Dropbox just picked up a huge asset in Dennis Woodside. He’s been the CEO at Motorola since Google bought them in 2012. We weren’t sure what was going on with the personnel at Motorola once Lenovo finally took over, which should be in about a years’ time, but it looks like Dennis Woodside won’t be there when that happens. As a report out of The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Dropbox has snagged Woodside from Motorola/Google.
Woodside is a 10-year Google Veteran, so he definitely knows what he’s doing. He became the CEO of Motorola in 2012, when Google took over, and he helped push Motorola to what’s its doing today. That includes all the Moto X, Moto G and Moto Maker things. Back in January, Google announced it was selling Motorola off to Lenovo for a nice $2.91 billion. Which that transaction should finish up later this year.
Dennis Woodside is taking the COO position at Dropbox. Woodside gives Dropbox a seasoned manager who was previously running Google’s advertising sales in the America’s after he replaced Tim Armstrong, who left Google to become Chief Executive of AOL, inc. Woodside joined Google in 2003, and helped manage Google’s relationship with partners and advertisers internaionally.
Once arriving at Dropbox, Woodside, will be tasked with leading a high-stakes push into business software, which is an area where Dropbox competes with fast-growing rivals like Google Drive and Box, in selling security and collaboration in addition to file storage. In addition, Dropbox’s sales may be decreasing. Dropbox has had huge increases in revenue since 2010. Starting at just $12 million in 2010, $46 million in 2011, and $116 in 2012. It’s still unclear how much revenue they made in 2013, but the expected sales goal was $200 million.
The two co-founders of Dropbox will remain at the top of the company, alongside Dennis Woodside, who should be able to take the company in a new direction. Instead of being led by two engineers. This is a common business move, as both Facebook and Google have done this in the past. Google brought in Eric Schmidt as CEO in 2001, to help out the co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Now Schmidt is the Chairman of Google, and a valuable asset to the search giant.
So Woodside is heading to Dropbox. It’s still unclear as to when he’s taking over, but I’m sure it’ll be pretty soon, within the next few months or so. But on the bright side, that’s one Motorola employee that won’t be on the unemployment line when the Lenovo sale is final.