EP 119: Drew Houston (CEO, Dropbox): Reflections on the 17+ Year Battle Against Big Tech | The Logan Bartlett Show

Welcome to The Logan Bartlett Show.

On this episode.

What you're going to hear is a conversation I had with co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, Drew Houston.

In this discussion, Drew and I talk about a number of different things, including his reflections on the growth of Dropbox over the last 17 years, how he's learned to become a better leader and CEO, his reflections on the different mistakes that he made along the way, what happens when you try to compete with big tech, as well as his view on the future of artificial intelligence and the opportunity that it presents for Dropbox going forward.

Thanks for coming on.

I'm glad we were able to make this work.

It's great to be here.

So one of the topic du jour is I don't know your perspective on this is artificial intelligence these days,

And I think you sit in an interesting purview, both as the CEO founder of Dropbox, but then also you fairly recently joined Facebook's board.

Yep.

About five years ago, a little under five years ago.

Okay.

So so, not that recent, but you've probably seen.

I mean, this has been a an interesting.

Was it Facebook at the time, or was it Facebook at the time?

And then they, uh, changed the name a couple of years in.

So you've seen a lot of the AI investment that that business has gone through.

I'm curious how has that seat, that purview, informed your perspective on the AI opportunity for Dropbox?

Well, it's been great to watch.

And I won't speak for meta itself, but certainly like seeing the rise or seeing the power of open source and the impact it's had on democratizing.

AI has been really powerful.

And you know, whenever there's like a new era of computing, there's a question of you know, is it gonna be open?

Is it gonna be closed?

And so open source has been super powerful for clearly, in terms of making AI more accessible and in terms of both being able to use it, build products with it research.

I think on balance it helps with things like safety, because you have a lot more people working on that problem.

Versus a situation where, you know, one couple companies are the gatekeepers to everything.

I think there's definitely an alternate future where we'd all be kind of like paying rent to a couple big companies.

But instead, we've seen the price performance of these AI models increase.

Plummet, like drop 10 or 100 times better price performance every year.

And that's for a product developer like me or like Dropbox.

That means what we can build is a lot more exciting and more affordable, and things that would have been kind of priced out as being too expensive to do that much inference at our scale suddenly become viable.

So it's been awesome to have that vantage point too.

Did you have a moment in time that you can remember that was like okay, this is gonna.

I clearly need to focus on this for Dropbox business going forward.

For me personally, it was started to heat up.

I mean I started playing with more classical machine learning several years, you know, 20 mid 2010s.

Um, cause I didn't, I wanted to go, or at least thought about going to grad school, did my undergrad in computer science, but never did like the grad level courses.

So I tried to self-teach classical machine learning to see what that was about.

And then certainly, as deep learning, large language models came on the scene, then there was like that thunderclap, you know, iPhone launch moment of ChatGPT.

And when they had these instruction tuned models in GPT-3, then it was a little embarrassing.

I was on my honeymoon coding and playing with these things.

Um, where I was like, Oh my God, it's happening.

Like all this stuff I wanted to build.

And you know, back when I first started studying this stuff is like I hit all these roadblocks because, like computers basically couldn't understand text.

But then the large language model is like not only does it understand text, it can write text, it can write you JavaScript and then write a sonnet about the JavaScript.

I'm like, wow, a lot just happened in like one second.

One minute, what seemed like a very unusual person that could do all of those things.

Yeah, which is powerful to the AI.

So it was a big wake up call.

Is there something that you look at now, both from your seat as CEO of Dropbox as well as you know getting this purview into how meta is making these investments that you sort of think is an inevitability?

Yeah. that maybe we're not thinking about.

If you pick a point, I don't know, 10 years in the future, that sort of feels to you like innately, obviously this is gonna happen but might not be, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing I'm most excited about is we sort of have this We have our human intelligence, or our human brain, and then there's this new silicon intelligence, or silicon brain.

And just as you saw in computing, where adding a GPU to the CPU suddenly made all these new things possible, like AI in our working lives.

We're going to have this really... wild partnership as we plug in the silicon piece of our brain.

And so I think a lot of work will be reimagined, where we'll be able to offload a lot of our busy work and be freed up for more creative or relational tasks.

I don't think anybody can really predict exactly what this, The precise route, will be, through this, through the fog here.

But I think we'll be able to have, or I think we're opening the door to being, you know, where anybody can be a 10x person, and people that really figure out how to master these tools can be 100x people.

So I think it'll be certainly the most transformative change in our lifetimes.

Have you played with any of the physical devices, like the pendants or any of those things?

Not a lot.

I mean, I'm very excited about voice or the ability to have sort of like an infinite memory in all these different contexts as you're using your computer or your phone, for sure.

It needs to become more... socially acceptable.

I think a lot of those things are very It's very cool, but there's some social element of adoption that exists in the real world.

Yeah, and I mean, even there's some... basic legal restrictions.

You're not allowed to just go around taping everybody.

Single party consent and all that stuff, yeah.

Now, Dropbox has some AI principles?

We do.

And what are those?

So we established pretty basic principles around transparency, around how we use AI, things like privacy safety, kind of all the setting forth all the things that Dropbox will and won't do, because I mean for a number of reasons, but one is you know, customers and I'd say all of us are really excited about the good parts of AI, pretty concerned about the things that can go wrong.

And then when you intersect that with, like your stuff or your like most important information, your personal information, your company's information, you care a lot about making sure that you can trust your counterparties or the services that you're using, and we had some experience around this with Dropbox 10, because people for the first time, or a lot of people for the first time, were putting their most important information into the cloud.

Um, and this happens a lot.

You know, whether putting your money in a bank instead of under your mattress, or putting your credit card over the internet, or putting your files in the cloud, people start out with a lot of same apprehension.

That's very justifiable.

And so this was a way for us just to be on front of that, say, here's how we'll use your data.

Here's how we won't and reinforce one of Dropbox's big advantages, which is that um, Our incentives are much more fundamentally aligned with our customers from a trust perspective, because I think a lot of people worry about – when you think about how these models are trained, it's like, oh man, is this service going to take all my stuff and sort of grind it into little pellets to either sell me ads or to train their next foundation model or have other some kind of – you know, undisclosed use of my information?

We wanted to draw a bright line and say no, we're not.

You know, I think everybody's looking for providers they can trust.

And so setting these principles affirmatively was a step we took pretty early on.

And a lot of companies are, have also published similar principles.

And so for folks that don't know, what AI products have you released to date?

And what are some of the things you're excited about for the potential going forward?

Yeah, the most notable one is we have a new product called Dropbox Dash, which is really centered around universal search.

So the first basic problem we're solving is I know that thing exists, can't find it.

And this question of like why do we live in a world where it's easier to search all of human knowledge with a Google search?

And then when I go to search for my company stuff or search my company stuff, search my own information.

You know I got 10 search boxes and it's much worse experience.

And then weirdly, despite all this technological progress, this problem is like much worse today than it was 20 years ago.

20 years ago, if you wanted to find your stuff, you'd just search your hard drive or your email.

So maybe one or two search boxes.

But now we've had this.

It's kind of gone wild.

So Dash is really about fixing that, giving you one search box that can search everything.

So it'll search your Google Docs. your Slack, your email, your files, but really anything.

You don't even need files in Dropbox.

It can be a completely standalone thing or integrate with your Dropbox.

But we see that as a very fundamental challenge that a lot of knowledge workers have, and especially as we've moved into these distributed ways of working like where's the information I need to do my job?

And all the paper cuts that come along with that.

By the way, how is that powered or enhanced by AI today?

Enterprise search is a market that's been around for a long time, and it sounds like this is both consumer and B2B elements of it.

We're focused on work use cases, yeah.

Um, so it's on the one hand enterprise search has been around for a long time.

On the other hand, it's sort of similar to cloud storage.

Like when we started, there were a lot of other things that sort of claimed to do it, but In our view, none of them had really done it right.

And I think there's a similar dynamic that we've seen with how enterprise search has evolved where yeah, it exists, but no one really.

When you ask the average person, do you use any of these enterprise search products?

They're like, no.

And have you used them?

Yeah, it didn't really work very well.

And so certainly the generative AI allows you to not just do search, but really get answers.

And so we also view dashes for a lot of the questions that ChatGPT can answer, because it's not connected to your stuff.

So if you ask...

If you or I ask ChatGPT a question, we'll largely get the same answer.

But then if I want to ask, when does my lease expire?

Where's the slide from last year's product launch?

Things like that.

You need a product like Dash, which is connected to all your stuff and is grounded in all of your content.

And so is the search opportunity then and forgive me if this is a little nerdy, but more enabled in the natural language of how you can ask and then how you can.

I guess is there anything on the back end that's more intelligently done through large language models or whatever that actually surface this stuff up.

Absolutely.

So with search, well, there's a couple aspects.

When you sort of like double click on this specific problem.

There's People often have retrieval use cases where it's like I know there's a thing or I'm looking for a specific asset and I actually just want the thing.

I actually don't want to have a question I want answered.

Or I want an answer to a question.

I'm really, at the end of the day, looking for, okay, what is...

What's Dash's roadmap, or when's the release date, or what are the key features, things like that.

So it's a question.

