Dropbox's product head is leaving to become a partner at one of its investors

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Ilya Fushman

Ilya Fushman/LinkedIn

Ilya Fushman

Index Ventures is hiring Ilya Fushman, Dropbox's product chief, as its third general partner.

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Fushman will join existing partners Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi in Index Ventures' San Francisco office next month.

In 2011, Index Ventures led Dropbox's $250 million Series B round of funding.

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A source tipped us off to the news last night, and Dropbox confirmed the news Wednesday on its blog.

We called Fushman and Dropbox, but both declined comment. Index Ventures did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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Fushman's title at Dropbox is Head of Product, Business, and Mobile, and his role is pretty important. He oversees most of Dropbox's newer products, including Dropbox for Business, the company's play to capture money from business users.

Before leading Dropbox's product function, Fushman led corporate development at the company. He also has a background in venture capital, having served as a Principal at Khosla Ventures, and a master's degree in physics from Stanford.

A person familiar with the matter says that Dropbox has been looking for a product VP for "years." This person says Fushman went to Geneva last month to participate in Index Ventures' offsite. He is headed to wine country later this week for their annual CEO event.

According to a Facebook post by Huddle cofounder Andy McLaughlin, Fushman recently invested in a $1.65 million seed round into OnboardIQ, a company that aims to streamline hiring for companies who hire mostly contractors. The round was announced yesterday.

It's certainly not unheard of for a VC firm to grab talent from one of its portfolio companies. In October 2012, Andreessen Horowitz hired Elizabeth Weil, who was at the time a Twitter marketing executive, as a Partner (Marc Andreessen invested in Twitter's 2007 Series A round.)

Dropbox's annualized run-rate is "north of $400 million," according to one report. Over the last 8 years, Dropbox has raised a total of $1.1 billion. The company was valued at $10 billion in its most recent round of funding.

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