Such a delight to host Drew after, I don't know if you've been to the Goldman Sachs conference before, maybe it's your first time or second time.
Mm-hmm.
But, great to see you after a long time. It's just been ages, but welcome to the conference. I love your outfit, by the way.
Thank you.
So you get the best, the coolest tech CEO outfit award - on day one for the, of the conference, at least.
It's already worth it to come here, right?
Yeah.
To get compliments from Kash.
And, my co-moderator is Gabriela Borges , who's on my team. So Drew, the company has been around for a long time. It's a substantial company at scale, significant scale. And you had this idea, I remember your story, you're at MIT, you're going on a bus trip somewhere. Did you imagine the company to be this large at this point in time?
Yeah, I had it all figured out. So first, yeah, thanks, Kash, for having me, and hello, everyone. But, yeah, it's been quite a journey. I mean, Dropbox had its sixteenth—we celebrated our 16th birthday in May. And started around... Yeah, as you pointed out, the initial problem I had was just I have all this stuff on all these different devices and can't access it, and all these challenges of that, and the solutions, like emailing myself files or carrying around my thumb drive, just seemed like medieval compared to what we should be doing. And then had that experience of, like, moving from Boston to California, starting a company that I took-
What made you move to California from Boston?
Well, so fun fact, and probably most of you probably know Y Combinator, the like early-stage startup incubator, basically, and they they used to be bicoastal, so they would have a Boston batch in the summer and a Mountain View batch in the winter.
And then, we were one of the last, maybe we were the last batch that they had in Boston. I mean, the short answer from our perspective was we... Like, the Silicon Valley investors, like, quickly wrote checks. That was an important distinction. And we had a bunch of friends from-
Nothing against Boston Venture Capital.
Yeah. I mean, I'm still a Boston... I'm a Boston native, still have a 617 phone number, I'm still a Patriots fan, which makes me really popular- everywhere else. But yeah, no, it... Then moving to California and getting funding from Sequoia and all these great places and, you know, this is still, the place where, this is the place where it happens.
So, five years from now, if you were to come back to the Goldman Sachs conference, we hope that you're still maintaining this cool attire. What does Dropbox make? What is your intuition telling you as to what the company is gonna look like? Are you gonna be doing some new things, solving new customer problems, or more continuation on executing against the current time? What does the company look like? What's your vision?
Well, it's, we're evolving, so a lot of... When you think about five years from now, or even where we are today, I mean, we started with syncing your files, but over time, moving much more to organizing your working life, and organizing all your cloud content. And so, we see that, you know, work has changed a lot, but a lot of the problems are pretty familiar in a lot of ways. We're still going after the problem we started with, if you... In a sense, where you know, in the beginning, my stuff was everywhere, I couldn't find it. Back then, that looked like my files were on these different devices, and the solution, like, the solution looked like keeping moving everything to the cloud and keeping files in sync.
But today, a lot of work has shifted, right, to the browser, and we still have, you know, 100 files on our desktop, but that lot has shifted. We also have 100 tabs in our browser, and you look under your Zoom window and it's just total mayhem. And we see, you know, I live this, probably all of us live this, just the fragmentation and the information overload that we experience. Again, the fundamental problem is, like, my stuff's everywhere, I can't find it.
That, that's still, unfortunately, still a huge issue today but the shape of the problem and the shape of the solution is pretty different. So, for example, we just announced a product called Dropbox Dash, which is doing AI-powered universal search so helping organize all your cloud stuff in addition to your files. So, for your email, for your Slack, for your Salesforce, for your Notion docs, for your Airtable being able to search all those different things from one place, because we observed, I mean, we observed a while ago that, that these, the just... In kind of ways that we're like, I'm like: Why do I have to carry a thumb drive around? But even just like, I'm like: Why does, why is it easier to search all of human knowledge than my company's knowledge?
Yeah.
If you think about it, right?
Yeah.
'Cause, like, you can search everything, you can search the world with a Google search, but then when it comes to searching my company's stuff, and increasingly, just, like, my stuff you know, I have, like, 10 different search boxes, and I get a new one every year. And actually, in a lot of ways it's worse today than it was 20 years ago.
