Dropbox co-founder to step down after a 19-year run as CEO

Dropbox's CEO and co-Founder, Drew Houston, recently announced that he plans to step down from the top leadership post after a historic 19-year run steering the cloud storage pioneer.

According to Houston, Ashraf Alkarmi will serve as the new co-CEO during a temporary "transition period" before Houston formally assumes the role of executive chairman. Alkarmi will then run the business as the sole chief executive. In a memo to Dropbox employees, Houston said that Alkarmi turned the core business around and placed Dropbox in a "stronger position than it's been in years." Alkarmi drove this shift when he made difficult and courageous calls and placed smart business bets that finally began to pay off. Houston trusted Alkarmi to steer the ship.

Alkarmi, the new co-CEO, also shared that Google and Amazon alumnus Mike Torres will join the executive suite as the new Chief Product Officer on July 7. Torres previously managed major consumer products, including Chrome and Kindle. Alkarmi joined Dropbox in November 2024 as General Manager of the company's core business, bringing experience from his previous tenures, where he worked at Vimeo (as CPO from 2022 to 2024) and Amazon.

His appointment as co-CEO comes as Dropbox faces severe market pressure and huge competition from big tech giants like Microsoft and Google, who bundle their cloud storage services directly into their enterprise ecosystems. To survive this onslaught, Dropbox chose to simplify its service offerings and killed off some secondary products that failed to gain traction.

For instance, Dropbox ended support for its Paper mobile apps on October 9, 2025, to force users onto the web version. It also shut down its dedicated password manager (Dropbox Passwords) while advising subscribers to migrate to alternatives like 1Password.