Dropbox appoints Google veteran Dennis Woodside as its very first COO

13 Feb 2014

File-hosting service Dropbox has hired Google veteran and Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside as its first chief operating officer.

Dropbox has been around since 2007, but it has not yet had a COO. Drew Houston, Dropbox’s co-founder and CEO, had been running the company.

Houston confirmed Woodside’s appointment as COO of Dropbox.

“We’ve long admired Dennis’ leadership at Google and Motorola, where he ran multi-billion-dollar businesses and built amazing organisations around the world. We’re so happy to welcome Dennis to our team – I can’t imagine a better person to help us bring Dropbox to global scale.”

In his new role, Woodside will be responsible for growing Dropbox’s service worldwide, along with leading the push of Dropbox’s business software in an increasingly competitive environment, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Woodside had been with Google for more than 10 years and most recently ran its Motorola Mobility handset unit as CEO. Previously, he ran Google’s advertising sales in the Americas.

His departure from the internet search giant comes as Google announced it would sell Motorola to Lenovo for US$2.91bn.

Dropbox on web image via Shutterstock

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

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