The cloud-based file storage and sharing service Dropbox is opening its first international office in Dublin, and plans to hire between 30 and 40 people by the end of 2013, the company says.
The hirings will be added to the 240 people in its San Francisco headquarters, but will principally focus on sales and customer support rather than engineering development.
Having seen rapid growth – and turned down an offer for the company from Steve Jobs in 2009 – Dropbox is now looking to accelerate its dramatic growth, which has seen it reach 100 million users worldwide, with more than one new user joining each second.
The fast-growing startup, founded in 2007, joins a number of other US companies including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Salesforce.com and LinkedIn by choosing Dublin for its non-US headquarters.
Mitra Lohrasbpour, head of business development at Dropbox, said that the low-tax regime in place in Ireland was not the principal factor for the choice of venue. "We took a look at cities in Europe with strong technical people - Dublin had a passionate pool of talent. There are many cities were technical company can be successful, but Dublin had a strong user base and they also had multilingual skills that weren't available elsewhere … There are other considerations, such as the timezone, as they had to coordinate with the headquarters in San Francisco, and the expansibility of the office."
He declined to say how important tax considerations had been in the choice of venue. But with the company already cashflow-positive - and hence profitable on an operational basis.
Dropbox is broadly split in terms of users around the world, with one-third of the 100m in Europe, one-third in Asia, and one-third in the rest of the world, including the US. People in 95% of the Fortune 500 richest companies are said to use it.
Source: The Guardian