Yeah.
Like, 20 years ago, you search your computer and your hard drive, and the thing you're looking for is there or it's not. But now, with all the new tools, there's a dark side of all the new tools that we've adopted, which is we have a much more fragmented experience. This often happens in technology. It's like, for every problem technology solves, it creates a new one.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Right? Part of why it's a good business, I guess. Having all these new tools means that there's no common way to organize stuff and there's a lot of issues with. So I just look at these fundamental experiences. But we're on that evolution, from syncing your files to organizing all your cloud content, and then organizing your working life more broadly in a more, you know, in a distributed world, in a hybrid world, a remote world that we're all living in.
Got it. I know a few years back you had this event in San Francisco where you unveiled the new desktop search. I forget what the name was back then. So how is the latest iteration of that? I mean, how has the search fundamental technology evolved to keep up with the expanding range of content, and you throw in generative AI, and see the whole world changing.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we pinpointed a lot of similar issues where a lot of these things have been trends for a long time, where as we're adopting more tools, or we've had increasing proliferation of tools, more information, and this, you know, the browser we're using or just the way of, our way of working and the tools we're using just haven't scaled to keep up with the amount of stress that we're putting on the system. And, you know, when you look at your browser or you look at your desktop, you're like, these things were like, especially after COVID, these things were never designed to be, you know, your entire working environment.
In a world where now we basically work out of screens instead of offices. I mean, that was already so we were heading in that direction before COVID, but then COVID really finished that swing pretty aggressively. You just look at that, like, yeah, even Zoom was never designed for, you know, bar mitzvahs, and congressional hearings, and all the things it was used for in lockdown, right? But we're all putting much more stress on the system, and we need fundamentally more scalable ways of facing this information overload. And a lot of what's changed with COVID has certainly accelerated the need to have a more organized working life and digital environment now that that's, like, our primary work experience. And even if you're going to an office, you're still spending most of your time working looking at a screen.
And then the second thing is AI gives us all these new building blocks to actually do something about it. 'Cause I think we've, we've all felt like, "Oh, yeah, it'd be great if things weren't so chaotic," but, like, what can we actually do? And the answer is, after the large language model and a lot of generative AI, there's a lot of new... we can paint with a lot of new colors.
There's a lot of products I would've loved to build probably products I would've loved to build in 2018, 2019, when we were started talking about some of these themes. We couldn't build them 'cause we didn't have that technical. We didn't have those building blocks.
Well, you said Zoom. Eric was here earlier today.
Mm-hmm.
Carl Eschenbach says hi to you.
Oh, really?
He just literally finished up his session, and-
Yeah.
... he said, "Are you done for the day?" I said, "No, I've got two more. I got Drew at Dropbox." And he said, "Oh, say hi to him.
Yeah, Carl's great.
Yeah. On that range, so since you mentioned Dash, let's just go in the direction of Dash. Where are we with customer adoption, trials, early feedback? What are your goals? Where do you want to take this in the next 2-3 years?
Sure. So, again, in June, we announced Dropbox Dash. It's something that we've been working on for a while, and something that we accelerated with, or we seeded with an acquisition of a company called Command E. A couple years ago, and then we've put a lot more investment into it after that. But basically, AI-powered universal search. So I talked about, you know, instead of having 10 search boxes, that each search, like, 10% of your stuff, giving you one search box, that searches everything, but then also, helping you organize your stuff.
And so, you know, I'm inspired a lot by when I look at how experiences get better on the internet in general. You know, things like Netflix actually have a lot of parallels that I, or that I see. So, where in the consumer realm, when you watch Netflix or you listen to Spotify, we all know that these systems just get smarter. You can still access the whole co- catalog but everything's kind of auto-curated for you, and the more you watch or listen, the smarter the experience, the smarter and more targeted the experience, the more personalized the experience is. And a lot of things have shifted. Like, you don't have to, like, file away individual songs into, like... Or you don't have to, like, manually assemble a catalog.