And the Bluelinks kind of format is actually pretty good for retrieval.

You just want to get the thing quickly.

But then when you, when you're discovering things, or you don't know the answer, don't know where it might be, then a natural language fits in a lot better.

And then there are also, like some of the underlying, underpinning technologies of large language models.

Um, So these embeddings are a lot of semantic search, neural search, fuzzy search, vector search, a lot of names for it same thing.

But basically, one of the unlocks was you can now search without having to match the exact keyword.

So if you say like, oh, what's the 2025 strategy or the 2025 plan? these uh vector search can help turn up the right results for both of the things within the proximity that are close to it rather it could be you could say 2025 plan and if it was only language based it might show nothing if it was actually called whatever company estimates through 2030 that's right but it can get directionally there yeah And when you implement these things properly, these can also be learning systems where they're always getting smarter based on how you're becoming personalized to you as you use the service and then just smarter overall as the world is using the service.

I guess, at a personal level, are there things you're using AI for to make yourself more productive, or regular behaviors that you've kind of adjusted?

Yeah, lots.

I mean, you know, my first love is the engineering.

And I grew up as a little kid coding.

And so when the large language model came along you know around the chat, GPT timeframe I was suddenly like coding like an 18 year old again.

And I'd say even before that when I was like learning classical machine learning or the kind of the pre deep learning techniques, there was lots of stuff that I wanted to automate.

And I, even in my career, I started out as an engineer.

I knew I wanted to be a startup founder.

I wasn't actually sure I wanted to be a CEO, sort of backed into it.

But as I really inhabited that role and the company was really scaling, I was like man.

There's a lot of tedious stuff that managers or executives do.

So yeah, I would have all these little tools to audit my calendar or figure out which of these emails needs a response.

Actually, the motivation for Dash from my perspective was like, I can't find my stuff.

I need to, we need a better, I need a better way of managing this personally from, forget a product.

And then I wrote it and I was like oh, and there's these, embedding based, or you know these, vector search is a new thing.

And I built this little prototype of a personal search engine.

And I'm like, Oh my God, it works.

It's super scalable.

It's super fast.

Everybody's gonna be using something like this in a few years.

This is maybe a 2018, 2019.

And I'm like, we should be all over this.

So actually this is a lot of, I still write many thousands of lines of code. um, a year.

Uh, and that's like one of the key ways that I really get more of a tactile feel for like here's what the technology is.

Here's what it can do.

Here's what it can't.

And this stuff's fully baked.

This stuff isn't. um, It wasn't just my prototyping that led us to Dash, but that's really what caused me to have a lot of conviction pretty early and put a lot of chips on the table.

AI, removing AI from the equation.

Is there anything you've done from a productivity either calendar tracking or email triage or just anything?

You would recommend that people that are busy and managing you know different constituents and all that and you've done that you reflect on, even outside of AI.

Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff.

And I'd say the best stuff is really timeless.

And often the principles are pretty straightforward to describe.

And the ones I lean on are some of my favorite books are High Open Management by Andy Grove.

I guess one of the best books on management ever written.

Another is The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker.

I could give a lot more.

But just on the sort of productivity and effectiveness angle, I think those two probably get you 95 of what you need to know from a theory perspective.

Yeah.

But what's really hard about it is applying it, right?

Because it's sort of easy to read the book and then you know it's probably a super disappointing fraction of people actually apply the lessons.

And this is kind of this constant fight.

A lot of my use of AI was really to automate some of these things.

So, for example, one thing that every, every busy person struggles with like is how am I using my time?

And this first chapter after the introduction of effective executive, the title is Know Thy Time.

So what you do is you basically do a time audit and you're like okay, here's all the stuff in my calendar and I'm going to categorize it, put in these buckets, and then you line it up to your priorities.

And so I read the book a long time ago about 15 years ago, I probably did my first time audit with my admin at the time.

And I was like, oh, I probably spend most of my time on recruiting and on products.

I don't know.

And then after the audit came back, we tallied it up.

And we're like actually I spend my time on just about everything except for recruiting and product.

So it sort of highlights this.

Um, it's one of these areas where um, it's not just that we don't we, it's actually worse than not knowing where your time goes.

You actually, where it actually goes and where you think it goes are often like wildly disconnected.

And that's like one of the first findings in the book is like people are usually shocked by a time audit.

And so it's something you have to do periodically, but it's a really manual process.

And so it's something that lends itself well to automation.

But yeah, all kinds of things like that.

How am I using my time?

Am I focusing?

How am I keeping on top of my communication?

Personal search.

There's a lot of little code repositories in my little bag of tricks.

I've heard you've moved to a memo-first culture internally.

I guess, what was the shift to doing that?

Was that something you guys did in the early days?

Yeah, it was something we did in the early days.

But I would say it was really reinforced after COVID and particularly after we shifted to being about 90 remote and really kind of rethinking our working model of being a distributed company and sort of navigating the new world.

So I think it became much more important then.

And the origin, or what really emphasized it, is...

So Jeff Bezos said, of all the decisions he made when scaling Amazon like the single best decision.

It actually had nothing to do with his products or his markets or any of the other things where they've been successful.

That's what I would have thought.

He would have said something about that.

But he's like no, the best decision I ever made was to ban PowerPoint and the company and switch to this narrative-based culture.

For a bunch of reasons,

I mean one is, or the reason why it was is is helpful is because, like we've all been in those, those meetings where someone's presenting you've already read the slide but you have to wait for the person's you know verbally to catch up.

Or you know someone interrupts and ask a question, but the question's answered a couple of slides later.

And one way or another, the presentation format is kind of limits how many people you can have in a room to have an effective conversation.

It's um the how compelled you are by the presentation is less about the merits of their arguments and more about their skill in presenting and thinking on their feet.

So there's a bit of a distortion or bias that comes in that way.

And then conversely, um Narratives, they work really well because they have a much higher bit rate.

So most people can read a lot faster than they can hear.

And then when you not just write the narrative but spend the first 10, 20 minutes of a meeting reading it which is part of Amazon's practice, something that we also do It's like then everybody has, instead of like some vague, like very vague and disjoint sets of context, suddenly everybody has the same kind of high def 4k view of like what is what?

Like what are we talking about?

What is the plan?

And you know everybody has that kind of fact-based and it's super.

It's super efficient to download that to you know you can have up to like 15 or 20 people in a room and have it still be efficient.

I mean, the challenge with it is that there's a couple of issues.

One is it's very time consuming for the writer.

But it's a trade off.

It's very hard for the writer.

Easier for the reader.

But that's generally a good trade off, especially in a bigger company, because there's a lot more readers and writers.

And often when you're communicating something, it's a lot more efficient to just give people the source of truth rather than verbally sort of game of telephone broadcasting it over and over again.

And then it can also become sort of a proxying.

That can happen, where people sort of forget that the point of the narrative is to help get the work done.

The point of the the point is not to write the narrative itself.

So if you have all these like and i think you've seen this with some of what amazon's reported recently like yeah, people are having the meeting, the pre-meeting for the meeting, and you know, and there's a lot of bureaucracy around the document, then you can lose the plot that way.

Once the people have done the readout, then is it open QA for people to ask or is there generally?

Do you follow the points through for discussion at each point along the way?

Because that's one of the things I've seen is you read it and then it's like any questions and then it ends up being a little too open-ended.

Yeah.

Well, I think there's different ways to do it.

We certainly start by doing the pre-read.

And then, while we're doing the pre-read, I mean we do it in Dropbox Paper, which is sort of our document tool.

Where but you can do this in Google docs or notion anywhere else?

You could just, you people leave comments in line.

Um and so um, you both want sort of the fine grain feedback on like okay, this specific little thing, but then you also want people to zoom out and be like Oh, what's your overall reaction to this?

And um, And we've even had things where you have a little form where at the end of the pre-read you put your overall reactions and a rating or things like that, which some other companies have done.

So I think all those things can work.

But I think the biggest win is that you can get that 10 or 20 minutes.

You can get a much higher fidelity score um download to everybody in the room.

Then you could get in an hour of just talking about it, interrupting each other.

And then, as far as how the you know, do you to start at a high level or low level, do you?

You know?

I think Amazon does care a lot about they're like they ask everybody in the room to go around and give their reactions and Jeff goes last.

I think something, things like that can be helpful to not bias people.

Um, So I think that, but I think there's like multiple ways to do the review.

I think that just the key thing is like is sort of doing your meetings through through memos or narratives, versus just conversation or presentations?

As you reflect 17 years into the journey now.

Uh, I guess it's still not at the point of more time with Dropbox than not, but you know, at some point that'll cross in the next couple of years.

Right.

Um, I'm curious if you could go back and tell Drew, from 2007 or 2010, something about, I don't know, leading a business or growing, or is there something you reflect on and you wish you could impart to someone going through this journey that you've now been on?

Totally.

I think the first thing would be something like it's a journey and just like, hold on in that.

Well, and then, more specifically, becoming a CEO or becoming a leader is something that is more learned than innate.

Cause I'd had sort of a picture in my head of CEOs are like this or they come out of the womb in an Armani suit with perfect hair or something, and I was like an engineer and I hadn't really ever been a business person.

