chief to co-CEO, serving for a time alongside Houston before eventually taking the job on his own. “There’s never a perfect time,” Houston said in an interview, regarding his decision to exit as CEO.

Dropbox 首席执行官 Drew Houston 在 24 岁时创立了这家云存储公司，他计划卸任并转任执行董事长。Ashraf Alkarmi 将从产品主管晋升为联席首席执行官，在与 Houston 共事一段时间后，最终将独立接管该职位。在谈到卸任首席执行官的决定时，Houston 在接受采访时表示：“从来没有完美的时机。”

Drew Houston founded Dropbox nearly two decades ago at age 24, eventually becoming a household name in Silicon Valley and the first tech entrepreneur to take a company from the Y Combinator incubator program all the way to the public market. Now, at 43, Houston is ready to do something else. He’s informing staffers on Tuesday that he’ll be transitioning into an executive chairman role after an initial period sharing the co-CEO title with Ashraf Alkarmi, who is being promoted from product chief. Alkarmi will eventually take over the top job on his own.

Drew Houston 在近二十年前、24 岁时创立了 Dropbox，最终成为硅谷家喻户晓的人物，也是第一位将公司从 Y Combinator 孵化器项目一路带到公开市场的科技创业者。如今，43 岁的 Houston 准备开启新的篇章。他于周二通知员工，在与从产品主管晋升上来的 Ashraf Alkarmi 共同担任一段时间联席首席执行官后，他将转任执行董事长。Alkarmi 最终将独自接管最高职位。

By almost any measure, Houston has had a great run at Dropbox, helping pioneer the cloud storage market, competing head-to-head with Google and Apple and building a net worth of more than $2 billion, thanks to substantial ownership in his company. But in the land of outsized expectations, Houston has overseen a company that peaked too soon and never became a generation-defining brand.

从几乎任何标准来看，Houston 在 Dropbox 的职业生涯都非常成功。他帮助开创了云存储市场，与谷歌和苹果展开正面竞争，并凭借在公司持有的大量股份积累了超过 20 亿美元的净资产。然而，在充满过高期望的领域，Houston 所掌管的公司过早达到顶峰，却从未成为定义一代人的品牌。

Dropbox’s current market cap of just over $6 billion is down by half from the high price on its first day of trading in 2018, and is below the $10 billion valuation it was ascribed by private market investors in 2014. Meanwhile, Airbnb, another early breakout hit from Y Combinator, has a market cap of close to $80 billion, and CEO Brian Chesky is credited with upending the hospitality industry.

Dropbox 目前 60 多亿美元的市值较 2018 年上市首日的高点缩水了一半，且低于 2014 年私募市场投资者给予的 100 亿美元估值。与此同时，同样出自 Y Combinator 的早期明星企业 Airbnb 市值已接近 800 亿美元，其首席执行官 Brian Chesky 被公认为颠覆了酒店业。

Houston, who created Dropbox due to a “personal frustration” with constantly losing USB sticks when he was in college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brushed off the Airbnb comparison. “I think my 18-year-old self would be high-fiving me,” Houston told CNBC in an exclusive interview, noting that Dropbox is “something that a percentage of the planet still uses.”

Houston 在麻省理工学院读书时，因总是丢失 U 盘而感到“个人挫败”，从而创立了 Dropbox。他并未在意与 Airbnb 的比较。Houston 在接受 CNBC 独家采访时表示：“我想我 18 岁时的自己会和我击掌庆祝。”他指出，Dropbox 是“全球仍有一定比例用户在使用”的产品。

In its latest quarterly earnings report, Dropbox said it has more than 18 million paying users, and the service remains popular with media professionals, graphic designers, architects, and others who share files and photos as part of their daily work.

在其最新的季度财报中，Dropbox 表示拥有超过 1800 万付费用户，该服务在媒体专业人士、平面设计师、建筑师以及其他将文件和照片共享作为日常工作一部分的人群中依然广受欢迎。

Dropbox topped $1 billion in annual revenue in 2017 and surpassed $2 billion four years later. But revenue is roughly flat over the past two years and declined slightly in 2025. The company’s perpetual challenge has been to distinguish itself from the swarm of competition, which includes Apple and Google as well as Amazon and Microsoft. Then there’s longtime rival Box, which is still run by founder Aaron Levie and faces similar obstacles. Box is valued at just over $3.5 billion.