You can just have access to everything, and then even when you create a playlist, maybe you put the first songs in, first couple songs in manually, but then it, the UI quickly switches to a recommendation engine where it's like, "All right, here's a song that's like that. Do you want this, that?
And you're just sort of saying like, "Yeah, I like that. Add that, don't add that." And then the next round, then it comes up with a new round of recommendations that are even smarter. And so there's all this intelligence that we kind of take for granted, where, yeah, of course, like, the content experience is, like, so much better than it was when we had... You know, there are many generations of that experience improving. And then I just look at the experience around content at work and, you know, you could take a screenshot and compare it to, like, the Mac Finder from 1984 and the Mac Finder in 2023, and like-
Talk about the Clippy or whatever.
Well, right. And it's like, yeah, there really hasn't been a lot of... Or there's a lot of room to improve that experience. There's very little intelligence in that. And then, actually, there are all these new problems, even beyond search. Just even the basics of, like, where's my stuff, right? At least on your, you know, in the file world or on, you know, in the PC era, like, if you reboot your computer, you know all your files are gonna be there. But, that's actually not the case with your browser, right?
'Cause either you declare tab bankruptcy and just kind of nuke everything and start over-
So Jacob, who works with me, comes over to my desk and says, "Whoa, you got like, I cannot count the number of tabs you have here.
Yeah.
How do you function?
Exactly. But this is, we're all like that, right? But, like, so there's no persistence, so everything kind of vanishes, either because you just close everything and get overloaded, or because, you know, your system updates itself and something that causes Chrome to forget all your tabs or whatever, but then you're starting over. I'm like, that's a crazy... There's, like, no persistence.
There's no, you know, and I said, like, files have folders, songs have playlists, but URLs, links, they don't really have any concept of collections. So Dash aims to build the missing organizing layer for all your cloud content and bring all these things together.
So it's in, it's in closed beta right now. We've been opening it up, taking people off the waiting list, and and introducing new users, and tuning the, I guess, what we're focused on, I mean, just the fundamentals. Kind of back to basics, back to a lot of what made the Dropbox 1.0 was successful, just that start with the best possible user experience, focus on retention and frequency and depth of engagement, and user growth, and then monetization. And then also taking advantage of generative AI. So I mean, the best search results or the best the kinda best experience, search experience you can have is a search you didn't need to make at all. So we think about how do we predict what you're gonna need, what you're gonna wanna open, right?
'Cause we know, if, like, you have a meeting coming up about a certain topic, then the system should connect the dots for you.
Yeah.
And like, yeah, you're having a meeting on this product launch, and you have a document you were just looking at on that product launch or the documents that that shared. Like, why, why doesn't that just show up?
Mm-hmm.
Right? So we have the start page concept in Dash that's sort of this, kinda your... that we think about as your cockpit, to try to predict what you're gonna need without even having to search for it.
Mm-hmm.
So there's a lot of AI and machine learning in terms of how do we sort of organize your stuff for you. And then, with the rise of things like ChatGPT, people I think that sets new levels of expectation or creates a lot of curiosity in customers. Like, okay, well, ChatGPT is great for a lot of things that, like, a Google search is great for, but it's not personalized.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Right? And so there's a big opportunity to have, you know, ChatGPT-type experience or a messaging experience, but that is personalized to you, that where you can ask the AI a question about... that ChatGPT can't answer. 'Cause if you ask ChatGPT, like, "Oh, what's my passport number?
Mm-hmm.
Or, you know, "Where's that deck from last year's product launch?" Or-
Dash can do all this.
That, that's what we're building.
Yeah.
So basically, because Dash connects to all your different, different tools, we can aggregate a lot of that and then put a layer of AI-
Yeah.
... to organize it.
Sorry. Yeah, so when thinking about the typical Dropbox customer, and the millions that you already have either using it and paying for it or, or, potentially can convert to paying customers, how do you think about their reception to the new technology such as Dash or generative AI, right? I think typically, we can assume that they will be faster to implement those than an enterprise, and that has a lot more complexity and just bureaucracy along with it. And so I'm curious to get your thoughts on that, and what you're seeing from your initial beta of the Dash.
