Meet Dropbox’s new CTO, Aditya Agarwal from India

Photo credit: Dropbox.

Here’s the latest instance of Indians rising to top positions in American companies. File storage company Dropbox, which is one of the world’s top unicorns with a valuation over US$10 billion, has just announced a new CTO who is of Indian origin: Aditya Agarwal.

“Aditya has played an instrumental role in building products like Dropbox Business, Dropbox Enterprise, Dropbox Paper, and Dropbox Infinite. He has also scaled our engineering team from 20 to hundreds of people across multiple locations,” the company announced. Dropbox’s co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, who was also the company’s CTO until now, will continue to help Dropbox scale as a company and business, the announcement said.

“Innovation [is] at the heart of every technology company’s journey,” says Aditya on his Facebook wall. “As CTO, I’ll focus on fostering a culture of technical creativity so we can continue to build breakthrough products.”

According to Bloomberg, Dropbox is in talks with advisors for a possible IPO in 2017. One of Dropbox’s biggest competitors Box Inc. went public last year at a US$1.7 billion valuation.

Wizard of Facebook

Aditya came to Dropbox via the acquisition of Cove, a company he co-founded. It focused on improving group collaboration and communication.

Earlier, he was one of the first engineers at Facebook, who played a key role in designing and building Facebook’s engineering infrastructure. He oversaw the development of several Facebook products, including News Feed, Search, Photos, Profile, and Applications. He was the director of product engineering at Facebook when he quit to co-found Cove. He has also worked with Oracle.

Aditya, who is on the board of directors of Indian ecommerce leader Flipkart, holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is on the board of the Anita Borg Institute as well.

Google, Microsoft, and Adobe are among several American tech companies helmed by Indian professionals, signaling a culture of meritocracy.

See: The world’s best firms have Indian CEOs – but why not in Asia?