Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston speaks at the CNBC @Work conference in San Francisco on November 4, 2019.
Allen Nevada | CNBC
Dropbox Chief Executive Drew Houston announced in a report to employees on Wednesday that the company will lay off 20% of its global workforce, equivalent to 528 positions.
The company is in a “transitional period” as its file syncing and sharing business and its Dash AI search capabilities mature, Houston wrote.
“Addressing this shift while maintaining current structures and investment levels is no longer sustainable,” he said in the report.
Prior to this, Dropbox laid off 16% of its employees in 2019. April 2023affecting 500 employees. At the time, Huston wrote that the layoffs were due to slower growth, economic headwinds and the need to devote more resources and people to the increasingly competitive artificial intelligence race.
Dropbox will cut parts of the company’s business that are “overinvested or underperforming,” Huston wrote, while working to create a “flatter, more efficient” team structure.
“Our core business continues to see soft demand and macro headwinds,” Houston wrote. “But external factors are only part of the story. We’ve heard from many of you that our organizational structure has become too complex, with too much management Layers slow us down.”
Affected employees will be paid for 16 weeks starting Wednesday, with an additional week of pay for each completed tenure year at the company.
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