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Dropbox, in a move that will surely have investors wondering about the storage startup’s IPO plans, is replacing its insider CFO Sujay Jaswa with former Motorola Mobility CFO Vanessa Wittman.
The San Francisco company confirmed the move after Re/code called about the impending change.
The shift puts in place a top financial exec with strong public company experience, as well as a link to COO Dennis Woodside. Wittman worked with him at the Google-owned company.
Jaswa — who has been at Dropbox since 2010 and has been a key exec of co-founder and CEO Drew Houston — only got his CFO job a year ago, after the company looked at a number of external candidates. The former venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates will be moving back into some kind of unspecified investing job, but will also remain a special adviser to the company.
At Dropbox, Jaswa led international expansion, several large deals and massive fundings, which have ultimately valued the company at $10 billion. Sources said it is currently working on some additional funding to expand its infrastructure that could raise its market value to $11 billion.
Wittman has longtime experience in the public sector. She was CFO at Marsh & McLennan and a corporate development exec at Microsoft. Wittman also worked in finance at Morgan Stanley, as a VC at Sterling Payot and as a CFO of both 360Networks and Metricom.
Perhaps most interestingly, she was also CFO at cable giant Adelphia in the wake of its epic implosion and was charged with cleaning up the vast accounting nightmare through its bankruptcy.
Wittman starts her financial reign in March and will surely face a lot of questions about when Dropbox is going public. Most observers do not expect an IPO until 2016 — it’s still not clear if the company is profitable, although annual revenue estimates are about $200 million.
“There are very few companies that have the potential to completely shape the way we interact with technology on a daily basis,” said Wittman in a statement to Re/code. “This is what has attracted me to Dropbox.”
Said Houston, praising Jaswa: “Sujay joined Dropbox back in 2010 and before long was running the entire business side of the company. He built our business teams from scratch, raised more than a billion dollars, and hired some of our strongest leaders.”
And let’s give Jaswa the last word (because why not?): “The last four years have been an incredible journey as Dropbox has grown from just 25 people in a small office on Market Street to a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of millions of users around the world,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
