Dropbox, Inc. (DBX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
September 5, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Kasthuri Rangan
analystIt's such a delight to host Drew after -- I don't know if you've been to the Goldman Sachs conference before, maybe it's your first time or second time. But great to see you after a long time. It's just been ages, but welcome to the conference. I love your outfit, by the way, that's the coolest tech CEO outfit on day 1 of the conference, at least.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeAt least it's already worth to come here, right? The compliments from Kash.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystAnd my co moderator is [ Galina Paulovich ], who's on my team. So Drew, the company has been around for a long time. It's a substantial company at scale, significant scale. And you had this idea I remember your story, you're MIT, you're going on a bus trip somewhere. Did you imagine the company to be this large at that point in time?
Andrew Houston
executiveYes, I had it all figured out. So first, thanks Kash, for having me. And hello everyone. But yes, it's been quite a journey. I mean, Dropbox had its 16th -- we celebrated our 16th birthday in May and started around as you pointed out, the initial problem I had was I have all this stuff on all these different devices and can't access it and all these challenges that -- and the solutions like emailing myself files or carrying around my thumb drive just seemed like medieval compared to what we should be doing. And then and had that experience is like moving from Boston to California, starting a company that...
Kasthuri Rangan
analystWhat made you move to California from Boston?
Andrew Houston
executiveWell, we did -- so fun facts and probably most of you probably know Y Combinator, the early stage startup incubator, basically And they used to be bicoastal, so they would have a Boston batch in the summer and a Mountain View batch in the winter. And then we were one of the last maybe we were the last batch that they had in Boston. And I mean, the short answer from our perspective was we -- like the Silicon Valley investors like quickly wrote checks. That was an important distinction. And we had a bunch of friends from...
Kasthuri Rangan
analystNothing against Boston venture capital.
Andrew Houston
executiveYes. I mean, I'm still -- I'm a Boston native, still have 617 phone member. I'm still a Patriots fan, which makes me really popular everywhere else. But yes, then moving to California and getting funding from Sequoia and all these great places, and this is still the place where -- this is the place where it happens.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystSo 5 years from now, if you're able to come back to the Goldman Sachs conference. We hope that you're still maintaining this cool attire. What does Dropbox -- what is your intuition telling you as to what the company is going to look like? Are you going to be doing some new things solving new customer problems or more continuation on executing against the current TAM? What does the company look like? What's your vision?
Andrew Houston
executiveWell, it's we're evolving so a lot -- when you think about 5 years from now or even where we are today. We started with syncing your files, but over time, moving much more to organizing your working life and organizing all your cloud content. And so we see that work has changed a lot, but a lot of the problems are pretty familiar in a lot of ways. We're still going after the problem we started with, in a sense where in the beginning my stuff was everywhere. I couldn't find it. Back then that looked like my files were on these different devices. And the solution, like -- the solution looked like keep moving everything to the cloud and keeping files in sync. But today, a lot of work has shifted to the browser and we still have 100 files on our desktop, but that a lot has shifted. We also have 100 tabs in our browser and you look under your zoom window and it's just total mayhem and we see -- I live this, probably all of us live this just the fragmentation and the information overload that we experience. Again, the fundamental problem is just like my stuff's everywhere, I can't find it. That's still unfortunately, still a huge issue today. But the shape of the problem, the shape of the solution is pretty different. So for example, we just announced a product called Dropbox Dash, which is doing AI powered universal search. So helping organize all your cloud stuff in addition to your files. So for your email, for your Slack, for your Salesforce, for your Notion docs, for your Airtables, being able to search all those different things from one place. Because we observed -- I mean, we observed a while ago that these just in kind of ways we're like, I'm like, why do I have to carry a thumb drive around? But even just like, like why does -- why is it easier to search all of human knowledge than my company's knowledge, if you think about it, right, because you can search everything. You can search the world with a Google search. But then when it comes to searching my company stuff and increasingly even just like my stuff, I have like ten different search boxes and I get a new one every year. And actually, in a lot of ways, it's worse today than it was 20 years ago. Like 20 years ago. You search your computer and your -- or your hard drive and your -- the thing you're looking for is there or it's not. But now with all the new tools, there's a dark side of all the new tools that we've adopted, which is we have a much more fragmented experience. And this often happens in technologies like for every problem technology solves, it creates a new one, right? Part of why it's a good business, I guess. But having all these new tools means that there's no common way to organize stuff and there's a lot of issues with. So I just look at these fundamental experiences, but we're on that evolution from thinking your files to organizing all your cloud content and then organizing your working life more broadly in a more -- in a distributed world, in a hybrid world, a remote world that we're all living in.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystI know a few years back, you had this event in San Francisco, where you unveiled the new desktop search. I forget what the name was back then. So how is the latest iteration of that? I mean how is the search fundamental technology evolved to keep up with the expanding range of content and you throw in Generative AI or...
