Dropbox to put off 500 staff, or about 16% of its team of workers

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston speaks onstage all over the Dropbox Paintings In Growth Convention at Pier 48 on September 25, 2019 in San Francisco

Matt Winkelmeyer | Dropbox | Getty Photographs

Dropbox on Thursday introduced plans to chop 500 staff, or about 16% of its team of workers, in keeping with a weblog submit at the corporate’s web page.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston wrote within the weblog submit that the corporate has been reckoning with slowing enlargement, partially because of a maturation of its trade, but in addition because of financial headwinds which can be pressuring its consumers.

Houston mentioned that the corporate may be dealing with an urgency to focal point extra on synthetic intelligence-powered merchandise, and doing so would require hiring staff with other talent units.

“In a perfect global, we might merely shift other people from one workforce to some other,” Houston wrote. “And we now have executed that anywhere conceivable. On the other hand, our subsequent degree of enlargement calls for a unique mixture of talent units, specifically in AI and early-stage product building. We now have been bringing in nice skill in those spaces during the last couple years and we’re going to want much more.”

Impacted staff will obtain unfastened activity placement services and products and profession training, in keeping with the weblog submit, along side as much as 16 weeks of severance pay and one further week consistent with 12 months of Dropbox tenure.

The layoffs are a part of a broader corporate consolidation, Houston wrote, as the corporate merges its Core and File Workflows companies and a few different interior workforce restructuring. Dropbox plans to host interior the city halls day after today and subsequent week to reply to worker questions.

“Those transitions are by no means simple, however I am decided to make sure that Dropbox is at the vanguard of the AI generation, simply as we have been at the vanguard of the shift to cell and the cloud,” Houston wrote.