The Information's TITV
00:20:06 · Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:20:06] S4: So let's start with a little bit of context. So Dropbox is almost celebrating our twenty year anniversary in a couple of months, and that's a huge milestone. For the last twenty years, we've built a lot of incredible infrastructure, and that happened to be an amazing product for people. So basically, have the ability to have a trusted content foundation. You're able to not just store things, but securely share them, apply permissions. And what we found as we started rolling out our own AI capabilities, that we have a structural advantage. People don't want to just use AI. They want to use AI where their content is. They want to be able to use AI in a trusted, safe way. You want to be able to apply permissions and sharing. You don't typically work in a siloed environment, you work with people. And so what we solved for people over the last two decades, we realized there's an opportunity to solve it for agents as well. And as we started thinking more about it, we realized that what we've built over the last twenty years has an insane potential to enable other developers and AI companies to build on top of. And so as we started looking at this, we found Tigris to be an incredible match for us. And I'll explain why. Number one, they have actual thousands of customers who are developers, both AI builders and large known AI companies like fal.ai, for example. And so not only do they have traction, they have a lot of experience building for AI developers. And this is a company that built their product from day one for agentic use cases. So they have capabilities like forking and snapshotting. I'll give you what it translates to in simple terms. If you build agentic or AI workflows, you're gonna get better speed, better latency, and you're gonna be able to do things much faster and closer to your GPUs. So essentially, they've built their product from the ground up in a way that is really compelling. And what we could do with them, the match here, is we can help with taking this to more customers, and we can also help bring the exabyte scale efficient infrastructure we built in our own data centers to that company. So The Match was really great, and it accelerates significantly the opportunity.
00:22:31 · Akash Pasricha, David Risher
[00:22:31] S0: So are you talking to the replets and the lovables of the world about trying to make Tigris or, I guess, whatever you call it, DGX... Is it... DGX... Dropbox cloud? Is that what [00:22:44] S3: you're calling? [00:22:45] S0: Yeah. So we're Are you talking are you talking about them making it the the the de facto developer storage tool? I mean, is that the distribution strategy here?
00:22:45 · Akash Pasricha, Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:22:45] S0: Yeah. So we're Are you talking are you talking about them making it the the the de facto developer storage tool? I mean, is that the distribution strategy here? [00:22:55] S4: Yeah. The strategy is twofold. One is to enable a developer motion that people can come in, pick up an object storage API designed for agentic use cases. We're starting with object storage, but we're not stopping there. That the things we built over the last twenty years will also be added as APIs. So I'm going give you examples. When you store content, you need to apply typically if you're building a product capabilities on top. So who has access to that content? Can you share it? Is it secure? So there's a lot of governance on top of that content that we have today in Dropbox that will add as set of APIs. We also have capabilities to edit and transform over 300 file types because over the last twenty years, we built these capabilities. So how to process the content? So now it does not only can just drop in stuff, it can actually govern it, it can process it. And so these are capabilities that we wanna add. So part one of the motion is to enable developers in a self serve fashion to come in and pick up these APIs and use them. And part two is going after companies that are building at scale AI solutions and need to store things. You and I both know that more agents means more content. And so we have a lot So [00:24:12] S0: you are talking to all these AI coding companies about about trying to make this the de facto tool, sounds like.
00:24:12 · Akash Pasricha, Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:24:12] S0: you are talking to all these AI coding companies about about trying to make this the de facto tool, sounds like. [00:24:22] S4: Yeah. As an API, yes. And not just AI coding. We're talking about companies that, you know, you think of a, think of Higgsfield. There's a lot of companies that store a lot of content need to process it. Right. Right. There's a lot of different audience for this. Again, from self serve AI developers all the way to companies that have established products, yes. [00:24:46] S0: Right. Okay. So last time we had you on, we were talking about Dash, which is another AI tool that you guys are developing. This is of course the tool that will help people make sense of all of the context, I guess, that lives within their gigabytes, terabytes of Dropbox files. [00:25:08] S4: Sometimes petabytes, yes. [00:25:11] S0: Petabytes. I didn't know what came after terabytes, to be honest. So I asked you the question last time. I said, How are you thinking about monetizing it? You said, Well, we're going to test a few different ways in the quarter, and we are going to start monetizing it. Then they asked you on the earnings call, they said, What's the monetization strategy, but where it's at? And you didn't really answer the question. So, I mean, where is that at? How much money is Dash making you, if any at all? When are we going to start charging for it?
00:25:40 · Ashraf Alkarmi, Akash Pasricha
[00:25:40] S4: Okay. So let me give you also a little bit of context so that... Because it's important. Dash was rolled into the main Dropbox experience. So before, it used to be a standalone experience that customer had to go to and interact with. What we did based on customer feedback, they want AI in context. Customers, I'll quote one customer that said something that I really loved and appreciated. They said, This is incredible to see AI coming to my content versus my content going to AI. And so that's literally one unprompted customer feedback. So what we've done is we've put AI where people actually do work. So we've upgraded the actual Dropbox experience, and it's the largest, I would say, most significant update we've done over the last many years. So it becomes very AI native. It actually understands your content, and you can action it. So that's the biggest difference that we've done. It's not just about asking stuff about your files or finding them, although that's very important. You can actually action it. You can say, Prep me a brief on this campaign, not even describe what the campaign is because we have your files. It can take steps forward, put in briefs. It can edit PDFs, create [00:26:55] S0: But a PDF Ashraf, I want to know when it's going to raise overall revenue growth. Because this is the I mean, this is [00:27:02] S4: I'll get to your part of the question. [00:27:04] S0: Trust me.
00:27:04 · Akash Pasricha, Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:27:04] S0: Trust me. [00:27:06] S4: So basically, we did this over the last few months. We announced this as part of our strategy just last quarter. And this quarter, it's already in the hands of over 70,000 teams, and teams think of them as the small businesses. The goal is to roll it up to all English speaking teams by end of year and roll it to all customers, including people on individual plans next year. The idea is we gave people a bunch of free credits in their accounts. And the goal of this is to have people use, learn, discover. And we actually have in the rolled out experience, sorry, we actually have in the rolled out experience the ability to add and buy additional AI packs. So you get a bunch of free credits. We believe they're enough for you to experience the value of bringing AI to your content and save you a significant amount of time for the mundane tasks. And the goal is, over time, what we want to see is these AI packs getting sold. And, you know, it's too early. The reason why I didn't talk about it in earnings specifically is because we don't talk about speculative numbers. We want to be concrete about what's happening. And this is just a brand new experience that we launched. We do see people and teams buying AI packs until we are able to see like a few months of like that trend. We've talked about, you know, next quarter we'll talk more about the monetization. But this, yes, there is a monetization plan. Everybody gets a bunch of free AI credits. And as they see the value, they can buy more. That's what we Last