Dropbox ties the cloud ecosystem together through partnerships, helping the company grow: CEO

• The online backup and data storage company beat analysts' expectations on Thursday's first-quarter earnings report.
• CEO and co-founder Drew Houston said revenue is up 28 percent.
• Paid subscribers also increased by about 500,000.

Working with competitors has helped Dropbox grow, said Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of the company.

"Some of our larger competitors have become partners," Houston told Deirdre Bosa on "Closing Bell" Thursday. He listed partnerships with Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.

"A lot of these competitors have become partners because their customers have their information in Dropbox and organize it in Dropbox," he said. "They want that to be a good experience. And then tying all the different cloud ecosystems together is a job that we do better than anyone else."

"It's not a zero-sum game," Houston said.

Drew Houston, chief executive officer and co-founder of Dropbox Inc., left, speaks as Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox Inc., listens during the company's initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., on Friday, March 23, 2018.

Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The online backup and data storage company went public in March 2018, trading on the Nasdaq composite. Thursday after the bell, Dropbox reported 2018 first-quarter earnings, its first earnings report as a publicly traded company. The report beat analysts' expectations on earnings, at 8 cents per share vs. 5 cents anticipated, and revenue, at $316.3 million compared with $309.2 million expected.

The company has a market cap of nearly $13 billion, and Houston said revenue is up 28 percent. Paid subscribers also increased by about 500,000, jumping to 11.5 million.

"We had a really strong first quarter as a public company," he said.