Dropbox CEO Drew Houston Steps Down After 19 Years
Drew Houston founded Dropbox because he forgot his USB drive on a bus. That was 2007. He was 24. Nineteen years later, at 43, he is ready to do something else. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston will transition to executive chairman after an initial period sharing the co-CEO title with Ashraf Alkarmi.
Alkarmi will become Dropbox’s co-CEO alongside Houston today. Following a transition period, Alkarmi will become the sole CEO, and Houston will move into the role of executive chairman.
Alkarmi had served as general manager of Dropbox’s core business. He becomes co-CEO effective Tuesday alongside Houston. Alkarmi’s pay includes an $825,000 yearly salary, a target bonus equal to his base salary, and about $12.65 million in restricted stock units that will vest over several years.
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.” Alkarmi joined Dropbox from Vimeo in late 2024. He has been at the company for just 18 months. Separately, Michael Torres, currently vice president of product for Google’s Chrome, will join Dropbox as chief product officer on July 7. Torres previously served as VP and general manager of Kindle at Amazon.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston Steps Down
The leadership change is honest about what the company is navigating. Dropbox’s core file sync business still generates revenue, $629.5 million in the first quarter of 2026, but growth has stalled at under 1% year over year. The company has responded with cost discipline. Dropbox cut 16% of its workforce in 2023 and carried out further restructuring in 2024.
It ended the first quarter of 2026 with $1.3 billion in cash. But efficiency alone does not solve the growth problem. Dropbox’s market cap of just over $6 billion remains down by half from its 2018 IPO peak. The choice to elevate Alkarmi, who ran the product side, over a finance or operations executive signals the company believes its next chapter is a product story, not a cost story.
What Houston Is Looking Toward
Houston said in the interview, “There’s never a perfect time” regarding his decision to exit as CEO. His interest in AI entrepreneurship prompted the shift. He told CNBC: “I trust the right leader. The company’s in the right place.” The transition closes a chapter that began in 2007 when he forgot a USB drive on a bus and decided to solve the problem. Dropbox’s advantage has always been simplicity and cross-platform neutrality. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android without favouring any ecosystem.
Whether Alkarmi can drive the product reinvention the company needs while maintaining the loyalty of a workforce that has been through multiple rounds of layoffs is an open question. It is the question Dropbox shareholders will be watching closely from May 26 onward.