Andrew Houston
executiveYes. Well, I mean, I think we pinpointed a lot of similar issues where a lot of these things have been trends for a long time where as we're adopting more tools, is we've had increasing proliferation of tools, more information -- and this -- the browser we're using or just the way of -- our way of working and the tools we're using, just haven't scaled to keep up with the amount of stress that we're putting on the system. And when you look at your browser or you look at your desktop, these things are like -- especially after COVID, these things were never designed to be your entire working environment and in a world where now we basically work out of screens instead of offices I mean as always we're headed in that direction before COVID, but then COVID really finished that swing pretty aggressively. You just look at it like even Zoom was never designed for bar mitzvahs and congressional hearings and all those things it was used for in lockdown, right? But we're all putting much more stress on the system, and we need fundamentally more scalable ways of facing this information overload. And a lot of what's changed with -- COVID has certainly accelerated the need to have a more organized working life and digital environment. Now that's like our primary work experience. And even if you're going to an office, you're still spending most of your time working -- looking at a screen. And then the second thing is AI gives us all these new building blocks to actually do something about it. Because I think we've all felt like, yes, it would be great if things weren't so chaotic, but like what can we actually do? And the answer is after the large language model and the live Generative AI. There's a lot of new -- we can paint with a lot of new colors. So there's a lot of products I would have loved to build and probably products I would have loved to build in 2018, 2019, when we started talking about some of these themes. We couldn't build them because we didn't have that technical -- we didn't have those building blocks.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystWell, you said Zoom, Eric was here earlier today and [indiscernible], we just finished up his session and he said, are you done for the day. I said no, I've got 2 more. I got Drew at Dropbox and he said, say hi to him. On that range, since you mentioned Dash, let's just go in the direction of Dash, where were we with customer adoption, trials, early feedback? What are your goals? Where do you want to take this in the next 2 to 3 years?
Andrew Houston
executiveSure. So again, in June, we announced Dropbox Dash is something that we've been working on for a while. And something that we accelerated with -- or we seeded with an acquisition of a company called Command E a couple of years ago, and then we've put a lot more investment into it after that. But basically, AI-powered universal search, I talked about I want 10 search boxes that each search like 10% of your stuff giving you 1 search box. That search is everything. But then also helping you organize your stuff. And so I'm inspired a lot by when I look at how experiences get better on the Internet in general, things like Netflix actually have a lot of parallels that I see. So -- where in the consumer realm, when you watch Netflix or you listen to Spotify, we all know that these systems just get smarter, you can still access the whole catalog, but everything is kind of auto curated for you. And the more you watch or listen, the smarter and more targeted the experience and more personalized the experiences is and a lot of things have shifted. Like you don't have to like file away individual songs into playlist -- or into like -- or you don't have to like manually assemble a catalog, you can just get have access to everything. And then even when you create a playlist, maybe you put the first songs in -- first couple of songs in manually, but then the UI quickly switches to a recommendation engine or it's like, here's a song that's like that. Do you want this, that? And you're just sort of saying like, yes, I like that, add that, don't add that and then the next round, then it comes with a new round of recommendations that are even smarter. And so there's always intelligence that we kind of take for granted where of course, like the content experience is like so much better than it was when we had or -- there are many generations of that experience improving. And then I just look at the experience around content at work. And you could take a screenshot and compare it to like the MAC finder from 1984 and the MAC finder in 2023.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystThe [ flipee ] or whatever...
Andrew Houston
executiveRight. And it's like, yes, there's still -- there really hasn't been a lot of -- or there's a lot of room to improve that experience. There's very little intelligence in that. And then actually, there are always new problems even beyond search, even just the basics of like, where is my stuff? At least on your -- in the file world or on the PC area, like if you reboot your computer today, when you reboot your computer, you know all your files are going to be there, but it's actually not the case with your browser, right, because either you declare tad bankruptcy and just kind of nuke everything and start over.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystSo Jacob, who works for me comes to one of my desks and says you got like -- I cannot count the number of tabs you have, how do you function?
