Startups

Dropbox Lays Out An Updated Enterprise Playbook

Comment

Image Credits:

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and his lieutenants took the stage today to give their big enterprise pitch to customers. Houston, of course, has to answer questions that a lot of critics have for the company. Can it be a force in the enterprise? Is it worth $10 billion? Will it hold that valuation as online storage becomes a commodity and the cost of storage goes to zero?

Dropbox sought to answer some of those questions at its first customer conference, Dropbox Open, in San Francisco today. It was focused on new enterprise tools — which, as the company increasingly has to shift its business model from simply charging for storage, are going to be tools that will help it build a bigger business. Houston said the company had hit 150,000 paying customers, 50,000 of which it added in the past 10 months, and unveiled a suite of new tools to make that justification as well.

“Because we’ve been heads down for most of the year, and we don’t talk about ourselves that much, there’s been these misconceptions, oh we’re just for consumers, we’re playing catchup, we’re not serious about business,” Houston told me. “I think we’re like, hey, we don’t want to dwell on this, but just so you know this is the scoreboard, and the rate of growth and adoption is really big right now.”

And the biggest tool the company unveiled was an enterprise tool set called Dropbox Enterprise, which includes some additional tools above its Dropbox business product. It’s essentially giving IT managers more tools to onboard employees to a corporate Dropbox account and have visibility into their collaboration processes, and also gives those managers a dedicated customer service representative.

There were other elements that came from today’s event: It’s partnered with Symantec for loss prevention; Dropbox is adding shared folders and shared links to their development API. It’s also launching a partner network with more training and support, and help them market their tools to customers.

This is all a lot of very in-the-weeds enterprise technology, but it’s important for the company’s business. It has to differentiate itself from other services like Box, with cloud storage becoming increasingly commoditized.

image1

The competition is very much heating up in this space. Both Box and Dropbox have to basically sell their services not as a bucket of storage, but as a set of powerful collaboration tools that sit on top of that service. This is essentially something that Dropbox is still young at in the business world, but COO Dennis Woodside said that the opportunity spans hundreds of billions of dollars and that Dropbox — and the rest of the companies in the industry — are still in the very early stages.

“It’s easy in the Bay Area, to think, we all know a lot more about what the business is than lots of people,” Woodside said in an interview. “But literally every business in the world, we believe, will migrate to a cloud-based solution. They’re gonna continue to have large files, they’re gonna continue to collaborate around those files. Every person around the world will have some sort of cloud service that they’ll also use for collaboration.”

To be sure, Box has been in the business of capturing enterprise clients like Coca-Cola, IBM and General Electric, which the company says have deployed Box to as many as hundreds of thousands of employees, for much longer than Dropbox. While Dropbox talks about the number of businesses that have signed up as paying customers, there’s a little bit of ambiguity in terms of the number of customers for each of those businesses.

There’s plenty of high-level talk here for Dropbox, but it all still comes down to execution. Dropbox is still using its ground-up model, but the company is also increasingly working with partners to help distribute the service, Woodside said.

“That’s one of the reasons for the new tier and the event,” he said. “The organic adoption’s always been great, but our customers go through other channels to buy their software, or have more complex environments. And that higher touch is really helpful that’s something they get from other vendors.”

So, one last question that critics of the company frequently ask: Is Dropbox worth $10 billion? Houston wouldn’t comment on the valuation, but he certainly had an argument for why his company was so valuable.

“What are the recipes for building a great company. You want to have things like, build products people love, have a beloved brand known around the world, a really powerful business model. We’re super early in this huge market,” Houston said. “We combine the consumer Internet piece with all the great things about SaaS business, the monetization, subscription revenue, sticky customers, I just can’t think of examples of too many companies that have a model like that.”

More TechCrunch

Stack AI’s co-founders, Antoni Rosinol and Bernardo Aceituno, were PhD students at MIT wrapping up their degrees in 2022 just as large language models were becoming more mainstream. ChatGPT would…

Stack AI wants to make it easier to build AI-fueled workflows

Pinecone, the vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon’s AI Labs, has long been at the forefront of helping businesses augment large language models (LLMs)…

Pinecone launches its serverless vector database out of preview

Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount…

Special mud helps XGS Energy get more power out of geothermal wells

The market play is clear from the outset: The $449 headphones are firmly targeted at an audience that would otherwise be purchasing the Bose QC Ultra or Apple AirPods Max.

