Aditya Agarwal, who came in to Dropbox from its acquisition of Cove way back in 2012 and was given the CTO role last year, will be leaving the company.
He announced his departure in a post on Facebook. Agarwal held the CTO role for about 9 months and was previously the VP of engineering. That kind of five-year tenure at a startup in Silicon Valley alone is pretty long, to be sure, though Agarwal is leaving the company as it begins to aggressively tout its success as a business.
“We have come a long way since then,” Agarwal said in a Facebook post. “We have over half a billion users today. We have hundreds of thousands of business customers who are using our products to make their teams and companies more productive. We have expanded our product line through SmartSync, Dropbox Paper and more. We have 12 global offices with over 1500 amazing Dropboxers. These are the hallmarks of a company that is built to last.”
Since joining Dropbox in 2012, the company has said it’s hit 500 million users, hit a $1 billion run rate and continued to aggressively pursue business customers. During this time, Dropbox has had to increasingly compete with companies like Box and Microsoft while proving itself as a unique product with superior technology and an origin story embedded in the average consumer.
“[Agarwal] helped us establish and grow our world-class engineering team and played an instrumental role in building products like Dropbox Business, Dropbox Enterprise, Dropbox Paper, and Smart Sync,” the company said in a statement. “We’re incredibly grateful for all he’s done for Dropbox. Aditya remains a close friend and ally of the company, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors.”
Dropbox has been aggressively expanding its portfolio of business products in the past several months, as well. Its note-taking app Paper launched globally earlier this year, it continues to update its business products and it began a network expansion to further improve its pitch as a seamless and secure way to share and collaborate on files online.
There are a lot of ways that you can read into this one — that Agarwal is leaving at a time when Dropbox appears to be setting itself up to go public, or that it was a short tenure as CTO. But given his long time at Dropbox in general, it seems normal enough that executives feel like it’s time to move on to something new (or, at least, take a break).
Agarwal is finishing up the month at Dropbox and will be leaving officially toward the middle of next month.
“I am very excited by the ever-increasing scope of technology to fundamentally improve people’s lives around the world,” he said in the post. “I have been fortunate to be part of seminal companies like Facebook and Dropbox so the next act has a lot to live up to. For the time being though, Ruchi has graciously agreed to let me be an intern at South Park Commons.”
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