Dropbox CEO Drew Houston speaks onstage during the Dropbox Work In Progress Conference at Pier 48 on September 25, 2019 in San Francisco
Matt Winkelmeyer | Dropbox | Getty Images
In this weekly series, CNBC takes a look at companies that made the inaugural Disruptor 50 list, 10 years later.
One year after graduating from MIT in 2006, Drew Houston began working with Arash Ferdowsi in hopes of creating one of the first cloud-based file sharing platforms that would eliminate the annoyances of physical thumb drives. The result was Dropbox, a company that has now made a name for itself as one of the leading organization and collaboration tools worldwide.
Today, Dropbox reports having more than 700 million registered users in more than 180 countries and regions globally. The company brought in $2.2 billion worth of revenue in 2021 and is a five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company.
With goals to reduce busywork and help organizations stay in sync, Dropbox offers a suite of systems that include cloud storage platforms, password managers and computer backup systems. It has grown its offerings in acquiring platforms such as HelloSign in January 2019, Valt in November 2019 and DocSend in March 2021.
In its most recent quarter, Dropbox reported $591 million in revenue with a net profit of $83.2 million. Over 17.5 million users pay for its services, and the company has said more than 90% of its revenue results from individual consumers buying subscriptions.
“In particular, we’re pleased with the results of the changes to our team’s plans, and excited about our progress innovating around new products and driving multi product adoption, including the release of Capture to all Dropbox users and the introduction of the rebranded Dropbox Sign,” Houston, who is now Dropbox’s CEO, said in a statement. “As we look towards 2023 and beyond, I’m proud of our team’s execution towards our strategy while maintaining a healthy balance of growth and profitability.”
Dropbox went public in March 2018, listing a highly-anticipated $756 million IPO on the Nasdaq. One of the largest IPOs in tech at the time, Dropbox was valued at more than $12 billion on its first day of trading. Its performance since an initial surge has been rocky.
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As one of the first companies to embrace the shift to a virtual workplace at the beginning of the pandemic, Dropbox announced its “virtual first” remote work setup in October 2020, asking employees to work remotely 90% of the time. The program, which officially launched in April 2021, was a significant shift for the business that once flaunted perks like award-winning cuisine in its cafeteria, and a top-notch gym and yoga studio, all at no cost for employees. The change also cost the San Francisco-based company almost $400 million in real estate, turning it unprofitable in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Even with some reports that the business is seeing high turnover rates attributed to the previous in-office bonuses being taken away, Dropbox has picked up on “boomerang” employees, bringing many previous employees back to the company on account of the workplace flexibility it now offers, Houston said at the CNBC Work Summit in October.
“We’ve been able to punch way above our weight class,” Houston said at the CNBC Work Summit. “I think the companies who offer that flexibility are going to be able to outrecruit, outretain, outperform ones that don’t.”
Dropbox continues to face many competitors in the cloud space – Google, Microsoft and Apple, to name a few of the most notable, as well as fellow former startup to IPO, Box. The company is forecasting revenue of $2.3 billion for 2022 and foresees revenue between $592 million and $595 million for the fourth quarter. But the stock remains well below its first-day trade from back in 2018, and at roughly half the value of its highest market peak, caught up in the tech downturn that has cratered many former high-flying, high growth startups.
“We’ve always lived in a competitive environment … and importantly all our growth has happened in that environment,” Houston said at the time of the Dropbox IPO. “We don’t see Amazon in our space. You know, things can change. We don’t count anyone out.”
To create long-term value, Dropbox is building on momentum through promoting new products and acquisitions, Houston said on CNBC’s “TechCheck” in November 2021. The company plans to introduce more of its products to existing customers in hopes of increasing the number of paid users on its platform, Houston said.
“We certainly made a lot of progress since we went public, and we have a lot of opportunity in front of us,” Houston told TechCheck.
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Qwen3 is Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Alibaba released the next generation of its open-sourced large language models, Qwen3, on Tuesday — and experts are calling it yet another breakthrough in China’s booming open-source artificial intelligence space.
