Dropbox

Dropbox founder Drew Houston conceived the Dropbox concept after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT.Houston founded Evenflow, Inc. in May 2007 as the company behind Dropbox, and shortly thereafter secured seed funding from Y Combinator. Dropbox was officially launched at 2008's TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual technology conference. Owing to trademark disputes between Proxy, Inc. and Evenflow, Dropbox's official domain name was "getdropbox.com" until October 2009, when it acquired its current domain, "dropbox.com". In October 2009, Evenflow, Inc. was renamed Dropbox, Inc.In an interview with TechCrunch's "Founder Stories" in October 2011, Houston explained that a demo video was released during Dropbox's early days, with one viewer being Arash Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi was "so impressed" that they formed a partnership. In regards to competition, Houston stated that "It is easy for me to explain the idea, it is actually really hard to do it."

User growth

Dropbox saw steady user growth after its inception. It surpassed the 1 million registered users milestone in April 2009, followed by 2 million in September, and 3 million in November. It passed 50 million users in October 2011, 100 million in November 2012, 500 million in 2016, and 700 million in 2021.

Acquisitions

In July 2012, Dropbox acquired TapEngage, a startup that "enables advertisers and publishers to collaborate on tablet-optimized advertising". The following December, Dropbox acquired two companies; Audiogalaxy, a startup "allowing users to store their music files and playlists in the cloud then stream them to any device", and Snapjoy, a company that allowed users to "aggregate, archive and view all of their digital photos from their cameras, phones and popular apps like Flickr, Instagram and Picasa, and then view them online or via an iOS app". In July 2013, Dropbox acquired Endorse, a "mobile coupon startup".In May 2014, Dropbox acquired Bubbli, a startup that has "built some innovative ways of incorporating 3D technology into 2D views, and packaging it in a mobile app".In January 2015, Dropbox acquired CloudOn, a company that provided mobile applications for document editing and creation. At the same time, Dropbox told TechCrunch that CloudOn's base in Herzliya would become the first Dropbox office in Israel. In July, Dropbox acquired Clementine, an enterprise communication service.In April 2014, Dropbox acquired photo-sharing company Loom , and document-sharing startup Hackpad. Dropbox later announced in April 2017 that Hackpad would be shut down on July 19, with all notes being migrated to Dropbox Paper.In January 2019, Dropbox acquired e-signature company HelloSign. The acquisition was reported to be Dropbox's largest to date, at a reported $230 million.In March 2021, Dropbox announced the acquisition of DocSend. DocSend offers a secure document sharing and analytics product.

2021 workforce reduction

In January 2021, Dropbox CEO Houston announced the layoff of 315 employees, which is approximately 11 percent of the current workforce. The company said the reductions were necessary in order to focus the company team structure and focus on top level priorities. The software firm also announced that COO Olivia Nottebohm would be leaving the company on February 5, 2021. In the same month, announced it would sublease many of it's office space in a transition to remote work.