Well, it's I mean, the first thing is, you know, now, compared to a few years ago, like, I don't need to spend much time explaining the problem. Like, people get it. Yeah, 100 tabs, okay.
Yeah, 110 search boxes. Got it. So it's been really encouraging to finally get Dash out into our early customers' hands, and the concept resonates, and we're doing more to increase the coverage of all the tools that Dash integrates with, and we're just tuning, improving search quality and responding to customer feedback and building and just continuing to iterate on the experience. That's been exciting to get out there, and I think there's a universal knowledge worker need. It kind of reminds me a lot of what the situation that we started with, with Dropbox 1.0.
It's like, basically, I'd just ask people, like, "Do you carry around a thumb drive?" And they're like, "Yeah, obviously." And I'm like: "You don't have to do that anymore." And then, you know, there's a lot of curiosity about the solution, and then just making sure that we can deliver on the promise.
The experience continues to get better and better every week, so I'm really excited. We'll continue to be opening up Dash to bigger and bigger audiences through the end of the year, and we'll pretty soon, you know, early 2024, be in a position where it's just everybody can give it a shot.
I think you mentioned Command E before as an enabling technology for Dash and for a lot of the innovation that you're doing in Dropbox overall. How do you typically evaluate these opportunities and decide whether to buy or build internally?
Sure. Well, we're pretty open-minded, and we've used—I mean, we do a lot organically. There's a lot that we've done both in the core business and continue to optimize that. So we think about... First, I think about as a portfolio.
Mm-hmm.
Right? And so, our core Dropbox business, you know, we've got 18 million subscribers. There's still... I think there's still a lot of opportunity for invention and improvement in that experience, and opportunities to add AI. So we launched, as part of our June launch, we also shared that that kind of ChatGPT-like experience where you can, we have a product called Dropbox AI that lets you, basically chat with your files. Or if you have a big PDF or a big slide deck or, or a big video, right?
If you have a long video and you just wanna get a sense of, like, "All right, what is this about?" Like, "Summarize this for me," or "Ask questions about it," or "Just take me to the you know, take me to the, the plate instead of having to read this whole, you know, this whole securities filing just answer the questions about it, or it's a big contract, we can answer those questions. So there's a lot of optimizations in the core business. We've also.
Then the content in Dropbox doesn't just sit there. Like, people have all kinds of workflows around that content, and so we've made investments in document workflow and acquisitions, like DocSend and HelloSign for e-signature, and rich content sharing, for example. And then things like. And then we look at opportunities to accelerate our product roadmap, and Command E is a great example of that.
Mm-hmm.
FormSwift is a company we bought on the document workflow, flow side. That's another example. So I'd say we're agnostic. We think about where there We've had success with both, like, talent acquisitions or early-stage acquisitions. Sometimes we will buy early products like Command E that can accelerate our roadmap.
Mm-hmm.
Then, sometimes we'll buy businesses that are scaling, like a HelloSign or a DocSend or a FormSwift.
Yeah. And I think that you, you just mentioned platform, and that kind of bleeds into my next question. When thinking about pricing and the packaging of Dropbox and its different functionalities, and how penetrated are the users of Dropbox currently in tapping into all those opportunities? And I know that you've second question will mostly be around the pricing strategy, which I know you made some changes recently with the price increases and even to your advanced SKU. So if you can talk to us about that, and any implications or changes in the strategy that you have, would be great.
Sure. So, so there's a lot of different, different levers across that portfolio. Like, how do we—well, we start with, like, how do we create the most value? How do we solve new problems for our customers? How do we make sure that the experience is high, as high quality as it can be? And how do we add features to these products? And that's when we... And we think of it first as kind of this flywheel, where we start by creating user value and improving the experience. And then, historically especially, we—you can be—as we create more value, you can capture more value through pricing or better or bundling or different, different approaches. I'd say that can. I don't think that underlying philosophy has changed much.
