Cloud storage firm Dropbox to lay off 315 employees

“Last spring I made a commitment to all of you to preserve job security through 2020, and it was important to me that we honored that promise,” CEO Drew Houston wrote in a memo to employees. “But looking ahead at 2021 and beyond, it’s clear that we need to make changes in order to create a healthy and thriving business for the future.”

Houston founded Dropbox in 2007, and the company quickly grew from 1 million users in 2009 to more than 500 million by 2016, according to the company’s website. That growth slowed as the company competed with larger document-sharing platforms such as Google Drive and in 2019 peaked at 600 million users, according to SaaS Scout.

Dropbox went public in 2018 for $28 per share and failed to break that valuation since August of that year, despite the coronavirus pandemic leading shares of some cloud-based and telework companies, such as Zoom, to surge as much as five times in value.

In October, the company announced its “Virtual First” policy, which made working from home “the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work,” according to a company blog post.

“The steps we’re taking today are painful, but necessary,” Houston wrote. “Our recent decisions regarding our new leadership structure and remote work policy have set us on the right path, and now we need to make sure our teams and investments also line up. For example, our Virtual First policy means we require fewer resources to support our in-office environment, so we’re scaling back that investment and redeploying those resources to drive our ambitious product roadmap.”

In the same memo, Houston announced that COO Olivia Nottebohm will step down in February. Nottebohm joined Dropbox in January 2020 and “played a pivotal role in setting [Dropbox] up for success in 2021,” according to Houston.

The Washington Examiner reached out to Dropbox for further comment.