Dropbox has welcomed the former Nike CFO Don Blair to its board of directors.
Blair has more than three decades of financial and management expertise on a global scale and will serve on the board's audit committee.
He was previously the CFO at Nike for 16 years, where the company's revenue more than tripled and its market value increased by eight.
"Nike has long been a source of inspiration to me, and it was clear from the first time I met Don that we shared a belief in building a brand - and a business - that stand for something," said Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox.
Blair was an executive at PepsiCo before he joined Nike and is currently on the board of Corning Incorporated.
"Don knows how to build a sustainable business for the long-term, and we're looking forward to drawing on his expertise as we continue to grow and scale our company," said Houston.
"I'm thrilled to join the incredibly talented team at Dropbox," said Blair in a comment. "The brand stands for simple, powerful tools that help teams unleash their creativity, and I'm impressed by the way that mission inspires everything they do. Their products already reach hundreds of millions of users and the company continues to drive innovation. I look forward to being part of their continuing growth story."
Dropbox is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering according to reports from July. The cloud storage firm was looking for underwriters to draw up its IPO and was said to be interviewing investment banks last summer.
"It does look very much like an IPO is in the offing - the question will be when," said Clive Longbottom, co-founder and service director at analyst firm Quocirca. "Bringing in Don shows a definite target of something: the background he brings is of large corporate finance, rather than the ever-continuing raising of mezzanine and other rounds of investment."
"I would think that Don will want to get his feet under the table and carry out a deep study into how Dropbox currently stacks up before he would allow an IPO to be mooted - this could take up to a year if he finds that Dropbox is more of a tech company than he would really have preferred," he added.
"There are rumours around that Dropbox has already been working with banks to lay the groundwork for an IPO: hopefully, Don will not rush this process and will ensure that a proper process is gone through to ensure that it makes sense in both Dropbox's existing level of maturity and in the hunger of the markets for such a move."
HPE's outgoing CEO, Meg Whitman, also joined Dropbox's board in September. The two companies have previously partnered to build Dropbox's very own cloud infrastructure and HPE is one of the cloud storage firm's customers.
Image source: Dropbox