All I could see is like well, what those CEOs look like and the things they know.

I don't know a lot of those things and I don't have that seem to have that skill set.

So you know, as a first time founder, technical founder, I was like Probably like a lot of others, like insecure about am I going to be able to figure this out?

Because always the more I know, the more I realize I don't know.

So it's intimidating.

So I think the advice would be you know, just understanding.

That's part of the, it's part of the game.

All the best.

You know a lot of the best tech founders started out as engineers and learned the business part on the job.

Um, very few people went the other way.

So it's a learnable thing.

Um, but it doesn't mean it happens by itself.

Like you really have to be systematic.

The advice part that I would send myself now is like you have to be systematic about training yourself because as CEO you know to be effective you really do need to.

It's very helpful if you know a lot about a lot.

Um and like going and there's an 80 20 in each discipline, but there's like a lot of disciplines and a lot of skills you need.

Um.

So the way I've always broken that down is um, I've got to keep my personal growth curve ahead of the company's growth curve.

And in practice, what that means is think about well, what it's really thinking about.

What do I need?

Map out?

Like, what do I need to know?

You know, one year from now, two years from now, five years from now.

And what will I wish I had been learning today to kind of get ready for that?

Because, and so you know 2007, when I started the company, we didn't really have, we didn't really have much of a company.

There's sort of like.

There's just like coding, or my to-do list would have been like let's build a prototype.

Yeah.

We're going to need to hire a couple of people.

Okay.

If we hire people, we're going to need some venture funding, et cetera.

Then, like two years out, it might be more like well, we're going to have a product, but we're going to need to get users.

So we're going to need to do marketing or figure out distribution.

We're going to have to have a business model.

And then five years would be like, how do I scale an organization?

How do I be a leader manager?

How do I tangle with all these big platform companies who are all going to come after us?

So first thing he knows is like, those are all pretty different things.

And so you have to work back to like all right well, what you know, what do I need to start learning today?

Um, And some of those things you can learn pretty quickly like all right, what are the mechanics of raising venture funding?

There's a lot of technical details, but conceptually it's not that complicated.

But then something like, how do I become a great leader or a great manager?

That's so much longer.

Get comfortable with public speaking, like any of these things.

It just takes a lot longer.

And I think people psych themselves out because they're like oh, I'm not good at public speaking, so I'm not even going to try.

It's intimidating to be a CEO.

And so I'm not going to try.

But I think people sort of Yeah, in five weeks you're probably not going to learn to be a great CEO any more than you'd learn to be a great guitar player or a great doctor or something.

But in five years, you can go a long way.

And so I think that mindset of everything's...

Like learnable and the best founders like and CEOs like end up learning on the job.

You know, no one's born a CEO.

I think that would have given me some comfort and some, you know, pointed me in the right direction.

Were there good resources?

I know you're a big book reader.

And so how much did that help you?

Versus just simply doing and making mistakes, versus turning to people for advice that have been down.

Which was the most useful for you?

Yeah, by far, reading is the single for me personally.

I mean, different people learn different ways, but I think reading is by far the most efficient because most of the lessons about leadership or any of the disciplines you know, it's a lot more efficient to like learn from other people's stories and mistakes and try to do them.

Everything by trial and error.

But reading for sure.

I mean, even before Dropbox, like my first company was like an online SAT prep company, but like I would, I was in college and I would just like Search for sales on Amazon.

Buy a bunch of sales books.

Search for marketing on Amazon, buy a bunch of marketing books.

And that was how I just sort of started getting the initial scaffolding.

By the way, is it true you and your wife both got perfect SATs on both 1600 and 2400?

Is that true?

Yes.

Well-researched.

I had heard maybe two of the only people in the US, but you guys didn't meet over SAT.

We did not meet over SAT prep.

But probably bonded over it.

But after our first date I Googled, my wife and I was like no way, there's an article from some like texas periodical, that's the.

Yeah, you found it.

Yeah um, so mine hers, was a little rougher because, like the, she was like right on the bubble of the test, went from like 1600 points to 2400.

We're probably the same age.

That was me.

Yeah, i was like right, right in that, and so she had to take both.

Yeah um, she got perfect score both times.

I did not.

Mine was a little more uh, business minded, or I, when I was applying to college, I did, or I actually wrote all this software to like flash and like to drill the vocab.

And then um, that that helped a lot to to I mean, I got a perfect score and when I was in high school and then to sort of to get ready for the SAT prep company, which was actually I started it because the test was changing and made all those like 800 page books obsolete.

And at the time there weren't like great, like adaptive online learning online courses.

So that was the opportunity we were going after.

So I went, you know, as a 21 year old, to Brookline high school pulling up in my car and Starbucks and Billy Madison style.

Yeah.

That's for the kids at Brookline.

We're like, what is going on here?

If only they knew three years later, you would have started Dropbox.

That journey and all those lessons about... I'm sure everyone has this element of imposter syndrome.

I guess, as you think back on the 17 years that you've been at it, do you reflect on each moment with similar nostalgia of like this was, this was a fun part of the ride.

Are there particular points that really stand out either to the positive or to the to the negative on the journey?

Totally.

Yeah.

You know, I started Dropbox so soon after college that it was sort of All of that was just this kind of continuous blur, where

I mean, so I loved all the stages of Dropbox.

I don't know if I loved all of them.

I think they were all.

Certainly the early years were magical in that you know you move out to California a couple of kids fresh out of the dorms or whatever.

Yeah.

And, you know, you don't even know what you don't know.

And you're just trying to build something cool to then you've catch lightning in a bottle and have that kind of hyper growth, or you know, dot com experience again.

Um, that I thought I had missed, cause I I was still in high school during thecom boom.

And I was like, Oh man, maybe, maybe I just totally missed it.

Um, fortunately didn't.

Um, And then that hyper growth period where the thing is just taking off and just no matter what you're doing, it's just the numbers just going up and to the right was a really cool experience, or sort of like, you know, being a novice surfer and then suddenly being on a wave that's like 100 feet tall.

You're like, OK, I mean, it's interesting.

It's awkward and scary too because there's not a lot of style points.

You're not doing things kind of technically right, but you're just trying to hold on and stay on the board.

Then it gets tough when sort of that wave flattens out or...

They're like the natural competitive responses to your thing being successful.

It's like all the big tech companies are going to come after you.

You have to scale an organization.

And then we launched a lot of new products that we had to shut down, which is a super painful experience.

And then there are ups and downs.

Then we had another kind of up period as we went public, a down period during COVID.

AI happens back up again.

So um yeah, I feel like either like, all of the periods either were like fun to go through in some way, or they weren't fun to go through but they like were pretty necessary or, like you know, maybe I did need kind of a.

To get my teeth knocked in a little bit.

I'm curious actually, as you reflect the reason the product took off to the extent it did in the early days.

Obviously, product was elegant, very well done, and market right timing for it.

Was there anything I've actually not heard in the prep that you did?

That was actually a particularly good viral product distribution hack or some reason that it really shared.

Yeah.

Well, I think there are a few things.

And I think part of why Dropbox was able to thread the needle is we sort of got a bunch of things right in different disciplines that usually don't go together.

Meaning we needed to.

There were a lot of other, like storage companies or sort of online storage was like the startup cliche, the way that you know photo sharing or social apps or you know there's these like fad things.

Like storage was one of those.

It's hard to remember now but that.

But there are a million of these things.

Problem is none of them worked really well and to get it right you need to get a few orthogonal things right.

So you needed to get the engineering right, because part of why I built Dropbox instead of just like using one of the other services like if one of those services had worked, I wouldn't have started the company Um, but then I would go into, like the support forums of each of these other tools and they'd be like Hey, this thing like ate my wedding photos or I put in my tax returns not coming out like help.

Um, and so that was pretty terrifying to me.

Or you'd put in like a file with like a non English character and the thing would crash.

Um, or you put in a big file and it would never finish sending all that kind of stuff.

So I was like, I don't trust any of these services.

I really just want to get it right.

And I'd say there's even within the engineering.

There's a part that's like a more mathy algorithmic, like the sync protocol correctness rigor, that kind of thing, and then there's just like grungy, like operating system, like being in the guts of the kernel and you know it's like all this and just the plumbing where you had to really we had to like, basically cloud, enable other people's operating systems without the source code um, and even things like putting the i, the sync icons on the files.

So that's just getting it to work, which sounds like most people did not.

That's engineering.

But that was pretty hard.

And it was not something where you could throw lots of people at it.

You needed to throw a small number of really experts at it.

Second is the design and the user experience.

A lot of these tools just had a lot of knobs and dials.

And ironically, actually our early customers.

If they were searching for Windows file synchronization software, they were pretty bad customers because they wanted to twiddle with all these things, whereas we wanted to build something simple.

But that was even just like I was that kid in the neighborhood who would just get called to fix everybody's computers and then you learn a lot about.

Here's what easy looks like.

So there's a design piece.

And then, as you're alluding to that, they're getting distribution.

Like, how do you get distribution as a startup?

We.

That was a huge, huge um unsolved problem when we got started like all right is, people aren't looking.

You don't know, you need something like Dropbox till you have it.

Um, for the most part.

