Mark Zuckerberg's friend, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, is joining Facebook's board of directors

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Mark Zuckerberg's friend, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, is joining Facebook's board of directors
Drew Houston

Drew Angerer / Getty

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  • Dropbox CEO Drew Houston has been appointed to Facebook's board of directors.
  • In a statement, Zuckerberg said that "Drew brings valuable perspective to our board as a leader of a technology company with services used by millions of people and businesses."
  • There has been significant turnover on Facebook's board of directors in recent years.
  • Houston is a long-time friend of Zuckerberg, and will likely be a supportive figure on the board as Facebook faces ongoing scrutiny.

Drew Houston, the cofounder and CEO of Dropbox and a "close friend" of Mark Zuckerberg, has been appointed to Facebook's board of directors.

The move, which was announced by Facebook on Monday, adds another figure to the board who is likely to be strongly supportive of Zuckerberg at a time of mounting regulatory and political scrutiny of the company.

Houston cofounded cloud storage firm Dropbox in 2007, and remains its chief executive, leading it to a successful 2018 IPO.

Houston and Zuckerberg have a long-running and well-documented friendship: A 2015 Fast Company profile of Houston described him as a "close friend" of the Facebook CEO, and the pair have been photographed together over the years. Houston has also turned to Zuckerberg for business advice, he said in an interview in 2015: "[he's] given me a lot of advice just on company scaling, how do you organize people, how do you set up these systems.

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In the blog post announcing Houston's appointment, Zuckerberg said in a statement: "Drew brings valuable perspective to our board as a leader of a technology company with services used by millions of people and businesses. He thinks deeply about where technology is going and how to build a culture that delivers services that always work well."

There has been significant turnover on Facebook's board in recent years. In October 2019, Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and lead independent director on the board, departed after six years. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and politico Erskine Bowles left in April 2019, while Peggy Alford - former CFO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - was appointed.

In addition to Houston, Zuckerberg, and Alford, Facebook's board currently includes COO Sheryl Sandberg, investor Marc Andreessen, General Catalyst managing director Kenneth Chenault, Founders Fund investor Peter Thiel, and Cranemere Group CEO Jeffrey Zients.

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