Dropbox shares tumbled following an announcement that Chief Operating Officer Dennis Woodside is stepping down without a successor, but CEO Drew Houston reassured shareholders the cloud storage company has a plan to deal with the loss.
Dennis “built a great team, and so the transition creates an opportunity for a couple of our leaders that he helped develop to step into larger roles,” Houston said Thursday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
Woodside left a senior leadership role at Motorola to join Dropbox about 4½ years ago. At the time, Dropbox was balancing the growth of free users with its burgeoning enterprise business. He stuck with Dropbox up through a successful public offering, and today, the company counts more than 500 million registered users and more than 1,800 employees.
“I just think about the company when he joined and where we are now: a public company, billion-dollar scale. And we wouldn’t be here without Dennis, and so we are super grateful to him,” Houston said.
Woodside’s last day at the company is Sept. 4, and he will stay on as an advisor until the end of 2018.
“We will miss Dennis, but he is leaving the company in really great shape. And I am really excited to see what he does next,” Houston added.
The announcement of Woodside’s departure coincided with Dropbox’s second-quarter financial report, in which the cloud storage company reported stronger-than-expected earnings and revenue.
Shares of Dropbox seesawed in the extended session, at one point sinking as much as 11 percent. It was last down 10.8 percent.