Dropbox 的年收入在 2017 年突破 10 亿美元，四年后超过 20 亿美元。但过去两年收入基本持平，并在 2025 年略有下降。公司面临的长期挑战是如何在包括苹果、谷歌、亚马逊和微软在内的激烈竞争中脱颖而出。此外还有长期竞争对手 Box，它仍由创始人 Aaron Levie 经营，并面临类似的障碍。Box 目前的估值略高于 35 亿美元。

The latest hurdle for Dropbox, and the whole category of subscription software, is artificial intelligence, which has swept across the tech industry over the past three-plus years. The software space has been hammered due to concerns that foundation models from OpenAI and Anthropic will enable simpler tools that displace existing products.

对于 Dropbox 以及整个订阅软件行业来说，最新的障碍是人工智能，它在过去三年多里席卷了整个科技行业。由于担心 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 的基础模型将催生出更简单的工具并取代现有产品，软件领域受到了沉重打击。

Dropbox shares have held up better than many in the enterprise space. The stock is down less than 5% in the past year, while companies like Monday.com, HubSpot and Asana have lost more than 60% of their value. “Whenever there’s a new technology, people extrapolate very quickly,” Houston said. They make assumptions that may be “directionally correct” but take years or even decades longer to play out than they predict.

Dropbox 的股价表现好于企业软件领域的许多同行。过去一年该股跌幅不到 5%，而 Monday.com、HubSpot 和 Asana 等公司的市值则缩水了超过 60%。Houston 说：“每当出现新技术时，人们总是很快进行推断。”他们做出的假设可能在“方向上是正确的”，但实现过程却比他们预测的要长几年甚至几十年。

Regarding “this concept of SaaS Apocalypse or whatever,” Houston said he’s “never met a Dropbox customer who’s like, ‘I’m just using so much ChatGPT I’m going to cancel my Dropbox subscription.’”

关于“SaaS 末日论之类的概念”，Houston 表示他“从未见过有 Dropbox 用户说：‘我用 ChatGPT 用得太多了，所以我要取消 Dropbox 订阅。’”

‘Unanswerable question’ “无法回答的问题”

John Lovelock, an analyst at Gartner, sees parallels between the current AI era and the early days of cloud computing, when companies like Salesforce ballooned at the expense of legacy传统 vendors like Oracle and SAP. The traditional players didn’t collapse but saw growth slow as they tried to pivot to the cloud, despite businesses spending more on technology. The market is trying to predict how things will play out with AI, Lovelock suggested. “AI is going to bring more value, therefore there’s going to be more money spent,” Lovelock said. “Where everybody seems to get very excited is who’s going to make that money and that, in some ways, is the unanswerable question right now.”

Gartner 分析师 John Lovelock 认为，当前的 AI 时代与云计算早期阶段有相似之处，当时 Salesforce 等公司在 Oracle 和 SAP 等传统供应商的代价下迅速壮大。尽管企业在技术上的支出增加了，但传统厂商并没有倒闭，只是在试图向云端转型时增长放缓。Lovelock 指出，市场正试图预测 AI 将如何演变。“AI 将带来更多价值，因此会有更多的资金投入，”Lovelock 说，“大家似乎都很兴奋的是谁将赚到这些钱，从某种程度上说，这正是目前无法回答的问题。”

Analysts at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. wrote in a report earlier this month after earnings that Dropbox is “making progress,” highlighting its AI-powered Dash feature that customers can use to more easily search and interact with documents and messages across third-party apps. The analysts, who have the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock, said the AI opportunity and the company’s valuation are two reasons that “value investors may be drawn to Dropbox.”

Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. 的分析师在本月初的财报后报告中写道，Dropbox 正在“取得进展”，并强调了其 AI 驱动的 Dash 功能，客户可以使用该功能更轻松地搜索和交互第三方应用程序中的文档和消息。这些分析师对该股给予了相当于“持有”的评级，并表示 AI 机遇和公司估值是“价值投资者可能被 Dropbox 吸引”的两个原因。

Dash lets users quickly query and manipulate content that goes beyond text and into video and audio. Houston said advancements in AI models mean that “suddenly we can build the version of this that I would have loved to build 10 years ago.”

Dash 允许用户快速查询和处理超越文本、涵盖视频和音频的内容。Houston 表示，AI 模型的进步意味着“我们突然可以构建出我 10 年前就想构建的版本了。”