Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down after 19 years at helm of cloud storage pioneer

Drew Houston, chief executive officer and co-founder of Dropbox Inc., smiles during The Wall Street Journal Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2019. Martina Albertazzi | Bloomberg | Drew Houston founded Dropbox nearly two decades ago out at age 24, eventually becoming a household name in Silicon Valley and the first tech entrepreneur to take a company from the Y Combinator incubator program all the way to the public market . Now, at 43, Houston is ready to do something else. He's informing staffers on Tuesday that he'll be transitioning into an executive chairman role after an initial period sharing the co-CEO title with Ashraf Alkarmi, who is being promoted from product chief. Alkarmi will eventually take over the top job on his own. By almost any measure, Houston has had a great run at Dropbox, helping pioneer the cloud storage market, competing head-to-head with Google and Apple and building a net worth of over $2 billion, thanks to substantial ownership in his company. But in the land of outsized expectations, Houston has overseen a company that peaked too soon and never became a generation-defining brand. Dropbox's current market cap of just over $6 billion is down by half from the high price on its first day of trading in 2018, and is below the $10 billion valuation it was ascribed by private market investors in 2014. …