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Facebook Names Dropbox Chief Executive Drew Houston to Board

Dropbox’s Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston is joining Facebook’s board. 

Facebook Names Dropbox Chief Executive Drew Houston to Board
The silhouette of Drew Houston, chief executive officer and co-founder of Dropbox Inc. (Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Dropbox Inc. Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston is joining Facebook Inc.’s board.

Houston, who co-founded file-sharing software company Dropbox in 2007, is a friend of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Houston has in the past turned to Zuckerberg for help running his own company. “He’s given me a lot of advice on company scaling,” Houston told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in 2015. “How do you organize people? How do you set up these systems?”

Facebook Names Dropbox Chief Executive Drew Houston to Board

As a director of the world’s largest social-media company, Houston will be responsible for advising Zuckerberg. Still, Facebook’s dual-class stock structure means that Zuckerberg has a controlling ownership stake in Facebook, putting the board’s actual influence in question. Zuckerberg’s iron-clad authority over the company is one of the central issues each year at Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting.

“Drew brings valuable perspective to our board as a leader of a technology company with services used by millions of people and businesses,” Zuckerberg said. “He thinks deeply about where technology is going and how to build a culture that delivers services that always work well.”

Houston will be the board’s eighth member, and the first to join since lead independent director Sue Desmond-Hellmann left last October. Houston won’t be the company’s lead independent member, however, and Facebook is still looking for Desmond-Hellmann’s replacement, a company spokeswoman said.

“It’s been inspiring to watch Facebook grow into a platform that reaches billions of people around the world,” Houston said in a statement provided by Facebook. “I’m looking forward to working with Mark and the rest of the Board on the many opportunities and challenges ahead.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Kurt Wagner in San Francisco at kwagner71@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.