San Francisco’s Mayor Lee Drops by Dropbox’s New Headquarters

SF Business Times

April 25, 2012
Published in: SF Business Times
Author: Patrick Hoge, Reporter

San Francisco’s Mayor Lee drops by Dropbox’s new headquarters

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee visited the new China Basin headquarters of the super popular online content storage and sharing sensation Dropbox Inc. Wednesday in his continuing effort to embrace and tout the city’s booming tech sector.

Dropbox opened the doors of its new 87,000-square-foot digs in the China Basin Landing Building at 185 Berry St., just across Third Street from the San Francisco Giants ballpark, and CEO Drew Houston gave the mayor a tour and an opportunity to address employees.

“We’re proud to call San Francisco our home; there’s no better place in the world for creative thinkers and builders,” Houston said.

Houston founded Dropbox in 2007 with Arash Ferdowsi. The web service stores documents, photographs and videos and syncs them across different devices and platforms for more than 50 million users.

The panda riding the dinosaur to the left, by the way, was a birthday gift to an engineer from her boyfriend that subsequently got adopted by the staff. The creature is listed as an engineer on the “Our Team” page of the Dropbox website, which says, “Panda joins us from Sichuan University. When not coding, she enjoys wrestling and bamboo. Panda is a proud supporter of the WWF.”

Dropbox also has a thing for dinosaurs because Jon Ying, a Dropbox designer and artist who helped with marketing materials, draws them.

Ying is described as a native Kansan who graduated from UC San Diego who in his free time likes writing music, playing DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) and cooking.

Patrick Hoge covers technology for the San Francisco Business Times.