Name: Dropbox Isn’t Going Public Just Yet
Uploaded: 2016-08-10
Duration: 3 min 30 s
Description: According to COO Dennis Woodside

Dennis, everyone knows Dropbox, the popular cloud storage service grown dramatically over the last ten years. So now what? I mean, what's the next major goal? Yeah so really at Dropbox we're moving from keeping your files in sync to keeping your team in sync. And by that we mean We have 500 million people using Dropbox today. They've increasingly brought us into work. So eight million businesses are using Dropbox and we're seeing the opportunity to serve work in a very different way. So it's pretty exciting for us. Innovations and new ideas are the lifeblood of a company like Dropbox Where do you get your ideas from ?>> Well, really all over. And one of the things we do each year we have what we call hack week. It's actually coming up in about two weeks. We give the engineers the entire week to do whatever they want. Invent whatever they want. Whatever project they've been thinking about that they haven't been able to Get the time to do. So we find some really big innovations coming out of that kind of a project, that changed the company. Do you really institute them or did they become real? Yes. So Dropbox business, the original concept of having two accounts, a personal account and a work account came out of Hack Week. So it was a engineer's idea. What changes and trends are you seeing in your industry as it moves away from just pure storage into more specialized functions. Much more about productivity and I'm getting not just Dropbox, but people are taking control of their own time and they're finding applications that can help them save time. So part of what we're doing at Dropbox is building some of those applications into the product. A couple weeks ago we launched new features in Dropbox that allow you, as an example, to scan documents and save them directly to your Dropbox. Now the reason that's important is we have a lot of mobile workers using Dropbox, they need to collect receipts and submit expense reports. It's all electronic today. So, if you can scan a document Easily. Get it right to your Dropbox, share it and integrated it back into your expense reporting system. It's a lot easier and you save time. You're probably anticipating when am I gonna ask you a question about going public because we've seen Dropbox grow so dramatically less ten years or so. $ 10 billion valuation. What's your time table for going public? We're focused on building the business Making sure we've got the infrastructure in place to support potentially at some point being a public company, and then of course the market is alway a factor in when you decide to go. We don't have any plans at the time, but these are the three factors that we're working at. On your checklist, what about being profitable company, how important is that milestone. Well, it's absolutely important for us in the long run, and one milestone we recently reached is. Free cash flow policy on a gap basis. Meaning that when you take all of the cost of a business, and subtract them from the revenue, we've some money left over and we're adding cash to business. We're not spending investors- funded cash As you look at the IPOs of your competitors like Box a year ago, Tullio more recently. How has this influenced your thinking about going public? The IPOs that have done well are businesses that are growing and that are profitable. So, I dont think it's changed our view, maybe it's reaffirmed our view of how we're trying to build our business. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]