Rapid Response: A virtual-first workplace, w/Dropbox's Drew Houston
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In-office engagement or remote flexibility? We don't need to choose, says Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston. Facing the biggest shift in work habits in half a century, Houston has embarked on a radical experiment to reimagine how work gets done. The company's recently announced Virtual First plan dedicates all in-office activity to creative, team-based efforts, rebranding its offices as Dropbox Studios. Individual work will happen offsite, either at home or a self-chosen co-working space. Project teams set their own schedules. The unique opportunity of this moment, Houston says: How do we make work better? Yes, he admits, remote work feeds Dropbox's business, which now includes a collaboration with Zoom as part of a re-thought product roadmap. If Dropbox is going to design for the future of work, says Houston, then its own workforce needs to live in that future, right now.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We saw everything starting to unfold, watching the headlines. |
| 0:06.8 | We were in San Francisco in our office making the decision to shut down the office. |
| 0:11.6 | I don't think any of us could really imagine the magnitude of what would come next over |
| 0:16.1 | the following several months. |
| 0:19.5 | This idea of being able to work from anywhere or flexibly, this idea of telework has been |
| 0:24.3 | around for decades. |
| 0:26.3 | But if you sort of squint, you start to see a lot of the positive potential of that being |
| 0:30.9 | realized. |
| 0:32.3 | And then there are a lot of pain points we've gone through a one-way door. |
| 0:35.8 | The vast majority of our employees don't want to go back to exactly the way things were |
| 0:38.6 | before. |
| 0:40.8 | How do we preserve a lot of the flexibility and benefits of working remotely? |
| 0:45.1 | How do we as a company reach broader pools of talent? |
| 0:47.6 | We're calling our approach virtual first, which is trying to combine the best elements |
| 0:51.8 | of remote and being person-experience. |
| 0:55.2 | You don't get that many opportunities to totally reimagine how you operate or how work works. |
| 1:02.6 | And so when you think about that, it's pretty stunning. |
| 1:04.9 | Who would have thought that the world would just lock arms overnight and be like, all right, |
| 1:08.5 | we're just going to throw away the office, commute, all shift to working from home. |
| 1:12.4 | So okay, while the floorboards are up, let's really think about how we want this to look |
| 1:16.1 | when we're able to nail it back down. |
| 1:20.0 | It's a huge opportunity to rethink a lot of the fundamentals of the relationship between |
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