A conversation with Dropbox VP of Product Adam Nash and Quentin Clark CTO
Greg kumparak
According to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, 80% of product users trust him, at least partially, to work.
It makes sense, then, that the company is refocusing to try to consolidate its place in the workplace; to shed its image as “just” a file storage company (at a time when almost every large company has its own cloud storage offering) and evolve into something more immutably essential to day-to-day operations.
Earlier this week, Dropbox announced that the “new Dropbox” would be released to all users. It takes the simple, shared folders that Dropbox is known for and turns them into what the company calls “Spaces” – little mini collaboration hubs for your team, complete with comment sequences, AI to highlight files you might need in the middle of the meeting and integrations in things like Slack, Trello and G Suite. With a revised interface that takes much of Dropbox’s functionality out of the operating system and into its own dedicated app, it’s by far the biggest change the user has seen since launch 12 years ago.
Shortly after the announcement, I sat down with Dropbox VP of Product Adam Nash. and CTO Quentin Clark . We chat about why the company is changing things, why they are building this on top of the existing Dropbox product, and the things that they know they just can’t change.
You can find these interviews below, edited for brevity and clarity.
Greg Kumparak: Can you explain the new approach a bit?
Adam Nash: Insurance! I think you already know that, but I have products and growth, so I will have a product bias in all of this. But Dropbox … one of its differentiating characteristics is that when we created this utility, this “magic folder” was gone everywhere.