Motorola boss Dennis Woodside exits company for Dropbox role

Just a couple of weeks after Google announced it was planning to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for just under $3 billion, it appears the company’s boss, Dennis Woodside, is on his way to Dropbox to become its chief operating officer.

The news of Woodside’s move was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday and later confirmed by Google.

San Francisco-based Dropbox, a fast-growing online storage company founded seven years ago, recently received $250 million in funding, with Morgan Stanley among its backers. Woodside will be its first chief operating officer and, according to the WSJ, will be expected to help expand the business globally as well as lead a push into business software combining security and collaboration with cloud storage, a space in which it currently competes with the likes of Box, Wuala, Google Drive and others.

Prior to taking over at Motorola in 2012, Woodside had spent nine years with Google, helping to build relationships with international partners and advertisers.

When Google acquired the mobile maker two years ago, Woodside saw fit to trim down the size of the company, closing around a third of its 94 offices worldwide and axing 4,000 jobs, equal to 20 percent of its workforce. He’ll now be dealing with a significantly smaller outfit, as Dropbox currently only has about 550 employees based across three locations.

While at Motorola Woodside also oversaw the launch of the highly regarded Moto X handset, though during his short time at the company he was unable to return it to profitability.

In contrast, Dropbox has been growing at a steady pace since hitting the Web in 2008, taking its user base beyond the 200-million mark three months ago and receiving millions of dollars in funding.

Started by two MIT students “tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one computer,” Dropbox enables easy online storage and sharing of files and documents, and has more recently expanded into the business space, offering a subscription service that includes enhanced features.

CEO Drew Houston will be hoping Woodside’s experience and knowledge will help take Dropbox to the next level as it battles against other major players in the online storage arena.