And you know some things like that, like TiVo, like oh, you didn't know you needed TiVo till you had it, but you weren't really looking for it.

Um, But I had a bunch of questions, like, how are people going to find something like that?

I mean, maybe it's like antivirus.

People weren't, like, shopping for antivirus, really.

It was sort of your antivirus is pre-installed on your computer, so like maybe we should go partner with a bunch of big companies.

And then, or maybe we should try conventional PR marketing.

But like, none of those things worked, so we were like, oh God, how are we going to acquire customers?

What really did work was borrowing from a lot of the consumer internet playbook for how you scale these products and particularly the social platforms.

They were the first to really apply a lot of the viral math which actually came from like epidemiology.

Um, so it's things like are not and spreading and you know different factors, things that came back into.

Yeah, they'd sort of transplant.

Yeah, exactly.

Um so uh, But there was a lot of good stuff about how the social platforms were able to go from zero to millions of users overnight.

And things like Facebook platform were all just flying.

It was taking off in 2007 when we were starting the company.

So it was all around us, that sort of virality and the birth of growth hacking.

But we basically applied a lot of the same engineering discipline to customer acquisition and that ended up being the thing that really worked.

Where there are a couple of vectors well, first we tried a bunch of stuff and most of the stuff didn't work, but the things that worked really worked.

So one was um this referral program that we created where, if I tell you about Dropbox um, you know, send you a referral link, you get some extra free space.

I get some free extra free space.

So we sort of sort of double-sided incentive kind of gamifying the referral process process.

And that drove probably triple digit million signups.

And then we put little other bells and whistles on it.

Like we would do it within schools and have schools race against the students in the schools race against each other.

Like which college can have the most like free space.

Um, so that, you know, I still have people who sometimes say, Oh yeah, I got Dropbox from that.

Um, however many years later.

And then the other piece was just sharing, right?

And this is more classically viral stuff.

If I share a folder with you, you become a Dropbox user, um, or you hear about it.

And then you know, and then there was all this crossover of like Oh, I started using Dropbox at home.

I brought it into work.

I started using it with my coworkers.

And then that little team becomes a department becomes a wall to wall deployment.

And that's a game of inches because you sort of have to really think about.

The funnel starts with a signup.

Then how do you onboard people successfully?

And then how do you get as many people sharing as possible?

And then, if you're sharing, like Mac, have as many recipients as possible and then make the recipient experience really good, like make sure that.

As many of those invitations are accepted or shared things are accepted.

And so we were.

We put unbelievable amounts of effort and like sanding down all these rough edges in terms of the onboarding experience.

So, for example, when we started, maybe like 20 of people would figure out how to download the Dropbox app and then put a file in.

And that was like, unfortunately that was like a big kind of limiter on the whole system.

But then we took, we brought five people in off of literally off of Craigslist.

We're like here's 40 bucks, brought them into our office above the Walgreens on Kearney Street in the city.

And we're like, all right, go from this email to sharing a file with this email address.

And then we were like sort of simulcasting it in the other conference room in the office where literally the whole team, we were all watching live as people were like fumbling their way through this.

None of them succeeded, zero of five.

Um, but we made this list of like.

Here are like 85 things here, 85 little rough edges, some big, some small.

We sent them all down.

25 went to 65.

Um, and then we did the same things with like viral, make sure that email deliverability is good.

Make sure the copy is clear.

Make sure there's a few steps as possible.

Contact list importers, you know, all this stuff.

So um, But we then, once we got that working, suddenly then the thing just it was like an anti-gravity machine.

It was like a million users, 2 million users, 10 million users, 20, 100, 500, you know.

How many rounds of Craigslist people did you have?

We just did that, you know, we did that.

That first one was like humbling enough, where we wrote down so many things that we were able to kind of do it didn't need to go back.

I think we probably did.

I mean, of course we did more user testing yeah sure, but not actually.

But i think that was just like such a searing moment in all of our memories.

Um, and even that was born from like in the early days we would get like whenever you emailed, like press at draw, actually get dropboxcom in the beginning.

Uh, but like press at support at like it would actually go to the whole whole company.

You know all 10 people in the company and so everybody could see all of the customer feedback continuously.

But I got these.

I remember like reading through the support emails one day and I was the first email was like It's the most beautiful elegant, wonderful product, saves my life.

Love you.

And I was like, this is great.

And the next one was like this is the most like impenetrable, incomprehensible garbage I've ever used.

Like you MIT nerds, like can't design a product to save your life.

And I was like, first of all, they like personalized it to my college.

I'm like, you're like, thanks dad.

Okay.

Yeah, exactly.

So I'm like, But I'm like more than any.

I was like how can I literally be getting these two emails?

Like one after the other.

Okay.

We should probably do some music testing.

Yeah.

But it ended up being one of the most important things that we did.

So there was the period of time of just viral growth and it was a rocket ship ascension through that.

And I'm sure there's a bunch of things that you look back on fondly and also you're just hanging on as that wave is taking off, I guess as you reflect on that.

And I'm sure people would be very fortunate to find themselves in a position.

But is there something that you look back on during that period of time that you wished you had done differently?

Or was it just kind of survive in advance as much as you could?

I mean obviously, what sort of is not shown is like there were like a hundred other things that we tried with, like partnerships with PC manufacturers, any virus, referral programs, all the survivorship bias, other stuff that like had no, no returns.

But um No, I mean, I was super proud of what we – and there were other things, not just the virality, but also just monetization, like the freemium model, how we acquire business customers.

Like, we were pretty early in – Pretty pioneering in terms of the product-led sort of –

Um, I mean, the industry has taken it many steps further um since then.

But um, but yeah no, I I'm like super happy with that.

You referenced like having to shut down products, uh, which I'm sure was a hard decision.

Uh, there was, there was mail and carousel and probably a few others.

Um, But you didn't beat around the bush with it, at least, as I reflect on how long it took you to do that.

One in making a decision like that, to ruthlessly prioritize on something, was that an instinctual thing?

Or was the data just telling you, like, this isn't where you need to go?

I think it happened gradually then suddenly.

It was rough.

I mean, in 2014, we were spreading our wings as a company.

And we knew we had to, I think early on, even like well before then, I think, even in 2007, 2008.

We're like we're just gonna get crushed by the big companies.

And we're just sort of waiting under the shadow of the Google Drive hammer that was one day just going to come down and just like And you were, I mean to your credit, you were pretty public about when people would say that.

You're like, yeah, probably.

Like, that's probably what's going to happen.

But if not...

What could this be and what could people singularly focused on this problem actually be able to accomplish, which I think is a level of self-awareness?

And also to anyone that's fundraising, at least on our side, it's like yeah no, I mean statistically most things will get beaten by some competitor, and there's a level of self-awareness and humbleness that I think in saying that is effective.

Well, and then I think, when you just sort of start from the user experience for like what to investors, they're like yeah, this is a graveyard.

No, none of these companies have succeeded.

It's a, it's a commodity.

Um, But mainly, mainly it's just like too much competition.

And I was like, okay, but do you use any of these products?

And they'd be like, no, I'd be like, isn't that interesting?

Step one in our adventure was not like conquer earth.

It was like not carry a thumb drive.

Um so and I you know it's also pretty clear like okay, even if we did get totally just like mugged by one of these big companies, like all the other companies would need some solution.

They.

You know we could sell the company and go do another kind of crazy side project or or whatever.

But, um, but that like didn't happen.

Well, it was interesting.

Like.

Then all these products launched iCloud, Google Drive OneDrive, Amazon had things in the space.

Everyone had things in the space.

But it was sort of like you sort of saw the mushroom cloud in the distance, but you didn't hear or feel anything.

So it's this very delayed reaction where I mean the press likes to write like oh you know, Google launches competing product.

The startup's just like dead tomorrow.

And it doesn't really.

Competition is more like a boa constrictor than a shotgun, in that you could not look at our analytics and point to a date, our engagement numbers, our revenue numbers, anything and be like oh, that's when iCloud launched oh, that's when OneDrive launched.

What it was more like was sort of taking the oxygen, like slowing our future growth or taking our future customers.

And then I think what made that...

So I would have expected oh, maybe the 2011 2012, that whole period when these things launch, was going to be the painful period.

Actually, that was fine.

If anything, it just sort of reinvigorated everyone.

They're like, okay, well, all the competing things will launch.

We can't really tell that there's a problem here.

And yet it was pretty clear like we were on borrowed time and like strategically effed, as one of my uh mentors might have put it uh, where you know, because what was what was challenging is like we we were spreading it, we dropbox was still taking off, but i reckon that it was pretty obvious that and problematic that Dropbox was not going to be a great experience for all the different use cases.

So we experienced the benefit of Dropbox being such a horizontal, general product in that you know who's dropbox for what's dropbox for.

It's like well, what's a computer for, what's a phone for.

So this meant we had like an infinity, kind of like literally anyone with an internet connection.

Kind of tam from one perspective, but then when you think what people actually do with the product, tons of difference and it's like all right.

Well, you know, people use dropbox to back up their phone and they use it to share photos, they use it to like to replace their file server or they're just run their companies in the cloud.

But like the ideal products for each of those use cases is like quite different.

