The origins of Dropbox date to 2007 when the company’s CEOs Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi completed Y Combinator, the vaulted Silicon Valley seed accelerator. While the news of Dropbox leaving AWS shocked outsiders in 2016, Dropbox had been planning the move for years. That savings alone is massive, but it underscored its intention to go public: that $75 million in savings already accounted for 15 percent of the $500 million the company intended to raise for its public offering.Ī fascinating story on its own, the cavalier moves of Dropbox have left many wondering whether a similar play would help other tech companies save big in the short-term and improve performance in the long-term. In the first two years after the company relocated the majority of its data to its own custom infrastructure, Dropbox reduced their operating expenses (OpEx) by $75 million. By that point, the tech world already knew how Dropbox left Amazon’s cloud service (for the most part), but these financial reports underscored how much money the move saved them. With the decision, the tech company who specializes in personal and business cloud storage disclosed financial reports from the last few years of operations.

In February 2018, Dropbox announced its intention to go public in the coming months. If the cloud is key to ensuring company success, why did a major tech company, on the verge of an IPO, make the decision to largely leave the cloud services of AWS?

Dropbox amazon or google cloud