Dropbox for Business product chief leaving for Index Ventures
Dropbox for Business is undergoing a leadership shuffle as its long time lead is headed back to the world of venture capital.
Ilya Fushman, who has been with Dropbox since 2011 and head of the business-minded division for the last two years, has joined Index Ventures as a general partner.
"Ilya's passion has always been in the investment world," said a Dropbox spokesperson in an email on Wednesday. "He thrives on building things from the ground up -- with a strong Dropbox for Business team and the business experiencing strong momentum, he feels like he can return to his passion."
Incidentally, Index happens to be a major investor in the cloud storage service, propelling Dropbox to a $250 million Series B financing round in 2011.
Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi, Index Ventures partners based in San Francisco, noted the close relationship between Index and Dropbox over the last four years, highlighting Fushman's role as one of the first 75 employees at the file sharing wunderkind.
"He helped build and run both the company's business and corporate development functions, before taking on a product leadership role and building out Dropbox, Dropbox for Business and the developer platform," Rimer and Volpi wrote in a blog post. "His ability to be a flexible and malleable player across the company was exactly what we were looking for in an entrepreneurially-minded partner."
Fushman will be replaced at Dropbox by Rob Baesman, who has been a product manager at Dropbox since last year.
Dropbox reps also stressed "this has been a planned transition" in the works for more than a year.
Prior to joining Dropbox, Baesman served in several senior product management roles over the course of a decade at VMware.
Earlier this week, Dropbox for Business jumped over another hurdle as it aims to garner more professional clientele with sensitive and valuable data.
The San Francisco-based business announced on Monday it has been granted ISO 27018 certification, the world's first international standard for cloud privacy and data protection.