Obviously, in a more challenging macroeconomic environment, you know, I think you need to be more sophisticated than just continually raising prices or things like that, or what we see our customers want, or this renewed interest now is like, "Oh, we need to consolidate," or, "We don't want this many tools," or, "We need to control spend better." And so thinking about, okay, well, how do we shift our bundling strategy to accommodate that better? I also think about, I mean, I think something that's different today than a year or two ago, in addition to the economic environment, is, well, now we have a lot of new... we have 18 million subscribers. That's a lot. And so a lot of that, that game is really about connecting.
And we also find that those where we're as we become truly multi-product and attach our users, or connect our users to other experiences, like eSignature or other things, we find the biggest gap in the funnel right now is still awareness. Like, most of our customers don't realize that we do more than storage. So, there's an education and awareness piece of it that's really important that we're focused on, and pricing and packaging can help with that, but I think there's even broader, how do we make these experiences more integrated, bring them together? But I think about. So I think, how do we get for the 18 million subscribers, how do we connect them to the value we already have? But I also think about, like, the 1 billion knowledge workers, right?
Who maybe are using the files they can share offering that comes bundled with their Office suite, or, you know, we all struggle with these challenges in our browser. And, you know, there are a lot of different file sync and share offerings, but there's really no good solution to organizing cloud content. So I think a lot about how do we reach those, and how do we reach the other 90% whatever of our potential TAM, who might not be in the market for files that can share or might have had that problem solved for a while, but they have all these new challenges around organizing cloud content and think about, "Okay, I'm really excited about AI. I've played with ChatGPT, but, you know, I need something that's more personalized to me."
Or I'm curious about how can AI fit into my life and make my, and make my working life easier?" So there, I think about it as kind of two tracks . Like, how do we... And they do come together, so a lot of folks who, you know, a lot of our files that can share, our customers also need help organizing their cloud stuff. But it's, there's, there's definitely more moving parts than there were a few years ago.
So Drew, as someone who founded the company and who has tremendous stake in it, how do you view the company from a growth perspective going forward? Do you feel like there are enough vectors available to you in the technology industry? So many things have happened that you could go through a growth spurt, or do you continue to view the installed base as a tremendous asset, and there's always gonna be a high-end player in each base.
Yeah.
So do you view yourself as being comfortable being the high-end, high ASP luxury leader and letting the others do their thing? I mean, how are you approaching the next 4-5 years as to what the growth opportunity for Dropbox looks like g rowth itself.
Sure. Yeah, I mean, and I think actually, the Netflix analogy is another, is one I come back to a lot. They're a company that, you know, all along they've just- what their fundamental value prop was like, I just want to hit play on something that I want to see.
In the beginning, that took the form of, you know, I'm gonna wait in the mail for a DVD to show up, and then put it in a player and press play, like in a physical way, and then obviously they moved to streaming. The distribution and the audience that they already had was like, probably most of their early streaming customers were DVD mailing customers. They started out that way, but then, as they shifted to streaming, the potential audience opened up a lot more.
Mm-hmm.
So I think a lot about that, and then I think about some of what we talked about with pricing and packaging. I think we both want to occupy a premium, be a premium product, but then also through things like our Freemium approach, we can still get to big scale and become kind of a de facto standard or, you know, it went to the extent that Dropbox was like a verb for how you share files.
I think there's an opportunity to do that kind of thing again in the cloud world for a completely new audience. And so it's both. We both want to leverage the tremendous assets that we have, in terms of our existing scale and distribution, technical expertise, our brand, and as we all venture into this wild world of AI, like, what every customer wants and is worried about is, like: Is my stuff gonna be secure and safe and private? And, you know, none of us want a situation where you have these big companies training... using your personal information as more like, you know pellets to fuel some advertising engine or things like that.
So the fact that we have that trust relationship with our customers, and that our incentives are really well aligned, these are big advantages as we expand into AI, compared to startups. Maybe part of why I'm doing this in the context of Dropbox, instead of starting another company, is because of these advantages.
But at the same time, recognizing, like, yeah, we've got to embrace a world where you know, there's that where most people have their file sync and share needs addressed, and there's a lot. But there's a lot of new challenges, and it's much more of a green field. So I think there's, coming back to your original question, I think there's a ton of opportunity for growth. I think about how we grow, how we expand our existing accounts or expand that 18 million, and connect them to new value. There's a lot we can do there.