And so what you do from a complimentary standpoint with the next act is if you sample 100 users, you might get 500 different answers.

Yeah.

And then you know some kind of products kind of die this way or don't reach a lot of products kind of don't reach their potential because they get kind of picked apart from unbundling.

Like Craigslist in the beginning was like know, airbnb plus upwork, plus like all these companies, but like all the the list goes on all kinds of things.

Um, but the most valuable verticals got kind of picked off by more purpose-built like oh yeah, airbnb is a much better experience for like, short-term housing or, you know, getting a job.

There's a lot of better alternatives.

Um, so we launched things like carousel as a photo sharing service, like recognizing that no, we shouldn't, you know, you shouldn't have a bunch of like photo sharing should not be a bunch of JPEG files, starting with like DSC zero zero four, you know.

Right.

So, um, We built a more purpose-built thing for that.

And then we're like well, we should also branch out from storage and get into these more collaboration use cases.

Mobile email.

Mailbox, we bought this company that was the first good mobile email client.

What was the name of the company?

Mailbox.

It was Mailbox.

Yeah.

And these guys had like a million.

That was a great product.

Yeah.

They had a million. beta waiting list with a million people on it.

And so we're like we haven't seen this since, like our own thing and and um bought the company and founders are amazing.

We made a little bit of a mistake where we put the founders in charge of all this other stuff at Dropbox.

And so the product itself kind of stagnated, stagnated.

But again the bigger issue is like we're just going to get like everything we build is going to get copy bundle kill.

I mean, maybe it was just inevitability, but as you look on that one, in making the decision not what you should have done but I'm curious of that in a second but in making that decision did you take too many inputs and opinions from people?

Do you wish you were more declarative about, no, this is what the company is going to be?

Or is this just an inevitable?

When you have a lot of different use cases, it's hard to know what signal and what's noise.

Yeah, I think we're sort of So during that, you know, 2011 to 2014 period, I think there were a lot of problems or kind of a lot of debt that was going to, Maybe strategic debt that was going to come due.

It kind of all came due at once in, like, 2015.

So...

What happened was so?

2014 we'll launch things like Carousel, buy mailbox.

We're improving these things.

But it was clear all along the way that, like all right, all these use cases of Dropbox, you're backing up your phone.

Okay, so in that market, we're like competing against the iPhone to back up your iPhone.

Like, how is that gonna go? then in photo sharing, it's like, all right, well now we're competing.

It's like not just Google and Apple, but also Facebook and snap and Instagram and all these guys.

And it's like, how's that going to go?

Then it was like, all right, well there's like this work use case and collaboration.

And fortunately that was pretty durable.

Um, but even then we're fighting against Microsoft and Google.

So um, But I think the question that faces you or that faced me was like how are we going to get out of this?

Maybe it's a little bit time delayed, but I studied companies like Netscape versus Internet Explorer or Myspace or Friendster versus Facebook.

There are a lot of dead pioneers.

And I was like, I see this happening to us.

Where, and especially if you start losing, like no one wants to work at the you know the MySpace, when the Facebook is kicking your ass.

So, and then as you, as...

Even back then, Netscape didn't get killed by Internet Explorer 1.0 or 2.0 or even 3.0.

It was like IE3, IE4, IE5.

Then that's when things really started.

The bottom started falling out.

And so we could start to see that happen in 2014, 2015.

But I'd say there were a bunch of notable things.

One was...

Google Photos launched and just gave away like unlimited free storage to everyone for life, just like not even trying to make money.

And then bundling it with their phone and just doing all the things that you know an incumbent would do.

And I'm like, wow, do we look stupid or more?

Wow, do I look stupid?

Yeah.

Um, but then, like everybody you know, all of the industry, all of our employees are like what the hell are we doing?

Um, like that bet looked really bad.

And so I say there was sort of a groundswell internally of like, how are we going to solve it?

Like, what are we going to do?

Um, none of these things seem viable.

And I reread this book Only the Paranoid Survive, because we were not the first company to be in this kind of situation.

Intel actually had this pretty early in their lifetime.

I mean, we all know Intel is like this microprocessor company, but actually they were founded as a company, memory company um, making like ram for your computer um, but then they, you know, long story short, they had all this, this sort of onslaught of like japanese competitors that were like subsidized by the government or one way or another, there's like totally unlevel playing field, like they weren't dying yet but they were probably going to, And Andy walks through that whole, you know, sort of a memoir of that whole experience.

And he's like if we were advising ourselves.

Or this little vignette where they're in the two of the founders are in Andy's office and he's CEO at the time.

He's like you know, if we are advisors to ourselves or consultants to ourselves, what would, what would he advise?

What advice would we give or what would we do?

And they're like, oh, we'd get out of the memory business and go all in on microprocessors.

And it sort of sounds easy, but it's sort of like Google saying, yeah, let's get us search.

And then Andy talks convincingly about yeah, there are these strategic inflection points and markets.

You know when you're in one you really like.

CEOs normally want to hedge and sort of keep all these options open.

That's the opposite of what you should do.

You should put all your eggs in one basket.

Watch that basket.

And the Mark Twain quote.

So I'm like, yeah, that's what we got to do.

We have to sort of stop focusing on anything else but this like collaboration opportunity.

Stop, stop thinking about photo showing, stop thinking about consumer generally.

And it was tough, but I'm like we, but I would never forgive myself if, like we were fighting 10 wars, lost all 10 when we could have won one of them.

Yeah, and so that's, that's what we did and I'm like Super glad that we did that.

And so it was pretty quick.

I mean it was a slow build, but you know I remember going home kind of licking my wounds in New Hampshire with my family, like rereading that book.

And I'm like, oh, God, I got to do this.

And so I went back, shut everything down in one shot.

I wouldn't say that solved all our problems.

I think that sent the narrative of the company into a tailspin.

It certainly sent morale and all these other problems.

But I'm kind of triaging the issues.

We went from hemorrhaging cash because we were sort of in land grab mode to being that was the start of being like pretty financially disciplined.

We turned casual positive maybe seven, eight months after that in 2016.

Um, but yeah, that was sort of like the initiate that like the hazing ritual into the big leagues.

Like, but it was really, it was really tough.

Was there something after that journey that you thought about reinvesting in?

I mean, you subsequently lost Dropbox Paper.

Now we have Dash on the search side.

And so at some point, you've picked your head up and launched other products.

So what was that decision to go after and do other stuff after?

Yeah.

Um, let's say there was a pretty long period of malaise, both like with the company and then me personally as CEO.

I was sort of like okay.

So we shut down all that stuff.

People like, got it.

I understand what we're not doing, but what, what are we doing?

And you know, the truth was like if I knew the answer to that question, like we were doubling down.

What is my job?

I'm like, yeah.

So and then part of it was also just for me personally, like stepping back, like.

I'm like, I don't know.

This is pretty rough.

We built this awesome product.

It wasn't that these products were bad or didn't work.

Actually, the problem was they were really good and rapidly copied.

But I'm like, all right.

What was the scale of the business?

How many people at this point?

About 500 people.

500 people doing...

A hundred million?

Doing, yeah, probably a few hundred million.

That's right.

Yep.

And about to be breakeven.

So, these are caviar scale, but, you know, some very real problems.

Totally.

But you know again, there are blackberry nokia, like a lot of these companies got way further than we did sure, and you know um, So it was pretty – and it wasn't even like we had that – it was like okay, we're going to focus on collaboration, but we didn't really have an answer of like, what that would look like or why we'd be better.

And then you know, for me personally, I'm like, I also am not – we just got totally – like crushed by an incumbent, like in one area.

So, you know, it's not even just a question of, like, what do we do?

Or what can we build?

It's like what like?

We can have a hundred ideas on what to build and probably 99 of them would face the exact same fate of being like Oh, cool idea.

Dropbox.

Thanks for being free R and D for us.

Copy bundle kill.

Um, So that was really the problem.

Yeah, decision paralysis of the inevitability.

Yeah, you're like okay, I'm trying to play chess as well as I can, but they got eight queens in the back and this game isn't that fun anymore.

And so then it sort of drew me to, well, why does Dropbox need to exist?

If we're just inventing stuff 10 minutes before you know the big, the big tech company is like that's, that's cool, i guess, but it's like really it's not.

It's not very fun.

Was that the closest you thought of getting off the the ride, like selling the company at that point?

Yeah yeah, totally.

It sounds like a point in time most founders would just sell.

Yeah um, So yeah, it felt sort of like I don't know like being in the basement in Fight Club, but not in a cool way.

It's like yes, I'm bleeding and my teeth are on the ground, but I don't know how I'm going to get up from this.

Um, but it sort of uh, like a lot of these things were all coming together where it's sort of on top of that, like this company is like super successful, but I'd sort of run out of merit badges to get.

I'm like, we'd raised the money at the valuations we wanted and they're just I'm like, is this it?

Or is this big numbers bigger?

And, you know, yeah, maybe it's time for my like tech bro ascendancy.

Like maybe I should be flying car, working on flying cars or space or climate or you know, but not files.

Like we kind of did the file syncing thing.

Like maybe it's done.

That would be okay.

Um, I think it'd be okay.

And, and I was even just looking at my own experience and I was like, okay, this is cool.

