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Commenters To Dropbox CEO: Houston, We Have a Problem
theodp (442580) writes "On Friday, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston sought to quell the uproar over the appointment of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the company's board of directors, promising in a blog post that Rice's appointment won't change its stance on privacy. More interesting than Houston's brief blog post on the method-behind-its-Condi-madness (which Dave Winer perhaps better explained a day earlier) is the firestorm in the ever-growing hundreds of comments that follow. So will Dropbox be swayed by the anti-Condi crowd ("If you do not eliminate Rice from your board you lose my business") or stand its ground, heartened by pro-Condi comments ("Good on ya, DB. You have my continued business and even greater admiration")? One imagines that Bush White House experience has left Condi pretty thick-skinned, and IPO riches are presumably on the horizon, but is falling on her "resignation sword" — a la Brendan Eich — out of the question for Condi?"
The bills from the Obama administration will dwarf the minor fraction of debt that was from the Iraq war.
Discretionary spending under Obama has grown at the slowest rate for any president since Eisenhower. Admittedly, the sequester has played a big role in this. The annual deficit Obama largely inherited from Bush has been cut in half. Go ahead and live your delusion. Some of us, including the parent poster HAVE moved on. Will you?
The real question is, "what does she bring to the table" as a member of the Board? Does her tenure as a faculty member in the Stanford School of Business matter? What about her time as the director of the Stanford Global Center for Business and the Economy?
Ms. Rice is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of Political Science, and the Faculty Director at the SGCBE.
Outside of Stanford, Rice is the founding partner of RiceHadleyGates. She also serves on the boards of C3 (energy software), Makena Capital, Commonwealth Club, Aspen Institute, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Rice is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ms. Rice is also an author, a contributor to CBS, and makes frequent appearances on the lecture circuit.
I have a lot of respect for Ms. Rice, but when you look at all the organizations and activities she's involved with, I really *do* wonder what value she would bring to the board of Dropbox. Rice seems to be spread pretty thin already.
I suspect Dropbox put her on their board for visibility/star power as much as anything.