But then I increasingly think a lot more about, you know, what's our equivalent of the folks that are the new streaming subscribers or that new audience who might not be part of that you know, be part of our 18 million today.
Got it. Love to get your thoughts on the macro view. You want to maybe cut it by SMB or consumer, where are we in this cycle, where, you know, rate increases have taken some toll on the economy? Are we, if we are at the end of these rate increases, do you think that things could get better in the SMB market, in the consumer market?
Yeah. I mean, yeah, if anyone, if anyone here has a crystal ball as to where exactly the macro environment's gonna go, I'd love to know. I mean, I think we've seen... I mean, on the one hand, Dropbox is, for a lot of our customers, a really mission-critical, like, non-optional thing. It's just a where it's, you know, all of my company's most important information is in Dropbox. I need that in a good economy, I need that in a more challenging economy.
And so we saw that with COVID too. We didn't really, like, have this big run-up, but we also didn't have this big rundown. So I think I'm thankful that we have, you know, on, relatively speaking, something that's really important to our customers and has a lot more relative stability on that front. So I think, and I think a lot of, you know, I still have the same open questions everyone else does. I mean, so it's been good to see something resembling a softer landing, but, like, at the same time, a lot of the... You know, I don't think a lot of what, a lot of the indicators that everybody looked at and was like, "Hey, this is not sustainable," like, I don't think those things have, like, disappeared.
So I'd say we're planning. We've always planned for, you know, you know, hope for the best, but plan for a challenging environment, or just make sure that our strategy makes sense in-
You just gave me an idea.
... any of these cases.
Just gave me an idea. We should call it software landing. Sounds good, right? See, yeah, our economist, Jan Hatzius, presented today, and he's been calling for a soft landing-
Mm-hmm.
... for quite some time. He thinks, he lowered his, probability of a recession from 20% to 15%. I'm sure he's got some fancy models that-
Yeah.
that he uses natural language.
Yeah.
Naturally, a very gifted man. But I just wonder if the world were... Let's say we didn't go through 0% to 525 basis points, and the world kind of stabilized. In a stable world, I mean, do you find more opportunities to rev up the growth engine? Because after all, only 18 million people pay you. I mean, that number-
Mm-hmm
... could be much, much, much larger.
Yeah.
So what's, what's the impediment for growth? Is it more marketing and more awareness of the other things that you have to offer, or better macro? What's holding the company back from achieving the, the, the better growth that, that you're truly capable of?
Yeah, I think in with our core business, I think there's continued room for optimizations, but I think those are probably more like... You know, that's been historically, and will continue to be, kind of singles, doubles. I mean, I think the file sync and share category is pretty mature, but then there's a lot more we can do. Again, as I was saying earlier, like, there's the biggest impediment to adopting multiple products from our customers, is that they don't realize that we have multiple products. So, like, that's one we should... That's a relatively more straightforward one to fix. But then I think, when I think about what's Dropbox's biggest opportunity, it's really to organize all of your stuff, right?
Not just... Organizing your files is important, we've done a great job at that. There's a lot more we can do on that front, but I think like, but what's the unsolved problem that a billion knowledge workers have?
I mean, it's much more these things around: How do I get the right information at the right time across all these different tools? Especially in a world where I'm no longer co-located with my teammates, we're no longer in the same room, we're putting a lot more stress on our communication tools and on, those 100 tabs in our browser.
So I think a lot about just, like, what, how... I work back from, like, you know, what does the desktop of 2030 look like? I mean, I think there's this whole, you know, debate, this, this kind of loud debate the world is having over, you know, is remote work a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I think people are taking kind of this pretty binary approach to that, when we always start with, like, how do we get the best of both worlds, right?
There's a lot of advantages to the flexibility of remote work. I think everybody's sort of pleasantly, and I think-
You're 100% remote, right?
We're 90% remote.
Yeah, so we have a Virtual First working model that we announced in October 2020. So we set a model very early in the pandemic, and have not changed it and don't plan to. And we've made it work super well. I mean, there was some learning curves, but those, the scores among our employees, you know, 2,500 people globally, the scores around our Virtual First model went from some of our most like turbulent, to the highest, like, to the highest rated, highest scoring questions on our employee engagement survey.
