Dropbox welcomes two new leaders: VP of New Frontiers and VP of Design

We’re thrilled to welcome two new leaders to Dropbox. Max Ventilla joins us as VP of New Frontiers and Alastair Simpson as VP of Design. 

Max is an experienced product leader, business strategist, and entrepreneur. His career has spanned two decades, successfully building and scaling teams, and executing the product vision for startups and global companies. He has extensive experience in M&A, business development, and social strategy. He founded several startups, including AltSchool, an education technology company, and Aardvark, a social search company that was acquired by Google. At Google, he was the Head of Personalization, where he led the development of dozens of personalization offerings and created the concept of a unified user profile that is used by hundreds of millions of users today. He also worked closely with Larry Page to bring the vision for a virtual assistant to life with Google Now and Google Assistant. 

At Dropbox, Max will lead our internal product incubator, which was created to foster discovery and to help employees convert their passions, beliefs, and creative energy into new products and insights for Dropbox. He will be responsible for exploring and incubating ambitious new ideas and products not currently contemplated in our product roadmap, while continuing to champion a culture of innovation.

Alastair is an accomplished design leader. He has deep experience building and scaling global teams and working cross-functionally to bring products from concept to market. He comes to us from Atlassian, where he led global design for Atlassian's largest cloud products and platforms. He created the design strategy for its Cloud Platform from the ground up, which has become the foundational design ethos influencing all of its cloud products today. 

At Dropbox, Alastair will oversee all teams supporting design and will drive our long-term design strategy and vision for our brand and product development, in close partnership with our Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) leadership. 

Nicholas Jitkoff, who previously held this role at Dropbox, will take on a new design role focused on innovation and special projects. He’ll work closely with Alastair and will continue to be a strong influence on design direction at Dropbox. 

We’re excited to have Max and Alastair on board to bring their fresh thinking and creative energy as we continue to design a more enlightened way of working and realize our vision of building the world’s first smart workspace. 

Welcome to Dropbox, Max and Alastair!