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Houston: Dropbox Went 90% Remote to Act as Distributed Work Lab

Drew Houston · Building the Silicon Brain - Drew Houston of Dropbox · Oct 18, 2024 · at 9:46

Drew Houston, Co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, describes the company's internal operating strategy and transition to remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“We decided to basically turn, we went like 90% remote, we still, the in-person part's really important, we can kind of come back to our working model, but we're like, yeah, this is, everybody is going to be in some kind of like distributed or hybrid state, so like, instead of like running away from this, like, let's do a full send, let's really go into it, let's live in the future a few years before our customers, let's like turn Dropbox into a lab for distributed work, and we do that like quite literally, both with our working model and then increasingly with our products”

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