Andrew Houston
executiveExactly. But this is -- we're all like that, right? But like -- so there's no persistence. So everything kind of vanishes either because you just close everything and get overloaded or because your system updated itself and something that causes Chrome to forget all your tabs or whatever. But are you starting over. I'd like that -- that's -- there's like no persistence. There's no -- I'd say like files have folders, songs have playlists, but URLs, links, they don't really have any concept of collections. So where Dash aims to build the missing organizing layer for all your cloud content and bring all these things together. So it's in closed beta right now. We've been opening it up, taking people off the waiting list and introducing new users and tuning the -- you asked what we're focused on. I mean, just the fundamentals, kind of back to basics, back to a lot of what made the Dropbox 1.0 successful just that, start with the best possible user experience, focus on retention and frequency and depth of engagement and user growth and then monetization. And then also taking advantage of Generative AI. So I mean the best search results are the best -- the kind of best search experience you can have is a search you didn't need to make at all. So we think about how do we predict where you're going to need -- what you're going to want to open, right? Because we can -- because we know like you have a meeting coming up about a certain topic, then the system should connect the dots for you, which like, yes, you're having a meeting on this product launch and you have a document you were just looking at on that product launch or the document that's shared like why doesn't that just show up, right? So we have the start page concept in Dash, that's sort of this kind of -- that we think about as your cockpit to try to predict what you're going to need without even having to search for it. And then so there's a lot of AI and machine learning in terms of how do we sort of organize your stuff for you. And then with the rise of things like ChatGPT, people -- I think that sets new levels of expectation. It creates a lot of curiosity and customers like, okay, well, ChatGPT is great for a lot of things like a Google search is great for, but it's not personalized, right? So there's a big opportunity to have ChatGPT type experience or a messaging experience, but that is personalized to you that where you can ask the AI a question about that ChatGPT can answer, because we asked ChatGPT what's my passport number or where is that deck from last year's product launch or...
Kasthuri Rangan
analystAnd Dash can do all this?
Andrew Houston
executiveAnd that's what we're building. Because Dash connects to all your different tools, we can aggregate a lot of that and then put a layer of AI to organize it.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeSorry. So when thinking about the typical Dropbox customer and the millions that you already have, either using it and paying for it or potentially can convert to paying customers, how do you think about their reception to the new technologies such as Dash or Generative AI? I think typically we can assume that they will be faster to implement those, faster than an enterprise, and that has a lot more complexity and bureaucracy along with it. And so I'm curious to get your thoughts on that and what you're seeing from your initial beta of the Dash.
Andrew Houston
executiveWell, I mean, the first thing is, now compared to a few years ago, I don't need to spend much time explaining the problem. Like people get 100 tabs. Okay. 10 search boxes. Got it. So it's been really encouraging to finally get this get Dash out into our early customers' hands. And the concept resonates. And we're doing more to increase the coverage of all the tools that you can -- that Dash integrates with. And we're just tuning the improving search quality and responding to customer feedback and building and just continuing to iterate on the experience. And so it's been really that's been exciting to get out there. And I think there's -- this is a universal knowledge worker need. It kind of reminds me a lot of what the situation that we started with Dropbox 1.0 is like basically I just ask people like, do you carry around a thumb drive? And they're like, yes, obviously. And I'm like, you don't have to do that anymore. And then there's a lot of curiosity about the solution and then just making sure that we can deliver on the promise. And so the experience continues to get better and better every week. So I'm really excited and we'll be continue to be opening up Dash to bigger and bigger audiences through the end of the year. And we'll pretty soon, early '24 be in a position where it's just everybody can give it a shot.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeAnd I think you mentioned Command E before as an enabling technology for Dash and for a lot of the innovation that you're doing in Dropbox overall, how do you typically evaluate these opportunities and decide whether to buy or build internally?
