Condoleezza Rice, Meg Whitman, Drew Houston, and everybody else who's poised to get richer from the Dropbox IPO
Mike Blake/Reuters
- Dropbox filed its S-1 on Friday, revealing ample information about who owns stakes in the $10 billion file sharing company.
- Among its biggest shareholders are CEO Drew Houston and his co-founder Arash Ferdoswi.
- Perhaps more surprising though: Former HP Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman and former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both have a piece of the pie.
Dropbox CEO and cofounder Drew Houston is set to make a pretty penny when the cloud storage goes public, as it filed to do on Friday. But he's not the only one.
In its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Dropbox revealed its biggest shareholders. That includes Houston's cofounder Arash Ferdowski, the venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Accel, two advisory firms and the company's board of directors.
And the Dropbox board of directors includes some high-profile figures, including former HP Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman and former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Indeed, the filing reveals that Rice, specifically, currently holds 22,356 Class B shares of Dropbox.
With the company valuing each of those shares at $7.01 as of the end of 2017, that makes Rice's stake worth about $156,000. And her stake could get far more valuable, depending on how Dropbox's IPO performs.
Here's who else stands to get rich off of Dropbox's public offering:
Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO and co-founder, holds a ownesrship stake in the company of 25.5%, giving him 24.4% of all voting power at the company. Arash Ferdowsi, Houston's co-founder, has 10.3% of ownership in Dropbox, giving him 9.8% of all voting power at Dropbox.
Otherwise, individual executives and members of the board of directors own less than 1% of Dropbox. However, Dropbox does say that all of its directors, and all of its executives, all together, own 36.6% of the company, with 35.5% voting power.
AP
Besides Rice and Whitman, Dropbox board members include Donald W. Blair, director of the material science company Corning Incorporated and the former CFO at Nike; Bryan Schreier, a partner at Sequoia Capital; Paul E. Jacobs, the executive chairman of Qualcomm; and Robert J. Mylod, Jr, managing partner at Annox Capital Management and the former CFO at Priceline Group. They all hold a modest stake in the company, included in that 36.6% figure.
The rest of the major Dropbox shareholders come from the world of venture capital.
Sequoia Capital, which led Dropbox's Series A round in 2008, owns 23.2% of the company with 24.8% voting power. Accel owns 5% of the company with 5.3% voting power. T. Rowe Price owns 3.5% of Dropbox, with 2.2% voting power. Finally, Green Bay Advisors owns less than 1% of the company overall, but 8.2% of Class A shares.
After the IPO, all these major shareholders will have the chance to cash out and make good on their investment. Or, perhaps, they could choose to hang on and see if Drew Houston can achieve his ambitious goal of getting the company up to $60 a share - at which point, he'd own even more of the company.
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