Dropbox Hires a Google Executive, as It Starts Its Next Phase for Growth

Dennis Woodside had once led sales and operations for the Americas at Google, and was considered a hot executive recruit by other Silicon Valley companies.

Dennis Woodside, the chief executive of Motorola, owned by Google, is leaving to join Dropbox, which competes with Google in cloud storage.

His departure came two weeks after Google announced plans to sellthe unprofitable Motorola to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, less than two years after paying $12.5 billion to buy it.

Mr. Woodside will be Dropbox’s first chief operating officer, reporting to Drew Houston, its 30-year-old founder and chief executive.

In the old days, founders were often replaced as chief executive by more seasoned managers. But Mr. Houston is following the model set by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook when he hired Sheryl Sandberg as his No. 2. More recently, Snapchat’s founders hired Emily White, a former Google and Facebook executive, to do the same role.

Dropbox, the fast-growing start-up with 200 million customers, is entering a critical phase as it tries to become a grown-up company.

It started a service for businesses last fall, and recently raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation. Meanwhile, its chief competitor, Box, submitted a secret filing to go public.

“We’ve long admired Dennis’s leadership at Google and Motorola where he ran multibillion-dollar businesses and built amazing organizations around the world,” Mr. Houston said in a statement. “We’re so happy to welcome Dennis to our team — I can’t imagine a better person to help us bring Dropbox to global scale.”

Mr. Woodside previously led sales and operations for the Americas at Google, and was considered a hot executive recruit by other Silicon Valley companies, including Apple. Partly to persuade him to stay, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, appointed him to run Motorola after the acquisition.

But less than two years into Mr. Woodside’s turnaround plan for Motorola, and after the less-than-stellar debut of the Moto X phone, Mr. Page decided to sell the company.

“This was not an easy decision to make, but I leave knowing that Motorola is in great hands — now and in the future,” Mr. Woodside wrote in a blog post, after the news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Page said in a statement, “Dennis and the team have reinvented Motorola, with wonderful products like Moto X and Moto G. I wish him all the best with his new big job at Dropbox.”

After Mr. Woodside leaves at the end of March, Jonathan Rosenberg will take the role of chief operating officer at Motorola. Mr. Rosenberg, who was Google’s senior vice president for product until 2011 but resigned after Mr. Page reorganized the company in a different way, has remained an adviser to Google, particularly at Motorola. Nikesh Arora, Google’s chief business officer, will remain executive chairman of Motorola.