Um, You know, the company is like so much more.

My 18 year old self would be like baffled why I'm upset at all.

Dude, you did it.

But you know, as I'm just going through running this company, I'm like, oh man, like I am just in meetings all day.

Emails all night sleep repeat, you know first world problem, but But still I mean you recalibrate to the new normal of all that stuff.

It doesn't matter what you're... paper bank account says at that point in time.

No, I was not thinking about money.

Your days are bad.

My days are bad.

Yeah.

Um and well cause, I was like trying to really do a retro of like all right God, I could have totally predicted that these companies are going to respond this way.

Like well, I was it, that was a stupid.

Why did i go after these things?

I was like so easily countered and that it and i was like oh, i don't, but you knew that.

You knew that way back in 2000.

You always you, sort of that.

That was always the risk when i was like doing the root sort of trying to do some kind of like root cause, and i'm like oh, like i really have like no time to think um this and i'm like this is really weird.

Um, Because my subjective experience of work is I'm just busy but I'm not really productive.

Or I don't know if I'm being productive.

And my brain just feels stuck in first gear.

And yeah, I would have probably had a better solution to somebody's problems if I just had some space to think.

And then I'm like, wait, why does knowledge work this way?

Isn't the whole premise?

We hire these people for their minds, but then why do we not give them the space and time to think?

And so I just went down this rabbit hole of what is going on with productivity?

And I'm like, something went very wrong with the tools we're using.

Imagine if Einstein were alive today.

Even back then certainly still now, but even back then he'd wake up, he'd check his email.

He'd like delete a bunch of LinkedIn invitations, right.

Then he'd like, okay, start, sit down and start working or writing equations.

But then, like someone would Slack him being like hey, do you have, you know, a PDF of that of your paper, or you know?

And then okay yeah here, think back to work.

The phone would buzz with some like tweet.

And I'm like, would we still understand relativity?

And then I would talk to people who were actually working on these other moonshots.

Like I interviewed an engineering director from SpaceX.

And I was kind of jealous.

I'm like, wow, this is so cool.

You guys are actually going to Mars.

How's that work?

How do you guys work together?

He's like, what do you mean?

I'm like, I don't know.

How do you collaborate?

What tools do you use?

What's it like to work there?

And basically, what's it going to take to put someone on Mars?

And the answer was basically a lot of emails and a lot of files.

And I thought about that and I'm like man.

Okay yes, on the one hand, emails and files are probably better than what preceded them, but we have to think of technology not just as a force multiplier but also as the limiting factor on progress.

And somehow we can only go as fast as our tools.

Let us go.

And I felt like the...

You know, all of these companies and even the people working on these other moonshots were, like all, constrained by like I can't think.

And our environment at work had become so kind of distracted and overwhelming and full of all this sort of busy work.

And these things that we were hailing as like the frontier of productivity, like Slack were, were actually these like distraction engines that are introducing, like all these empty carbs, you know, into our experience, or bombing us, or peppering us with all these interruptions.

And it was bizarre because I'm, like, on the –

In brain science or even just common knowledge.

People do their best work when they can focus in some kind of flow state, when they're not interrupted.

Blah blah, blah.

But then we go to work and there's a bunch of like cultural problems but even just like technically, like the technical environment, the screen we look at, it's like if you wanted to design an environment that made it impossible to ever get into a flow state like that's kind of what we have.

And I'm like okay maybe, maybe the real moonshot here um, or the moonshot that powers all the other moonshots, is like helping people get back to being able to use their brains at work, or like being able to run their brain in something more than first gear, or just like not be distracted and overwhelmed all the time.

So we, that was sort of the first answer for like, Okay, what problems are not solving themselves?

Because a photo gallery in your pocket that was synced to the cloud.

We were the first to ship that at scale, but that probably would have like happened.

Um, and you know Apple would have figured out.

The whole premise of iCloud was like yeah, your phone should be back to the cloud by default.

But um so, like a lot of things we were building which probably have been figured out by other people, but I'm like here's a problem that it's like not even not only is it not solved, like no one's even framing it properly.

Um, and when you think about like the ultimate non-renewable resource that we have, like that I have as a person, or my company has, or our economy and society have, it's like really your brain power, right?

Or your time.

And I'm like we don't even like we're really good at managing money as a species, but like when it comes to our like time or our attention, like we are completely blind.

So we established this new mission for Dropbox to design a more enlightened way of working, on the premise that yeah, the way we're working isn't functioning.

Like it's unenlightened, unexamined.

It'll look really medieval in 10 years.

Um, and I think yeah well civilizationally, we'll look back on this and be like yeah, remember that we had that weird detour sometime in the 2010s where we basically just like stopped using our brains at work and like put ourselves in these like super cognitively polluted environments.

That was nuts.

And so that's really what, that's like the biggest umbrella.

What year was that?

2017.

17.

And that's led to what products have been sort of the offshoots from that for you?

So the biggest one is Dash.

Yeah.

I mean, we've had other products like Dropbox Paper.

We've done some acquisitions.

But I'd say to really move in the direction of our mission.

Dash is the most important first step.

And it also requires a couple of things.

So first Um, COVID was another big turning point where, um you know, suddenly all of work is digitized and the world recognized.

Hey, we can work out of screens instead of offices.

Um, and that shift had been happening for a while but, like COVID, like completely permanently finished the swing, but then that created all these new problems where, like now, we're using our screens a lot more, putting a lot more stress on the system.

And when you're distributed or remote or hybrid or whatever, whatever flavor is same problem.

Like I can't find the basic information I need to do my job.

Um, And that's a problem because knowledge work without the knowledge is pretty hard to do.

So Dash is a very direct... it's both like a direct response to that problem.

Like how do you make it easier, make a better environment, that sort of knows what you're working on and can surface this to you?

Um, but search is just one piece of it.

It's really dash is like the 2024 version of the problems we started solving in 2007.

Problems I started solving in 2007 was like yeah, I didn't like carrying my thumb drive, didn't like emailing myself files, but really the bigger picture was like I can't find my stuff, I can't organize it, I can't share it, I can't keep it safe.

Because it's like all my stuff is scattered in all these different devices and these different operating systems.

And back in the day, the solution looked like file syncing to the cloud and across everything.

But today, we're sort of back to the same problem.

And maybe 100 files on our desktop are now 100 tabs in our browser.

And we've talked about search, but there's also problems like how do I organize my stuff?

How do I share my stuff?

And they're as basic as just like there's no persistence in the modern world, right?

So when you go to bed and wake up, your physical papers are still on your desk.

You reboot your computer.

Your files are still there.

But in your browser.

Your browser sort of clears itself out, either because you close it by declaring tab bankruptcy or your operating system updates in the wrong way, or one way or another.

When you close your browser, it takes all of your state with it.

And so if you don't even have like a durable place, what does it even mean to organize anything?

What does it mean to organize things across multiple tools?

It's just like a broken system.

And you know files and folders had their problems too.

But it's sort of weird that it's like well, files have folders, songs have playlists, links have.

There's like no collection concept right.

So there's a lot of like UX problems hidden in plain sight or things that actually were worse, that were better 20 years ago and worse today.

So just concept of organizing your stuff and then sharing, right?

Whether you're remodeling your house or getting ready for a board meeting.

What do you do if you have like a Google Doc plus an air table plus a 10 gig 4K video?

There's no common container that holds mixed format things.

And so Dash is really designed to solve all these problems, like both starting with search but then giving you a start page that kind of organizes your stuff and what you're working on and system, kind of like.

Organize your stuff the way that YouTube or Netflix or Spotify organize your content for you in a consumer context.

And then sharing.

We have stacks, which are basically these smart collections that can hold any kind of content.

And our aspiration is for this to be the default way to share mixed format stuff on the internet.

Um so, but these are really kind of solving the same genre of problems that we were successful with and with Dropbox 10, but with Dash.

It's really about how do we solve these in more of like a cloud native browser, native modern context.

I mean, we also support your files too, but it's we're revolving from storing and syncing your files to organizing all of your cloud content.

And then that sort of step opens up a lot of new stuff on the tech tree after that.

As you think about galvanizing behind a mission like that, it obviously started with coming up with a new way of working and operating which totally resonates.

It's amazing how, by interruption, we operate even faster.

It just gets worse every day.

As you think about setting the mission or the vision around something like Dash.

How do you go about identifying that opportunity?

I assume there's been a bunch of different iterations on it.

Then, when you find it, how do you get the company behind it, especially as a public company business that you know you have to share things with shareholders and all that stuff?

Well, I think you triangulate on these opportunities from a bunch of different directions.

And, you know, the ones that pass all these filters are the ones you really double down on.

So, you know, first is a mission.

I talked about, you know, okay, how do we...

I think a lot of people agree okay yeah sure, work sucks, I know okay, but what do you do about it right?

So where specifically should we try to fix the environment?

And then one of the things that, what plays to Dropbox's strengths?

So there's sort of a strategy piece of it where it's like well, one of Dropbox's advantages is that we're platform agnostic and a lot of the other companies are going to try to keep you within their garden.

Dropbox is not going to try to do that.

And then you know universal search, enterprise search.

