Google vet Neal Mohan is expected to leave the search giant to join Dropbox as its head of product.
Google’s Neal Mohan Expected to Move to Dropbox to Head Product
Another top exec departs the search giant.
Re/code had pinged Dropbox and Mohan about rumors of such a move weeks ago. Sources close to the situation said it was now happening, although a spokesperson for the San Francisco file storage company declined to comment.
I reached out to Google for comment too, but have not yet heard back. Google has tried to keep Mohan before, lobbing a significant counter offer when he was up for big job at Twitter.
Mohan’s new job he’s been offered seems to be to replace Ilya Fushman, who recently moved to Index Ventures as a partner.
Mohan would be taking over at Dropbox at an interesting time, as it seeks to expand its enterprise business and also mulls its next funding options — sources said a new round of fundraising is likely, ahead of an eventual IPO. That said, it faces intense competition all over from Google to Amazon to Box.
Mohan has been an important player over the years in Google’s efforts in the display advertising space, coming to the company when it bought DoubleClick. He worked under Susan Wojcicki, who moved over to run YouTube last year. While Mohan did not officially go over to that video unit, he has been spending a lot of time working with her of late, so much that many people inside the company thought he had moved over there.
Rumors of Mohan leaving have circulated for the last year, including moving to such companies as Twitter for big bucks (various reports said that Google forked over $100 million in stock to keep Mohan at one one point).
But here’s an interesting fact: Dropbox is one of the few consumer-facing companies that does not do ads, which are Mohan’s specialty.
Perhaps more interestingly, he is the latest major exec to leave Google of late, which has seen a bit of a talent trickle-out. Comms and policy head Rachel Whetstone left for Uber recently, as did commerce point person Sameer Samat for Jawbone.
Update: As of June 15, Mohan is staying put at Google after a series of conversations with Dropbox ended.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
