Dropbox shed an executive today. The storage and file-sharing company’s Ilya Fushman is joining Index Ventures as a general partner.
Index Ventures led Dropbox’s $250 million Series B round of funding. Benchmark, Greylock and IVP also participated in that round. According to startup and funding database CrunchBase, Dropbox has raised north of $1 billion during its life.
When Index invested in Dropbox, the company had 45 million users. That figure, according to the firm, is now north of 300 million.
Update: Dropbox reached out to TechCrunch, saying that Rob Baesman will take over Fushman’s role leading its Dropbox for Buisiness efforts. According to the firm, the transition was “planned,” and involved new kid watching old kid for “over a year.” The quick succession should tamp down concerns that the executive exit is at all a shift in strategy away from selling Dropbox’s enterprise offerings to large customers.
Fushman was an early employee of Dropbox and noted in a tweet today that he had spent four years at the firm. Vesting schedules tend to hew to a four-year plan, after all.
Index Ventures is a big shop, with dozens of denizens and billions under management. The hiring of Fushman is timely: Index recently raised a $706 million new growth fund. That new capital pool came on the heels of Index’s $542 million fund it raised in 2014 aimed at startups.
I’v reached out to Index Ventures with questions regarding the hire and will update this post when I hear back.
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Update II: Index’s Danny Rimer, a fellow general partner, answered TechCrunch on several topics regarding the hire. Two responses stand out [Questions lightly edited for clarity]:
TechCrunch: Does Index have any intention to add other new general partners?
Rimer: Yes, we are always looking for the right partner to bring onto the team. But as we alluded to in our blog post, that can be tough when you’re looking for certain attributes and a tight-knit culture you want to preserve. Our partnership is like a family and it takes time to find the right match. It took us five years to bring on our newest partner, and while I hope it won’t take as long to find the next one, we’re very patient about this.
TechCrunch: Will Fushman departure from Dropbox harm its ability to grow enterprise revenues through the Dropbox for Business product that Fushman was in charge of?
Rimer: Not at all. Ilya has helped to build a great business and an incredible team. That team has transformed Dropbox into a business-ready productivity juggernaut and are on the playing field with the greatest companies in the world. They’ve been working on a transition. Rob Baesman will be taking over been working closely with Ilya and the team for the past year. He’s a B2B veteran with almost a decade of experience at VMware and BS and MS in computer science from Stanford.
Both parties indicated that the exit of Fushman from Dropbox for Business is not a change in strategy. Given the revenue potential of the product offering, that makes sense.