It has to be kind of platform agnostic by default, because we just don't live in a monoculture world anymore.

So like everybody has this problem.

So like, okay, that's a good fit for Dropbox.

And it also requires a lot of customer trust, also requires a lot of technical like solving new technical problems.

Also you know.

It's also helps if you know.

If step two is organize all your cloud stuff, step one get hundreds of millions of people to trust you with your files is like a good stepping stone to that.

Um.

So even if we had gone directly at Dash, we would have built all these kind of prereqs along the way.

Then it's you know I like to experience things myself and that you know just coding the first sort of the proto version of Dash or coding a personal search engine myself and being like whoa okay.

There's a big why now here?

Because there's all these new search technologies that make a completely better experience.

But weirdly, enterprise search was kind of a graveyard.

Yeah, a lot of people had swung at this as an idea.

Enterprise search plus, ideas like the intranet had been around for a long time and Google desktop search 2004 like, so there were also precursor things that were good.

So I think Google desktop search is an example of like, that was a great product.

Um, but Google kind of killed it, you know.

And then plus, where we we seeded the dash effort by buying a company called commandee that had been working on this.

Um, and, So I kind of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of things pointed in the same direction.

I don't think it was any one, like you know well.

I think that if there was an aha moment for me, it was like doing that search myself and be like, oh my God, this is so much better than what I'm doing today.

Like we have to get after this.

So that's probably the singular most important thing to me.

But then.

It passed all the other filters from like a product, distribution, strategy standpoint.

It sounds like there's a lot of enthusiasm right now about all of this stuff.

And AI has been something of a jolt for you.

Totally.

Is that fair?

That's absolutely fair.

I mean I was pretty rough in the late innings of last season when it's sort of like yeah we're, we're sort of checkmate.

First of all, you know a lot of the workflow files will be around forever and there's still a critical part of um the kind of work experience and they're especially critical with our kind of key customer segments, like people that create media or people that do a lot of external sharing, like they rely on Dropbox.

We're big users for this stuff.

Yeah.

Right.

So but it's sort of like I don't know.

Were we in a situation... Creating more demand for it is like... Is that like blockbusters?

How would you create more demand for walking into a store and renting a DVD?

It's just sort of... Maybe it's just sort of had its time or it's peaked.

And so what do you do about that?

And then...

With AI or any sort of new era in computing and the ones I've grown up through.

I saw the internet era, I saw the cloud and mobile.

They made Dropbox possible and then now AI was the next big one.

I'm like, okay, yeah, the concrete kind of...

And for a few years, there's just like this chaos sort of like raining on the racetrack.

Suddenly, all these people can make all these moves and really change position in ways and create new franchises in ways that are just not possible when things are more kind of, more hardened.

So yeah, I got a massive jolt of enthusiasm, both because of what it meant to the market, but then, more importantly, what it meant for the technology and the products we can build.

Suddenly there's like all these new colors we can paint with.

We were talking about motivations a little bit before we started recording.

At this point, like what?

Along the journey, I'm sure different motivations have come and gone.

Yeah.

You don't need to be doing this, doing this next act in commandee.

I'm curious like why, what keeps you motivated to get up every day and sort of fight this, uh knife fight at different points in time, when they had eight Queens or whatever you said across the back of the board?

Um well, I think it was in the early years.

It really was kind of the novelty of okay, I want to start a company and that's something I had dreamed of and, And then that process can be pretty linear and kind of merit-badgy.

It's like, okay, let's get into Y Combinator.

Okay, let's raise money from venture.

I'm sure the first five to seven years were pretty... Serendipitous journey.

Six million valuation.

Now we're going to raise money at 27 million valuation.

Oh.

Now we're going to raise it to $4.2 billion valuation a few years later.

Yeah, there was always these next hurdle.

No, 10 million users, 100 million, 500, whatever.

And I think that was part of what it made the competitive stuff for that sort of reckoning pretty difficult to sort of like.

You know, not only are we in this like really bad competitive position, but now I'm just kind of rudderless.

Like, what do I even want to do?

And so I think, like identity becomes tied up in higher valuations and the you know and that's sort of stopped being motivational to me because it's not in you know.

I certainly enjoy the process of making a commercially successful company.

It's fun to make money.

The most fun is having access to all these interesting people.

So there's a lot of good stuff there.

But it wasn't like a 2x more of that money or valuation was really gonna make it that much of a difference.

Um, in my life.

Um and so, but like going through that fire like did get me through the other side with like a new purpose of like okay yeah, this is meta moonshot of like helping people use their brains at work.

That's something that's like unsolved, um, really matters to me something i feel like i can put a dent in um so personal sense of mission and purpose but then also just like all right why do i want to be a ceo um and yeah i'm not really i've sort of cleared what i want to clear as far as you know resume um and so i decided like pretty explicitly i was like all right i'm gonna do this I really want to get great at the craft of being a CEO because that's something you can... It's totally within your control.

It's something you don't really even master at, you know, in a lifetime.

You know, Steve Jobs was probably like just hitting his stride at 55 uh, you know 55, 56 when he died.

Um.

So I was, like I feel, pretty lucky to be in a line of work where you don't like peak in your 20s or 30s.

Because I mean, if you're in sports or like math or different things, you often have like a sort of artificial ceiling on success.

Or, you know, sort of an externally imposed expiration date.

But, like, business and being a CEO isn't like that.

And even when I was like 20, in my early 20s, I was like I want a job that gives me, That has like a high learning curve.

And I was like, oh, God, well, I certainly got that.

And then, you know, I just never get tired of...

Hearing about how Dropbox has changed their experience, and it's really gratifying when people say oh, I love Dropbox.

I will always look over someone's shoulder in a Starbucks to see if the little icon is there.

And that feeling of, oh, we actually changed how people do something.

Um, you know, or it's certainly at the peak when like, people were using Dropbox as a verb and it was like, you know, on movies and stuff like that.

Just that feeling of like leaving um, just really making something better at scale and that kind of impact is like super addictive and um.

And I think like tech was really rallied around that concept for a while and then sort of tech had a pretty necessary correction.

You know the narrative where you know stop taking so much credit for all the good things without taking any responsibility for the bad things.

But it's, like always been true that technology is both good like the source of all our problems, and it's still the solution to all our problems.

And there's really, you know, pick your favorite problem with the world.

Like we're going to need to invent our way out of that.

So it's really around like craft and invention and impact that still keeps me going.

Yeah.

And, just like I love that, the game is hard.

And yeah, You know, I think one of the things you have to learn too beyond reading or you know, the more technical aspects of the job are some of the things that are more around character or mindset.

You know, you never want to feel like a victim, practically speaking.

And you want to focus on the things in your control.

And, like you know, you can't control what happens to you per se, but you can control how you respond.

So, you know, sure, you know, I'm human.

Like, I certainly...

I'm not not bitter about some of the competitive stuff.

But at the same time like well, a lot of, There's definitely things I could have done to like navigate us through that a little bit better, or stuff that I've learned now.

And even when I talked to some of the execs who worked at, like, Netscape, I was like, man, that must have been... Like, that was... that was bs like they shouldn't have like copied you know that you blah blah blah microsoft and the guy kind of snorted and they got bill campbell his name he's like snorted and laughed he's like no trust me our our wounds were entirely self-inflicted and i that just stuck with me as like oh man um Uh, that's like really honest.

And I think it's like mostly true.

Like most of our.

You know, if I'm really honest with myself, we've we've had like a long period of stagnation.

Um, but that's okay.

Like companies do.

And you know, fortunately Texas sport where you can hit like a 50 run home run and um and no really, nobody really cares about what happened last season.

I guess you've gotten exposed, Bill Campbell.

Did you get Andy Grove too?

I did, yep.

You sort of span both generations of tech in that way, I guess, right?

Coming up in 07 through this period of time, like the old guard was still around in some ways.

Yeah, totally.

And those two passed away around the same time.

And actually that was, I left that out.

I think um, you know, as I sort of all this stuff was swirling and I'm like what do I want to do with my life?

And like what do I?

Um uh, you know I, I was like, at least I was able to read only the paranoid survive, and you know Andy's books.

Um, uh, And so I'm like, Bill Campbell was kind enough to spend time with me.

We weren't that close, but we went out to dinner a bunch of times.

And I was like, you know, again, like nursing my wounds.

And he's like, shut up and get your ass back out there.

You'll be fine.

You'll figure it out.

And he's like, I really needed that.

Yeah.

And I felt like Campbell was coached jobs and Sergey and Larry and, uh, I mean, on, on, on the list.

Yeah.

And so he's sort of like made you believe in yourself more than you actually believed in yourself.

Um, Which meant a lot to him because he wasn't an advisor.

He didn't have any equity.

He got sort of nothing sort of tangible from that.

And I was like, that's just so cool that someone would do that.

And I really needed it.

And then Andy, one of his big inventions was this concept of managerial leverage.

And he really...

And what's nuts about – I mean, Andy had a crazy life like immigrating from Hungary and all these different things.

But just think about – he was running Intel, which was kind of the Google of its time.

And like, in whatever spare time he did, he he had, he would just like write these books to like light the path a little bit for those who may follow.

So like, you know, only the paranoid survive, high output management.

