When San Francisco-based Dropbox announced plans to open an office in Austin, the company had more volunteers than positions here.
“We still have interest,” said Ross Piper, vice president of enterprise strategy at Dropbox.
The startup kicked off its local office with a small founding team from San Francisco to maintain its corporate culture, Piper said. It now has 700 employees worldwide and it has doubled in size for the past couple of years, he said.
Dropbox opened its office at 501 Congress in February. It has 40 employees now with plans to expand to 200 employees by the end of next year, Piper said.
“This is going to be a very big part of our organization,” he said.
Piper gave the afternoon closing keynote talk at the Austin Technology Council’s fourth annual CEO Summit on Thursday at Brazos Hall in downtown Austin. More than 140 registered to attend the daylong event, which featured panel discussions and talks on variety of technology topics from transportation concerns to increasing Austin’s share of the nation’s venture capital.
The Austin office serves as Dropbox’s gateway to Latin America, said Piper. Seventy percent of its customers are outside the U.S., he said. The company also has an office in Dublin, Ireland.
Dropbox, founded in 2007, provides an online storage box that allows people and businesses to exchange files including documents, photos and videos from anywhere. More than one billion files are uploaded daily on its platform. The company has more than 275 million customers including 4 million businesses including National Geographic, Dell, Whole Foods. It’s also a partner with Dell and provides Dropbox for business using Dell’s cloud software and services.
“This is really changing the way people work,” Piper said.
Last February, the City of Austin approved an incentive package worth $244,500 for Dropbox and the company received a $1.5 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant.
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