Andrew Houston
executiveSure. We're pretty open minded and we've used I mean, we do a lot organically. There's a lot that we've done both in the core business and continuing to optimize. So we think about -- first I think about is the portfolio, right? And so our core Dropbox business, we've got 18 million subscribers. There's still -- I think there's still a lot of opportunity for invention and improvement in that experience, opportunities to add AI. So we launched -- as part of our June launch, we also shared that kind of ChatGPT like experience where you can -- we have a product called Dropbox AI that lets you basically chat with your files or if you have a big PDF or a big slide deck or a big video, right? If you have a long video and you just want to get a sense of like, what is this about? Like summarize this for me or ask questions about it or just take me to the take place instead of having to read this whole securities filing just to answer the questions about a big contract, we can answer those questions. So there's a lot of optimizations in the core business. We've also then -- the content Dropbox doesn't just sit there like people have all kinds of workflows around that content. And so we've made investments in document workflow and acquisitions like Docsend and Hellosign for e-signature and rich content sharing, for example. And then things like -- and then we look at opportunities to accelerate our product roadmap. And Command E is a great example of that. FormSwift is a company we bought on the document workflow side. That's another example. So I'd say we're agnostic. We think about where -- we've had success with both talent acquisitions or early stage acquisitions. Sometimes we will buy early products like Command E that can accelerate our roadmap and then sometimes we'll buy businesses that are scaling like a Hellosign or a Docsend or a FormSwift.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeAnd I think that you just mentioned platform, and that kind of leads into my next question. When thinking about pricing and the packaging of Dropbox and its different functionalities and how penetrated are the users of Dropbox currently in -- tapping into all those opportunities? And I know that you've -- second question will mostly be around the pricing strategy, which I know you made some changes recently with the price increases and even with your advanced SKUs. So if you can talk to us about that and any implications or changes in the strategy that you have would be great.
Andrew Houston
executiveSure. So there's a lot of different levers across that portfolio. Like how do we I mean, we start with like, how do we create the most value? How do we solve new problems for our customers? How do we make sure that the experience is as high quality as it can be? And how do we add features to these products? And we think of it first as kind of this flywheel where we start by creating user value and improving the experience. And then historically especially, you can be -- as it create more value, you can capture more value through pricing or better bundling or different approaches. I'd say that I don't think that underlying philosophy has changed much. Obviously, in a more challenging macroeconomic environment, I think you need to be more sophisticated than just continually raising prices or things like that or what your -- what we see our customers want or there's renewed interest now is like, oh, we need to consolidate or we don't want this many tools or we need to control spend better. And so thinking about, okay, well how do we shift our bundling strategy to accommodate that better? I also think about -- I mean, I think something that's different today than a year or two ago in addition to the economic environment is -- well, now we have a lot of new -- we find that there's -- we have 18 million subscribers. That's a lot. And so a lot of that game is really about connecting. We also find that those -- as we've become truly multi-product and attach our users or connect our users to other experiences like e-signature or other things, we find the biggest gap in the funnel right now is still awareness. Like most of our customers don't realize that we do more than storage. So there's an education and awareness piece of it that's really important that we're focused on. And pricing and packaging can help with that. But I think there's even broader how do we make these experiences more integrated, bring those, bring them together. And then I think about so I think how do we get for the 18 million subscribers, how do we connect them to new -- to the value we already have? But I also think about like the 1 billion knowledge workers, right? Who maybe are using the file sync and share offering that comes bundled with their office suite or, you know, we all struggle with this these challenges in our browser. And there are a lot of different file sync and share offerings but there's really no good solution to organizing cloud content. So I think a lot about how do we reach those, how do we reach the other 90 whatever percent of our potential TAM who might not be in the market for file sync and share or might have had that problem solved for a while. But they have all these new challenges around organizing cloud content and thinking about, okay, I'm really excited about AI, I've played with ChatGPT, but I need something that's more personalized to me or I'm curious about how can AI fit into my life and make my working life easier. So I think about it as kind of two tracks like how do we -- and they do come together. So a lot of folks who know -- a lot of our file sync and share customers also need help organizing their cloud stuff. But there's definitely more moving parts than there were a few years ago.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystSo Drew, as someone who founded the company and who has a tremendous stake in it, how do you view the company from a growth perspective going forward? Do you feel like there are enough vectors available to you? The technology industry, so many things have happened that you could go through a growth spurt or do you continue to view the installed base as a tremendous asset? And it's always going to be a high end player in the space. Do you view yourself as being comfortable being in the high end, high ASP luxury leader and letting the others do their thing? I mean, how are you approaching the next 4 to 5 years as to what the growth opportunity for Dropbox looks like? Growth itself.
