Dropbox’s New CFO Signals IPO Aspirations
By Douglas MacMillan
Wall Street Journal
9:11 pm ET, Feb 11, 2015
Dropbox has a hired a new chief financial officer, a sign the online-storage company could be moving closer to an initial public offering.Vanessa Wittman, the former finance chief of Google ’s Motorola unit, will join Dropbox as CFO in March, the company said today in a blog post. She replaces Sujay Jaswa, a four-year veteran at the company who is leaving to pursue a career in investing.
Wittman is reuniting with her ex-colleague Dennis Woodside, the former head of Motorola who left to become Dropbox’s first operating chief a year ago. In that role, Woodside has overseen the startup’s global expansion and ramped up its efforts to develop and sell new tools geared toward corporate customers.
Though Jaswa was one of Dropbox’s earliest executives, who ran much of its business for years, his promotion to CFO last year was surprising given his lack of experience in a finance role at a public company.
Dropbox decided to address that need in hiring Wittman, who also previously served as CFO of publicly-traded consultancy Marsh & McLennan as well as senior roles at Microsoft and Morgan Stanley .
“There are very few companies that have the potential to completely shape the way we interact with technology on a daily basis,” Wittman said in an emailed statement. “Dropbox, in a short period of time, has impacted the lives of more than 300 million people, who use it to share and safeguard their most important information.”
A spokeswoman for Dropbox declined to comment on any plans for a potential IPO.
The company has no doubt kept a close eye on Box, its rival in online storage, which held an IPO last month. Box’s shares have risen 50% from their IPO price of $14.
Wittman’s hiring was earlier reported by technology blog Recode.
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