The permanent studio locations include San Francisco, Austin, and Dublin, Ireland. In October 2020 Dropbox announced a “ virtual first” working model in which employees would spend most of their time at home but also schedule visits to a “ Dropbox Studio” for in-person work with teammates. There’s no substitute for in-person experience “I think the same way we had a new generation of cloud tools that revolutionized how we work - and have all these advantages that we couldn’t imagine not having now - I think we're going to have a new generation of smart tools.”ĭuring his visit to MIT, Houston spoke with Ideas Made to Matter about how Dropbox is rethinking those next generation tools, and shared some achievements, challenges, and observations that have come from leading a company in the pandemic era.

It's not just the individual parts but how they're woven together,” Houston said.

“We need to both design better tools and a smarter system. But he's also looking to protect his own workers from feeling burned out and disconnected in a remote space. Houston’s spent the better part of the past 18 months thinking about how to reverse that course and relieve knowledge worker burnout - largely because his cloud storage and collaboration software are some of the tools increasingly replied upon in the new hybrid work environment. “Instead of the tools helping us do the work, the tools kind of became the work,” Houston, SB ’05, said during the talk with Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Stephen A. Knowledge workers spend much of the day in front of a screen responding to phone notifications, appearing on video calls, or tracking down and managing collaborative work saved in a cloud space. The physical separation between work and home has largely been erased thanks to the shift to remote and hybrid office environments. Eighty thousand unread emails might be more of a head-of-a-billion-dollar-company problem, but Houston’s point applies to many of today’s knowledge workers.

Who owns dropbox now