Andrew Houston
executiveSure. Yes, I mean and -- I think actually the Netflix analogy is one I come back to a lot. They're a company that all along they've just -- what their fundamental value prop was like, I just want to hit play on something that I want to see in the beginning that took the form of I'm going to wait in the mail for a DVD to show up and then put it in a player and press play like in a physical way. And then obviously they moved to streaming. The distribution and the audience that they already have, like probably most of their early streaming customers were DVD mailing customers. They started out that way. But then as they shifted to streaming, the potential audience opened up a lot more. So I think a lot about that. And then I think about some of what we talked about with pricing and packaging. I think we both want to occupy a premium, be a premium product, but then also through things like our freemium approach, we can still be the -- we can still get to big scale and become kind of a de facto standard or to the extent that Dropbox is like a verb for how you share files, I think there's an opportunity to do that kind of thing again in the cloud world for a completely new audience. And so it's both. We both want to leverage the tremendous assets that we have in terms of our existing scale and distribution, technical expertise, our brand and as people as we all venture into this wild world of AI like what every customer wants and is worried about is like, is my stuff going to be secure and safe and private? And none of us want a situation where you have these big companies training. Using your personal information is more like pellets to fuel some advertising engine or things like that. So the fact that we have that trust relationship with our customers and that our incentives are really well aligned. These are big advantages as we expand into AI compared to start ups. I mean, part of why I'm doing this in the context of Dropbox instead of starting another company is because of these advantages, but at the same time recognizing like, yes, we've got to embrace a world where, you know, that where most people have their file sync and share needs addressed and there's a lot -- but there's a lot of new challenges and that's much more of a greenfield. So I think coming back to your original question, I think there's a ton of opportunity for growth. I think about how we grow, how we expand our existing accounts or expand that 18 million and connect them to new value. There's a lot we can do there. But then I increasingly think a lot more about what's our equivalent of the folks that are the new streaming subscribers or that new audience who might not be part of that -- be part of our 18 million today.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystGot it. I'd love to get your thoughts on the macro view. You want to maybe cut it by SMB or consumer. Where are we in this cycle where rate increases have taken some toll on the economy? Are we -- if we are at the end of these rate increases, do you think that things could get better in the SMB market and the consumer market?
Andrew Houston
executiveYeah, I mean, yeah, if anyone here has a crystal ball as to where exactly the macro environment is going to go, I'd love to know. I mean, I think we've seen I mean -- on the one hand, Dropbox is for a lot of our customers, a really mission critical, like non optional thing. It's just where it's -- all of my company's most important information is in Dropbox. I need that in a good economy. I need that in a more challenging economy. And so we saw that with COVID too. We didn't really have this big run up, but we also didn't have this big run down. So I think I'm thankful that we have a, you know, relatively speaking, something that's really important to our customers and has a lot more relative stability on that front. So I think and I think a lot of, I still have the same open questions everyone else does. So it's been good to see something resembling a softer landing. But at the same time, a lot of the -- I don't think a lot of what -- a lot of the indicators that everybody looked at and was like, hey, this is not sustainable, like I don't think those things have like disappeared. So I'd say we're planning -- we've always planned for, hope for the best, but planned for a challenging environment just to make sure that our strategy makes sense.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystYou give me an idea. Just give me an idea. You should call it software landing. Sounds good right. So yes, our economist Jan Hatzius presented today and he's been calling for a soft landing for quite some time. He thinks -- he lowered his probability of a recession from 20% to 15%. I'm sure he's got some fancy models that he uses natural language. Yes, naturally, very gifted man. But I just wonder if the word were let's say we didn't go through 0% going to 525 basis points and we're kind of stabilized in a stable world. I mean, do you find more opportunities to rev up the growth engine? Because after all, only 18 million people pay you. I mean, that number could be much, much, much larger. So what's the impediment for growth? Is it more marketing and more awareness of the other things that you have to offer? Or better macro, what's holding the company back from achieving the better growth that you're truly capable of?
Andrew Houston
executiveYeah, I think in with our core business, I think there's continued room for optimizations. I think those are probably more like that's been historically and will continue to be kind of singles, doubles. I mean, I think the file sync and share category is pretty mature. But then there's a lot more we can do. Again, as I was saying earlier, like there's -- the biggest impediment to adopting multiple products from our customers is that they don't realize that we have multiple products. So that's one reason we should that we -- that's a relatively more straightforward one to fix. But then I think when I think about what Dropbox's biggest opportunity, it's really to organize all of your stuff, right now. Organizing your files is important. We've done a great job with that. There's a lot more we can do on that front. But I think like, well, what's the unsolved problem that 1 billion knowledge workers have? I mean, it's much more these things around how do I get the right information at the right time across all these different tools, especially in a world where I might have been working in the -- where I'm no longer co-located with my teammates or we're no longer in the same room, we're putting a lot more stress on our communication tools and on those 100 tabs in our browser. So I think a lot about just like how -- I work back from -- like, what is the desktop of 2030 look like? I mean, I think there's this whole debate, this kind of loud debate the world is having over is remote work a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I think people are taking kind of a pretty binary approach to that. We always started with like, how do we get the best of both worlds, right? There's a lot of advantages to the flexibility of remote work. I think everybody is sort of pleasantly and I think everybody...
