Dropbox is Laying Off 20% of its Workforce

Dropbox announced today that it will lay off 20% of its workforce. CEO Drew Houston announced the news in an email to all Dropbox employees, and the exec took full responsibility for this decision that will impact 528 of the company’s workers.

In recent years, Dropbox has been trying to evolve from a single cloud storage service into a productivity suite with collaboration features. The company has also been trying to ride the AI wave with Dropbox Dash, a new universal search feature.

Houston explained in his email to employees that Dropbox is still in a “transitional period,” adding that the company continues to be impacted by “softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business.” While Dropbox is going streamline how it operates, the CEO also said that the there are big opportunities ahead as the the company somewhat anticipated where the market was going with products like Dropbox Dash.

“It’s been tremendously rewarding over the last few weeks to see customers and prospects light up when using Dash for Business for the first time, much like people did when we first launched Dropbox,” Houston said. “This market is moving fast and investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this space. This both validates the opportunity we’ve been pursuing and underscores the need for even more urgency, even more aggressive investment, and decisive action.”

Dropbox is far from being the only tech company to lay off employees as it’s looking for the next big thing. Houston said in his email that he plans to share more details about the company’s strategy in the coming days.