Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal is set to leave the company in mid-August, amid rumours the collaboration platform is set to debut on the stock market.
Agarwal has been at Dropbox since 2012, and in a Facebook post described the company at that point as "a small scrappy startup of less than a hundred people all sitting on one floor in China Basin".
He said: "It's hard to move on from something that has been such an integral part of my life over the last five years. Dropbox is more than a company to me - it has been a part of my family. I shall miss all the Dropboxers, but will be cheering along loudly for all their future successes."
Agarwal, who took on the CTO role last year after serving as VP of engineering, described how the company has transformed today, including that it has 12 global offices and how it ships "one of the world's largest deployments of desktop and mobile software".
A Dropbox spokesperson told Cloud Pro: "After more than five years at Dropbox, Aditya has decided to leave the company. He helped us establish and grow our world-class engineering team and played an instrumental role in building products like Dropbox Business, Dropbox Enterprise, Dropbox Paper, and Smart Sync.
"We're incredibly grateful for all he's done for Dropbox. Aditya remains a close friend and ally of the company, and we wish him the best in his future endeavours."
News of his departure follows rumours that Dropbox is preparing for an initial public offering that would make it the largest US tech company to go public since Snap. At the start of June, the company was allegedly looking for underwriters to draw up the IPO.
However, previous tech IPOs may not augur well for Dropbox at the moment. Snap shares fell below their initial IPO price this month and where proceeds from technology IPOs are in a downward trend. Only 53 tech companies completed IPOs in 2016, according to PwC, which is a 42% decline year on year.
Agarwal has previously worked at Facebook but for now says he isn't clear what the future holds, simply saying: "I have been fortunate to be part of seminal companies like Facebook and Dropbox so the next act has a lot to live up to."
He did suggest he could be an intern at South Park Commons, an invite-only community organisation run by his wife, Ruchi Agarwal, where members can share and nurture ideas with each other, but Dropbox assured Cloud Pro that he's kidding.
