Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Dropbox Picks Dublin for Its Second Office

Dropbox, the online syncing and storage provider, plans to establish its first international office in Dublin, Ireland.

Dublin has become a popular spot for Silicon Valley tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to set up shop due to costs, taxes, language, potential employees and other factors. Dropbox hasn’t chosen a specific building yet or appointed anyone to be head of its international operations, but it’s looking and recruiting now.

It’s appropriate for Dropbox to go international at this point in its life because the majority of the company’s users are outside the U.S., said CEO Drew Houston on Monday. Actually, it’s been that way from the beginning.

Today, a third of Dropbox’s users are in Europe. Its 100 million total users live in more than 200 countries.

For Dropbox, expanding into a faraway timezone is key, Houston said. The Dublin office will be dedicated to all sorts of workday-dependent businesses like sales account management, user operations and support.

What about engineering? “R&D will probably stay in San Francisco,” Houston said. “It’s important to keep everyone together.” Still, he said he feels it’s important that all Dropbox offices — make that both Dropbox offices — share the same team culture.

Internationalization has perhaps been less of a challenge for Dropbox than other companies. Dropbox is currently localized in eight languages, but Houston noted that sharing files and collaborating are a cross-cultural phenomenon. “The product is really simple,” he said, “so localization hasn’t been a barrier like with more complicated products.”

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”