Storage startup Dropbox has hired Ramsey Homsany as it’s General Counsel. Homsany is a long time Google lawyer. He joined the company in 2003 and was most recently the deputy general counsel of the commercial group. The 100 or so internal lawyers that reported to him dealt with Google’s various commercial and partnership relationships.
That experience is what Dropbox needs right now, CEO Drew Houston told me today. The company is inking lots of partnerships, for example. And huge growth is on the way.
“Hundreds of millions of people will be moving their hard drives to Dropbox in the coming years,” says Houston, “and we’ll be pioneering a new legal and policy frontier.”
Hyperbole? Maybe. But Dropbox is growing like crazy. They’ve more than doubled their staff since the beginning of this year to 65 full time employees. They already have more than 25 million users, and they’ll be in the billion dollar valuation club as soon as they decide to raise a new round of financing.
This isn’t the first exec the company has stolen from Google. Head of product Jeff Bartelma, a former Google product manager, joined the company late last year.
Recently named General Counsel to Dropbox, Ramsey Homsany was previously VP of the Legal Department at Google. He began his career as an Associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Ramsey studied at Rutgers University and attained his law degree from NYU Law School as well as studying at ACS.
Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a...
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
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