And people love it. Like, they love being able to work from anywhere. It's allowed us to unlock these new pools of talent, it's improved our, employee retention is at all-time highs, and the sentiment, and things like that. So, like, we've really been able to make this model work really well. We've open sourced a lot of our fi- we, we p art of how we did that was we researched a lot of what these, like, remote-first companies had learned before COVID... and then we treat Dropbox basically as this lab for the future of distributed, and hybrid, and remote work.
And we lean into it super heavily on purpose, because we, like, we know this is, like, people are saying, like, remote work is less productive. It's like, yeah, you're right, because you have to operate a company differently in this new world. So I mean, two people can look at that, and either be like, "Okay, it's difficult, so therefore, we should go back, we should try to smash the 2019 button, the go back to 2019 button," which I think doesn't work.
What we believe is like, yeah, we were all forced into this, like, extremely buggy and bad beta test of what, you know, the Virtual First, or remote first, or hybrid, or distributed work can be. Like, the problems are kind of obvious. Like, let's just fix the problems and build a second version. And I think that's what, that's where ideas like Dash came from. It's like, oh yeah, there's this new, there's these new information and context challenges in the distributed world. Yeah, people can't get the right information at the right time. Okay, we need to launch a product called Dash to fix these issues with search, or alignment, or context for, for employees. So, so I think about different, you know, different opportunities on different timescales. But, no, I think there...
And then after—that's a lot of what I just talked about was COVID, or remote work, and that, but then AI could—I could have a similarly you know, long list of things that I'm excited about.
All right. Any questions? Yeah, please go ahead.
As you know, all of us, we just share more pictures and more videos, and all of the networks- [audio distortion]
Yes. As we obviously, all of us, we live in a world where we all share more pictures, more videos, big, big files, and all of that, you know, going through and from Dropbox. You know, what is your, your area of focus in terms of getting all of this compressed so that, you know, you can save on your CapEx, you can, you know. Because just storage is, we need infinite-
Yeah
... all of us.
Yeah.
There's no stopping into that, it just keeps on going more and more video, more content. How do you handle that, or how do you think about that?
Yeah. So I mean, fortunately, there's kind of two big forces, like, both the demand for storage continues to go up and, you know, we all consume a lot more today than we did five, 10, 20 years ago. At the same time, like, the cost of provisioning that storage has come down as... And especially for us, like, we have-- That's been a big source of advantage for us, as we are able to... You know, we were, like, the one car going the other direction on the highway from the public cloud to our own private infrastructure, and so we manage our own storage, and we innovate down to the hard drive or the, um... We don't manufacture the servers, but we design, you know, we co-design them with partners.
So we go all the way down the tech stack, and that's given us big advantages over our competitors in terms of cost, of performance, of being able to tune for our specific workloads. And in aggregate, as you've looked over, as you look at Dropbox since we've gone public, like, our gross margins have been ticking up, and, you know, this has been an economically favorable thing for us. And so a world you know, a world where people are consuming more storage or information, and as the complexity of that increases, the demand to have really simple solutions that scale, and are secure, and reliable, and use AI, that's only good for us.
And so, you know, I've talked a lot about the cost side of that, you know, in the storage, we're sort of talking about the cost side of that, but I think it's a huge opportunity in terms of opportunities to driving new engagement, or reach a bigger audience, or create more value. So on balance, I think these are all good things for us. You know, we're selective. We focus more on work use cases. I mean, we still have a lot of folks who use Dropbox for personal use cases, but the vast majority of Dropbox users, maybe we started more in a consumer and photo-sharing type world, but, like, 80% of our users use Dropbox, or our subscribers use Dropbox for work or some kind of mixed work and personal use case.
You know, more stuff, more complexity, more storage, more information on balance is good for us.
With that, I think, we've reached the 35-minute limit.
Okay.
Thank you so much, Drew.
Thanks.
Great to see you, and thank you for your attention and questions.
Thanks, guys.
Have a lovely evening.
Thank you. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.