On Wednesday evening the Wall Street Journal reported that Motorola Mobility boss Dennis Woodside had left the company for a position at Dropbox, though it wasn’t until Thursday that the news was confirmed by those involved.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said his team had “long admired” Woodside’s leadership at both Google and Motorola where he “ran multi-billion dollar businesses and built amazing organizations around the world.” He added, “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.”
Writing on the official Motorola blog, the now former boss of the mobile maker said it “was not an easy decision” to leave the Moto X creator, though he was confident its future was assured. That future is tied up with Chinese tech giant Lenovo, which has agreed to purchase Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.91 billion, just two-and-a-half years after the Web giant acquired it for $12.5 billion.
“While Google imbued simplicity and software sensibility into the company, Lenovo will bring it the scale it deserves,” Woodside wrote. “I have no doubt the two companies together will be a force for good in the mobile industry.”
He added that the transition to Lenovo’s ownership will be overseen by Jonathan Rosenberg, a former Google employee who worked as senior vice president of products for nine years until 2011. He’s also been working alongside Woodside for the last couple of years, helping to build Motorola’s leadership team and assisting with business strategy.
Woodside will become Dropbox’s first chief operating officer, using experience and knowledge built up across more than a decade at Google to expand the online storage startup globally as it seeks to beat down competition from Box, Wuala, Google Drive, and the slew of other companies battling it out in the same space.
Seven-year-old Dropbox has been growing at a steady pace since launch, gathering more than 200 million users and receiving millions of dollars in various funding rounds, the latest of which took place last month when it picked up $250 million from a group of investors.
[Image: Motorola]