Sonos finally made some headphones

Adobe says the feature is up to the task, regardless of how complex of a background the object is set against.

Adobe brings Firefly AI-powered Generative Remove to Lightroom

All cars suffer when the mercury drops, but electric vehicles suffer more than most as heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens.…

Porsche invests in battery startup South 8 to boost cold-weather EV performance

Scale AI has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name institutional and corporate investors including Amazon and Meta.

Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B

The new coalition, Tech Against Scams, will work together to find ways to fight back against the tools used by scammers and to better educate the public against financial scams.

Meta, Match, Coinbase and others team up to fight online fraud and crypto scams

It’s a wrap: European Union lawmakers have given the final approval to set up the bloc’s flagship, risk-based regulations for artificial intelligence.

EU Council gives final nod to set up risk-based regulations for AI

London-based fintech Vitesse has closed a $93 million Series C round of funding led by investment giant KKR.

Vitesse, a payments and treasury management platform for insurers, raises $93M to fuel US expansion

Zen Educate, an online marketplace that connects schools with teachers, has raised $37 million in a Series B round of funding. The raise comes amid a growing teacher shortage crisis…

Zen Educate raises $37M and acquires Aquinas Education as it tries to address the teacher shortage

“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.”

Scarlett Johansson says that OpenAI approached her to use her voice

A new self-driving truck — manufactured by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle tech developed by Aurora Innovation — could be on public highways as early as this summer.  The…

Aurora and Volvo unveil self-driving truck designed for a driverless future

The European venture capital firm raised its fourth fund as fund as climate tech “comes of age.”

ETF Partners raises €285M for climate startups that will be effective quickly — not 20 years down the road

Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system, launches Copilot+ PCs

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. For those who haven’t heard, the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has been pushed back yet again to no earlier than…

TechCrunch Space: Star(side)liner

When I attended Automate in Chicago a few weeks back, multiple people thanked me for TechCrunch’s semi-regular robotics job report. It’s always edifying to get that feedback in person. While…

These 81 robotics companies are hiring

The top vehicle safety regulator in the U.S. has launched a formal probe into an April crash involving the all-electric VinFast VF8 SUV that claimed the lives of a family…

VinFast crash that killed family of four now under federal investigation

When putting a video portal in a public park in the middle of New York City, some inappropriate behavior will likely occur. The Portal, the vision of Lithuanian artist and…

NYC-Dublin real-time video portal reopens with some fixes to prevent inappropriate behavior

Longtime New York-based seed investor, Contour Venture Partners, is making progress on its latest flagship fund after lowering its target. The firm closed on $42 million, raised from 64 backers,…

Contour Venture Partners, an early investor in Datadog and Movable Ink, lowers the target for its fifth fund

Meta’s Oversight Board has now extended its scope to include the company’s newest platform, Instagram Threads, and has begun hearing cases from Threads.

Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case

The company says it’s refocusing and prioritizing fewer initiatives that will have the biggest impact on customers and add value to the business.

SeekOut, a recruiting startup last valued at $1.2 billion, lays off 30% of its workforce

The U.K.’s self-proclaimed “world-leading” regulations for self-driving cars are now official, after the Automated Vehicles (AV) Act received royal assent — the final rubber stamp any legislation must go through…

UK’s autonomous vehicle legislation becomes law, paving the way for first driverless cars by 2026

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

SoLo Funds CEO Travis Holoway: “Regulators seem driven by press releases when they should be motivated by true consumer protection and empowering equitable solutions.”

Fintech lender SoLo Funds is being sued again by the government over its lending practices

Hard tech startups generate a lot of buzz, but there’s a growing cohort of companies building digital tools squarely focused on making hard tech development faster, more efficient and —…

Rollup wants to be the hardware engineer’s workhorse

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is not just about groundbreaking innovations, insightful panels, and visionary speakers — it’s also about listening to YOU, the audience, and what you feel is top of…

Disrupt Audience Choice vote closes Friday

Google says the new SDK would help Google expand on its core mission of connecting the right audience to the right content at the right time.

Google is launching a new Android feature to drive users back into their installed apps

Jolla has taken the official wraps off the first version of its personal server-based AI assistant in the making. The reborn startup is building a privacy-focused AI device — aka…

Jolla debuts privacy-focused AI hardware

The ChatGPT mobile app’s net revenue first jumped 22% on the day of the GPT-4o launch and continued to grow in the following days.

ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw its biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch