- You have this interesting legend of the time
you were summoned to Apple by Steve Jobs.
You know what I'm going to ask you.
What happened?
And then how does that relate to where you're at today?
- Well I, we had Steve had heard about Dropbox
and we arrived at 1 Infinite Loop, and he started
by telling us that we, we started the meeting
and he's like, "You've built a great product."
and so you can imagine, kind of bucket list,
and okay, check that off. (laughs)
- Steve Jobs said I love it.
- And then it was actually, we were interested in building
the company and we weren't looking to sell,
so the formal part of the conversation was pretty quick.
It's been a wild ride, for sure.
- Right, so the legend goes he said, not so subtly,
well we're just gonna have to crush you guys
and put you out of business.
And 10 or so years later you're here.
How does that feel to you?
Do you feel vindicated by that at all?
- It feels great.
I mean we're really proud of the business we've built
and I'm just really proud of the team.
It's sort of the culmination of a lot of hard work
by many people.
Just feeling really excited and really grateful.
- You're here now, speaking of Apple, though,
and these other giants, this industry is dominated by
four or five big players and it seems like
everyone else is kind of fighting
over whatever is left.
How do you compete in that environment where there's
so much power influence in just a handful of players?
How do you stay afloat?
- Well we stay close to our customers and when I sit
in roundtables with customers they show me their phones.
And they've got products from everyone, right?
They have Dropbox, they got all the Google products,
they got all the Microsoft products.
And they turn to us and they say, hey, can someone
build a cloud to sync my clouds?
And so we provide a real, that's our strength,
that we help tie everything together
and we've found that while there's overlap
with the larger companies, folks like Microsoft and Google
have become partners over the years.
- What does that partnership look like when you partner
with an Apple or you partner with a Google,
what does that look like to me, as a user?
- Well when you open an Office document in Dropbox
you can then open it in the native apps on the phone
and vice versa, and then Dropbox is a place
where you can put all of your information.
We certainly want, we share a lot of users between Dropbox
and any major product and so those integrations
are really valuable and we want to make sure
our shared experience is good.
- Going into today, your IPO day, there was a little bit
of worry about your valuation, how it seemed like
you might be IPOing at a price under the evaluation
you were at a few years ago which is reportedly
$10 billion.
Today how do you feel now that, I think it was up,
the stock was up some 40 odd percent, approximately
up to 12 billion evaluation.
How does that feel?
- Again we're really proud of the business we've built
and one thing I tell the team is get used to the stock
going up and down.
This will be a normal, every day occurrence
and so whatever the price is today it'll be
something different tomorrow.
That's outside of our control so what I really make sure
that the team stays focused on is that our customers
don't really care if we're public or private.
They just want a great experience and they're the ones
at the foundation of the business we're building
so we need to stay focused on keeping our customers happy
and building the best products.
- Do you see yourselves as kind of a bellwether
for the next round of big unicorn IPOs, you know,
the AirBnBs and Spotifys and Lyfts of the world
who are thinking about IPOing soon into this
kind of shaky market right now?
Do you see yourself as a bellwether stock for that?
- I think we're all excited about this cohort of companies
and I'm looking forward to seeing Daniel take Spotify
public and a lot of these founders are my friends.
It's certainly a lot of fun
to watch them scale their businesses.
- I want to read you something that I think
you probably have already read, but it's from
one of you competitors, Aaron Levie from Box.
He wrote a op-ed or open letter in Axios
a couple weeks ago.
He said, quote, "If you look at the past 10 years
"of headlines from Dropbox, every six months
"there's a new push into business.
They've had multiple heads of sales,
they've had multiple go-to-market efforts."
This is largely a critique, I guess,
of your enterprise business.
How do you respond to that?
Is your enterprise different, are you competitors
with Box in that sense, in enterprise
or what's your approach to enterprise?
- Well we, I think one thing that everybody now
is starting to better understand is we have
a lot of enterprise customers, we just don't have
a traditional enterprise model.
- [Steve] What does that mean?
- Yeah, we think about basically applying the consumer
internet playbook to business software.
Our business, we've got a really interesting hybrid model
because we have, we're taking the best
of our consumer roots,
so the virality and scale, and then combining it
with the predictability and monetization
of a SaaS company.
And the combination's really powerful.
So we're the fastest SaaS company to a billion run rate.
And we're able to acquire hundreds of thousands
of paying businesses without having a huge sales team.
We like to say our 500 million registered users
are our best sales people.
- Shifting gears a little bit I want to talk about
diversity and gender issues in the Valley.
I don't know if you've read it
but I was really into this book
by Emily Chang from Bloomberg, Brotopia.
One of the things they talked about in there
was, it's kind of a slow moving thing
you guys have released diversity numbers before,
pretty much in line with a lot of your peers
in the Valley.
One of the solutions presented in that book,
I'm curious for your take on this,
is the gender pay gap issue.
How it's one of those things sure, recruiting
might take time, years even,
and I know you're involved in efforts to help out with that
and we can talk about that.
But when it comes to gender pay
isn't that something that can be fixed now?
You can literally just flip a switch?
- [Drew] Oh absolutely.
- Talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that.
- I would say more broadly, we've always, Arash and I,
have always wanted--
- Arash your co-founder - My co-founder
and I have always wanted Dropbox to be a great place
to work for everyone.
And we certainly believe that two people doing the same work
should be compensated the same way.
So I agree.
There are certain, while as an industry we have a long
way to go there are certainly things that are directly
within companies' control and so by all means,
within our company we take a close look
at equity between, or gender pay equity,
and I think every company should.
- And on the diversity end this week
it came out that you're part of this new initiative
that I think is pretty interesting.
This idea that if you're a startup seeking funding
you won't accept the money
unless there's good representation from the VC firm.
Talk about what that's called
and how you got involved in that.
- Yeah, it's called Founders for Change and I think,
along the same lines, we want so much of America,
so much of Silicon Valley is based on this idea
of equal opportunity and I think all of us want
the Valley and tech to be a place where that is true.
We want it within our companies and we want that same
equal opportunity when it comes to our investors.
It's a large group of founders.
We got introduced to it through Sequoia who is
our first venture capital backer.
I think it's a really, I think it's great
that the founders and the community can come together
and try to move things forward.
- And is the idea here to start it with maybe
smaller startups who are building themselves
from the ground up?
Is that why you're doing it through VC firms?
- I think if all the founders can come together
as a community and agree this is the world
we want to live in and this is what we want
our funding landscape to be.
That's something that we hope the investment community
would pay attention to.
- Want to talk about Salesforce.
So I think it was last week or a few days ago
we learned about this $100 million investment.
People started raising questions, does that mean
an acquisition it seems like
they're kind of hungry to acquire companies.
They just had a big acquisition earlier this week
as you probably know.
How do you view, with this big investment
do you see them as a partner still, obviously,
but as a potential merger down the road?
- It's an evolution of our partnership,
and a pretty big one.
Mark and I have been friends for a long time
and I really admire
everything that he's done with Salesforce
and you know when I look at their path
from a billion to two billion to five billion,
ten billion revenue I think there's a lot of
important lessons there for SaaS companies
and for our company.
Mark's been excited about Dropbox for a long time.
So I think that the investment is a reflection
that he's excited about where Dropbox is headed
and it's a great way for us to have an umbrella
to do more to do on the partnership front.
A lot coming on the product integration front,
some interesting go-to-market opportunities
so we have, our median customer seems to be
a little different so Salesforce, or this partnership
can be over time a way for us to reach
or to drive adoption among larger customers
and vice versa.
So we have a lot of smaller businesses where,
and Salesforce is looking at S and B as a vector for growth.
So over time I think there's a lot more we can do
on many fronts.
- There's that partnership again
with the bigger guys, right?
- [Drew] Yeah.
- Finally I want to talk about this week
Mark Zuckerberg came out and part of that interview
really stuck out to me was this notion
that he's a little bit more open to regulation
which is the first I've heard from a major
tech CEO about even being open, instead of self regulating
maybe we should be regulated.
Have you thought about that at all?
I know you're not even close on the scale
or even in the same kind of business as the
social media companies.
But just broadly, industry-wide,
what do you think regulation could or should
look like?
- I think the, if you look at any other sector
and you look at our market, the government
is an important voice in these conversations.
How is the policy gonna evolve?
I think that's gonna be something that unfolds
over many years.
I also think that companies shouldn't be,
we shouldn't wait for that,
I think we all realized that it's critical
that we trust all the services we use
and that's certainly top of mind for us
as you can imagine, and our customers,
their security and privacy.
I think what the government does from a policy
standpoint from a regulation standpoint,
I think you could go a lot of different directions
but we want to make sure that we,
whether as a private company or a public company,
that we're doing everything we can to keep
our users information safe and earning their trust.
- And finally I read this really interesting
profile about you in the New York Times
a week or two ago, and I have this vision of you
in your apartment signing Pearl Jam by yourself.
Is that true, and what, tell me about
this Pearl Jam obsession we have.
- I loved in high school a lot of, 90s rock
was really the first genre of music I really got into.
We actually, the formal name of the company
was Even Flow Incorporated.
Because we weren't sure if we'd be able to get Dropbox.com
the domain name, so I'm like
all right let's leave our options open.
So yeah, I love music in general but the company was
technically named after a Pear Jam song.
- I think the fist check I think Y Combinator's tweeting it
today and it's--
- That's right, yeah.
And we actually got the Pearl Jam guys
to, or they invested in Dropbox a few years ago.
- [Steve] Is that like a dream come true?
More than IPO I got the Pearl Jam check.
- My general counsel was like, "Well that's one way
"to get Eddie Veder's signature."
It's been fun to get to watch them play and
get different musicians involved in the company.