Kasthuri Rangan
analystYou guys are remote...
Andrew Houston
executiveWe're 90% remote. So we have -- a virtual first working model that we announced in October 2020. So we set a model very early in the pandemic and have not changed it and don't plan to. And we've made it work super well. I mean, there was some learning curves, but those -- the scores among our 2,500 people globally, the scores around our virtual first model went from some of our most turbulent to the highest like to the highest rated, highest scoring questions on our employee engagement survey. And people love it like they love being able to work from anywhere. It's allowed us to unlock these new pools of talent. It's -- our employee retention is at all time highs and sentiment and things like that. So we've really been able to make this model work really well. We've open sourced a lot of our -- part of how we did that was we researched a lot of what these remote first companies had learned before COVID. And then we treat Dropbox basically as this lab for the future of distributed and hybrid and remote work. And we leaned into it super heavily on purpose because we like we know this is -- like people are saying like remote work is less productive. It's like, yeah, you're right. Because you have to operate a company differently in this new world. So I mean, 2 people can look at that and either be like, okay, it's difficult, so therefore we should go back. We should try to smash the 2019 button -- go back to 2019 button, which I think doesn't work or what we believe is like, yeah, we were all forced into this like extremely buggy and bad beta test of what, you know, virtual first or remote first or hybrid or distributed work can be, like the problems are kind of obvious, like let's just fix the problems and build a second version. And I think that's where ideas like Dash came from is like, oh yeah, there's this new information and context challenges in the distributed world. Yeah, people can't get the right information at the right time. Okay, we need to launch a product called Dash to fix these issues of search or alignment or context for employees. So I think about different, different opportunities on different timescales, but. I think. And then after -- a lot of was I just talked about COVID or remote work and that but then AI could have a similarly, you know, long list of things that I'm excited about.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystAny questions? Yeah, Please go ahead.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeYou know, all of us, we just share more pictures and more videos and all other networks are -- As we obviously all of us live in a world where we all share more pictures, more videos, big, big files and all of that, you know, going through and from Dropbox, how do you -- what are your -- what is your area of focus in terms of getting all of this compressed so that, you can save on your CapEx, you can -- because just storage is we need infinite, all of us. And there's no stopping into that. It just keeps on growing, more and more video and more content. And how do you handle that or how do you think about that?
Andrew Houston
executiveYes. So I mean, fortunately there's kind of 2 big forces, like both the demand for storage continues to go up and you know, we all consume a lot more today than we did 5, 10, 20 years ago. At the same time, like the cost of provisioning that storage has come down as and especially for us like we have, that's been a big source of advantage for us is we are able to -- we were like the one car going the other direction on the highway from the public cloud to our own private infrastructure. And so we manage our own storage and we innovate down to the hard drive or the -- we don't manufacture the servers, but we design, we co-design them with partners. So we go all the way down the tech stack. And that's given us big advantages over our competitors in terms of cost, of performance, of being able to tune for our specific workloads. And in aggregate, as you've looked over, as you look at Dropbox, since we've gone public like our margins, our gross margins have been ticking up and this has been an economically favorable thing for us. And so a world, a world where people are consuming more storage or information. And as the complexity of that increases the demand to have really simple solutions that scale and are secure and reliable and use AI, that's only good for us. And so I've talked a lot about the cost side of -- in the storage, we're sort of talking about the cost side of that. But I think it's a huge opportunity in terms of opportunities to drive new engagement or reach a bigger audience or create more value. So on balance, I think these are all good things for us. We're selective. We focus more on work use cases. I mean, we still have a lot of folks who use Dropbox for personal use cases, but the vast majority of Dropbox users, maybe we started more in a consumer and photo sharing type world, but like 80% of our users use Dropbox or our subscribers use Dropbox for work or some kind of mixed work and personal use case. But more stuff, more complexity, more storage, more information on balance is good for us.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystThat. I think we've reached the 35 minute limit. Thank you so much, Drew. Great to see you. And thank you for your attention and questions.
Andrew Houston
executiveThanks, guys.
Kasthuri Rangan
analystHave a lovely evening.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeThank you.
Andrew Houston
executiveThanks, everyone.
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