In a blog post, the Chinese tech giant said Qwen3 promises improvements in reasoning, instruction following, tool usage and multilingual tasks, rivaling other top-tier models such as DeepSeek’s R1 in several industry benchmarks.
The LLM series includes eight variations that span a range of architectures and sizes, offering developers flexibility when using Qwen to build AI applications for edge devices like mobile phones.
Qwen3 is also Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
According to Alibaba, such models can seamlessly transition between a “thinking mode” for complex tasks such as coding and a “non-thinking mode” for faster, general-purpose responses.
“Notably, the Qwen3-235B-A22B MoE model significantly lowers deployment costs compared to other state-of-the-art models, reinforcing Alibaba’s commitment to accessible, high-performance AI,” Alibaba said.
The new models are already freely available for individual users on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s web interface. Qwen3 is also being used to power Alibaba’s AI assistant, Quark.
China’s AI advancement
AI analysts told CNBC that the Qwen3 represents a serious challenge to Alibaba’s counterparts in China, as well as industry leaders in the U.S.
In a statement to CNBC, Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said the Qwen3 series is a “significant breakthrough—not just for its best-in-class performance” but also for several features that point to the “application potential of the models.”
Those features include Qwen3’s hybrid thinking mode, its multilingual support covering 119 languages and dialects and its open-source availability, Sun added.
Open-source software generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. At the start of this year, DeepSeek’s open-sourced R1 model rocked the AI world and quickly became a catalyst for China’s AI space and open-source model adoption.
“Alibaba’s release of the Qwen 3 series further underscores the strong capabilities of Chinese labs to develop highly competitive, innovative, and open-source models, despite mounting pressure from tightened U.S. export controls,” said Ray Wang, a Washington-based analyst focusing on U.S.-China economic and technology competition.
According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models on Hugging Face.
Wang said that this adoption could continue with Qwen3, adding that its performance claims may make it the best open-source model globally — though still behind the world’s most cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.
Chinese competitors like Baidu have also rushed to release new AI models after the emergence of DeepSeek, including making plans to shift toward a more open-source business model.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek is accelerating the launch of its successor to its R1, citing anonymous sources.
“In the broader context of the U.S.-China AI race, the gap between American and Chinese labs has narrowed—likely to a few months, and some might argue, even to just weeks,” Wang said.
“With the latest release of Qwen 3 and the upcoming launch of DeepSeek’s R2, this gap is unlikely to widen—and may even continue to shrink.”
Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned.
“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”
Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.
Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.
That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.
“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”
The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo.
“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”
Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster.
“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.
Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work.
“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”
Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’schief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.
Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.
“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.
Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is on the launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites, which are expected to eventually rival Elon Musk’s Starlink system, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 9, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
Amazon on Monday launched the first batch of its Kuiper internet satellites into space after an earlier attempt was scrubbed due to inclement weather.
A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly after 7 p.m. eastern, according to a livestream.
“We had a nice smooth countdown, beautiful weather, beautiful liftoff, and Atlas V is on its way to orbit to take those 27 Kuiper satellites, put them on their way and really start this new era in internet connectivity,” Caleb Weiss, a systems engineer at ULA, said on the livestream following the launch.
The satellites are expected to separate from the rocket roughly 280 miles above Earth’s surface, at which point Amazon will look to confirm the satellites can independently maneuver and communicate with its employees on the ground.
Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit, called Project Kuiper. The service will compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the market and has 8,000 satellites in orbit.
The first Kuiper mission kicks off what will need to become a steady cadence of launches in order for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency expects the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.
Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy dozens of satellites at a time. In addition to ULA, its launch partners include Musk’s SpaceX (parent company of Starlink), European company Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ space exploration startup Blue Origin.
Amazon is spending as much as $10 billion to build the Kuiper network. It hopes to begin commercial service for consumers, enterprises and government later this year.
In his shareholder letter earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kuiper will require upfront investment at first, but eventually the company expects it to be “a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.” ROIC stands for return on invested capital.
Investors will be listening for any commentary around further capex spend on Kuiper when Amazon reports first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.