Rapid Response: A virtual-first workplace, w/Dropbox's Drew Houston

**Drew Houston** (0:01)
We saw everything starting to unfold. Watching the headlines. We were in San Francisco, in our office, making the decision to shut down the office. I don't think any of us could really imagine the magnitude of what would come next over the following several months.
This idea of being able to work from anywhere, work flexibly, this idea of telework has been around for decades. But if you sort of squint, you start to see a lot of the positive, positive potential of that being realized. And then there are a lot of pain points. We've gone through a one-way door. The vast majority of our employees don't want to go back to exactly the way things were before.
How do we preserve a lot of the flexibility and benefits of working remotely? How do we as a company reach broader pools of talent? We're calling our approach Virtual First, which is trying to combine the best elements of remote and the in-person experience.
You don't get that many opportunities to, you know, totally reimagine how you operate or how work works. And so when you think about that, it's pretty stunning. Who would have thought that the world would just lock arms overnight and be like, all right, we're just going to throw away the office, commute, all shift to working from home. So, okay, while the floorboards are up, let's really think about how we want this to look when we're able to nail it back down. It's a huge opportunity to rethink a lot of the fundamentals of the relationship between people and the technology they use at work, the way to reimagine what working life is like more broadly. And so when you flip it and think of it less of like, oh, this is a problem and really an opportunity to redesign things in a fundamental way, I think there's a lot of reason for optimism.

**Bob Safian** (1:43)
That's Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox. As remote work has rippled across industries and around the globe due to COVID-19 restrictions, Dropbox's digital storage and services have been increasingly in demand.
But these boom times haven't come without their own struggles and a healthy measure of risk taking. I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group and host of Masters of Scale, Rapid Response. I wanted to talk with Drew because he's recently announced a radical new experiment for work practices across his company called Virtual First. Dropbox closed its offices early on and will keep them closed through at least June 2021 When staffers return though, it won't be to the old style of work, but to a new hybrid that Drew acknowledges isn't fully baked yet and won't be until it's put into action.
Drew set up Dropbox to be what he calls a lab, hoping to integrate the efficiency and flexibility of remote work with the benefits of in-person engagement. His goal is to bend the future of work into a better experience for all of us.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
Thank you. We'll start the show in a moment, after a word from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business.

**Chris Renner** (3:11)
I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife Shannon, and I said, honey, we're gonna start a construction company. And she said, sweetie, you don't swing a hammer.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:22)
That's Chris Renner, founder of Pinnacle Companies, the largest builder of vacation homes in Breckenridge, Colorado, a destination for skiers worldwide.
At the time, he was a management consultant advising a local construction company. And it occurred to him that a hammer might not be the most essential tool.

**Chris Renner** (3:38)
In my conversations with the owner, I said, does everybody do it like this? And he said, my tools haven't changed in 40 years. And I'm looking at him thinking, oh man, they should.
I was thinking laptops in the field and webcams and real time communication and what I was watching was the shuffling of papers in the front seat of a pickup truck. And I just thought, there's such a better way to do this.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:10)
Chris had a spark of inspiration that he couldn't ignore. And even though we had no construction experience, he set out to upend the way the industry operated. What he didn't realize was that the business he was setting out to create would be much more than a construction company.
We'll hear how he did it later in the show. It's all part of Capital One Businesses Spotlight on Entrepreneurs following Reid's Refocus Playbook at all levels of scale. Today's Playbook Insight, Focus on the Business Behind Your Business.

**Bob Safian** (4:42)
I'm Bob Safian, and I'm here with Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox. Drew is joining us from his home in San Francisco, as I ask my questions from my home in Brooklyn.