Um, like those had a big impact on me.

I'm like, well, I'm like, at least I'm having this set of problems.

Cause if I didn't read that stuff or I weren't exposed to things like this there, you know, then my life would be very different.

And then when they both died, I was like, man.

Maybe there's something I should be doing in this vein.

It should be easier to scale human organization.

We should be treating our limited brain power with a lot more reverence.

We should be redesigning our environment to to not have these, have these problems.

And I'm like in this privileged position where I can actually like have I have tons of like capital and resources and people to go do something about it, which is like super cool um, And but like you know, and when I have like so many more, so much more leverage to solve a problem like this than either Bill or Andy did.

Like Andy, his best, like mechanism to make things better was like write a book.

But the book you know Hypermanagement, was like published in like 1983.

Like of the people who like need to read it.

Maybe 01 have ever heard of it.

And you go all the way down the funnel.

You're like how many people read it?

And then take no action whatsoever as a result.

But, you know, our customers would tell us like Dropbox is not just a place where I like sync files.

This is like... my, this is where I like go to work.

Like this is where my dreams come true.

This is, it doesn't keep files in sync.

It keeps like my team in sync, keeps people in sync.

And we were just like people were using all these metaphors even 10 years ago of like Dropbox being this workplace or this like working environment.

And I was like, we had just like never thought of it that way.

And I was like, man, if we did think of it that way, we would have done things like so differently.

And so we get to do a lot of that now.

I guess, one that I think you might be appropriate to weigh in on, but you had a number of successful fundraisers.

I'm curious as you reflect today Do you think fundraise and valuation, is that just a rounding error in the history of the company?

And hey, raise as much money as you can and at the end of the day you'll survive or not, on your own merit.

Or do you reflect on high valuations or things and say some way that might have exacerbated some of these concerns?

Basically, can you say that founders should raise at lower valuations because I can't say that?

It sounds very self-serving when it comes from me.

When it comes from you, it's more credible.

Yeah.

Well, I think – the way I think about it is more –

Especially with some hindsight.

I've been overvalued, I've been undervalued.

They can both be quite painful.

Actually being overvalued can be more painful in some regards.

Yeah, for sure.

We went from a raising raising a 4 billion valuation in 2011 to raising a 10 billion valuation in 2014.

I wish I could say that our thought process, or my thought process, I was just like 10 sounds like a good number and investors were willing to give it to us.

So we took it.

And then after I just remember afterwards, like looking at the market caps of all these public companies um, And like being like wow, Dropbox is like more valuable than all, like the you know all these like blue chip companies that I really admired.

I'm like, either I'm a genius or I'm an idiot.

Cause like, wow.

And I knew very little about corporate finance at that time.

And you know, I don't, I don't think it was like categorically that I think we did over, we overshot by a lot.

Um, Which then made a lot easier to paint this pretty rapid reversal or reversal in the narrative from like oh, this company's now going from the little engine that could to then the first dead deck of corn and all these things.

There's only two narratives. right?

It's, it's either up or down.

And so you gotta know which side of that.

I think we raised it six.

Probably much of that would have been like easier.

But you know, at the same time I'm like optimized dilution a lot.

It's not deterministic.

And so it's just sort of, you know, you're, you're trying to keep a lot of these things in balance.

Like you and importantly, I think whenever you're the way I think about it, less than like overvalued or undervalued is good or bad.

I think it's more like well, just like try to play it.

Um, uh like, play the game forward a few steps and and certainly work back from like okay, if we're a public company um, you know, by and large our valuation will not be vibes based at all.

It will be like a pretty basic function of like revenue growth profitability, some plus or minus based on like sentiment.

But like, if you can't draw, you know if you draw the dot where you are today, to the dot you were, where you would be as a public company.

Um, and it's like where you're raised, where you're raising is like way off of that trend line.

Um, then you're either leaving a lot on the table or you're setting yourself up.

You're opening 10 years of Christmas presents.

Most founders don't generally think they're going to end up on the wrong side of this stuff when they're raising.

I've found

I'm sure Zuck doesn't feel like he should have raised at a lower price from Uri Milner way back when right.

Yeah.

It's not really practical.

But, like, I think it's more the things where... How much margin you have.

Yeah, it's like you know, you do have you know, at some point the market will set the price, but then you do have some latitude to be like.

Are we really going to like juice it?

Yeah.

Wiggle around, you know?

And I think you know this, it was compounded by me sort of like elbowing it up because I thought like, why not?

10 sounds good.

Yeah.

It does sound good.

And it went, you know, by it actually wasn't that nuts, you know, in my modern standards, but you know we're 250 million going to 400.

So, you know, 40 X revenue multiple going to 25.

I'm still very rich, but like, it's not, you know, still 60%.

Yeah, exactly.

There's, there will be way worse.

Yeah.

But like we spent the next 10 years digging out of that.

Yeah.

We're still below that market cap today.

Just a nerdy one to end on.

Data centers.

Yeah, sure.

When did you decide to do all that stuff in-house?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was somewhere kind of the mid-teens, probably like 2015, 2016.

We'd been sort of experimenting our way into it for a while.

Very contrarian at the time.

Yeah, we were like the one car going the other direction on the highway because everybody else was migrating to the public cloud.

We had actually started on AWS and went off of it.

I actually don't even recall.

Was it purely cost at the time?

Cost was part of it.

I mean, it's kind of funny where, I mean, there are actually a few issues.

One was.

I mean this one will sound kind of crazy, but you have to remember the public cloud itself was pretty nascent and we were like users of S3.

Amazon's S3 is one of the AWS services the storage service.

So we're big users of that.

And then we were growing so fast.

Actually, our biggest concern was like, are they gonna be able to keep up with us?

And like, I don't know what our recourse is if like, suddenly they can't keep up like having a hotline and being like hey, can you guys please get our like company back up please please, please.

You guys had to have been one of the biggest customers, if not the biggest, at the.

I think we were in the certainly in the top kind of echelon.

I don't know if we were like number one.

Number one, but we were.

You know, we didn't.

We didn't want to be number one yeah um, So there was a first question of is the public cloud even going to scale as fast as we need it to?

And if something goes wrong, what are our tools to actually make it better if we don't control it?

That ended up not being a big deal.

Actually, Amazon was a great partner.

And they scaled just fine, but that was a concern.

Then it did get a little trickier because all these guys, the public cloud providers, were also competing with us, like including Amazon.

So you know, Google had their thing, Microsoft had their thing.

Um, or you know, one drive and Google drive, Amazon had, like a storage product.

And so we were like pretty uncomfortable with like all right, we're going to, so let me get this right.

We're going to like put all of our keys, um, in someone else's hands.

They're also competing with us.

What could possibly go wrong?

So it's more like in a regret scenario, I felt like we'd look really dumb.

Or just you know, I felt like the responsible thing to do for our customers, to make sure we were able to, like you know, protect their destiny as much as possible.

And then, but then third, yeah, cost performance.

The public cloud pricing stopped following the hardware cost curves down.

And yeah, they needed to take margin.

But yeah, there's absolutely no guarantee and probably it was unlikely that we would keep getting cost savings as the

Um, or we basically be relying on the kindness of strangers to like lower prices on the um, on the we and we were only really using the commodity pieces of just like raw compute EC2 and S3.

Like raw compute, raw hard drive space.

Um, and so.

We were able to really build a tuned system just for our workload.

And then you get not just cost, but a lot of performance advantages.

You can more vertically integrate across the stack and then that also is helpful for things like, as you have more compute that needs to go to the storage or machine learning, then they're like advantages like that.

They even translate into the world today.

Um, I mean you have to be careful not to.

We were very surgical in what we do in our kind of private cloud.

Um, Because you can sort of end up in a situation where you're sort of re-implementing the whole public cloud badly.

But it's worked super well for us.

But we're a pretty unique case in that it's like that specific platform.

So you're glad you did it?

Super glad.

I'm super glad we started on the public cloud.

It's really worked out to be on our own infrastructure.

We still get massive cost and performance, cost savings.

And we were able to, you know, we go down to the, we co-design our servers.

We go down to the hard drive and the rack as far as how all that infrastructure works.

And our teams have done phenomenal things to just keep writing that down.

Therefore we still have software margins, even though you'd think a lot of the storage piece is kind of commodity.

I guess one last one before we hop.

Anything that you would say if you're a founder listening.

We've touched on a bunch of different things that you've learned or thought of over the course of 17 years of doing this.

Any other lessons or particular insights that you reflect on this journey you've been on that might be useful to leave people with.

I think scaling the company was a lot harder than I feel like it should have been.

And we've talked about some of the books which are largely some of them are on management and things like that.

But I think, building on what we were saying about narrative culture and Amazon, I'm a big fan of Working Backwards, which is a book that really kind of chronicles the development of all their scaling mechanisms.

And I think they had really good insight into into like, what goes wrong as you scale a bunch of people up.

Um, and, uh, and narrative culture was just one part of it.

So there's like how do you maintain a high talent density and like we'll keep raising the bar as you hire people?

How do you do business reviews?

How do you, They basically have this operating system that's really powerful.

During some of the more difficult years.

I would give anything to uninstall the operating system we have and install someone else's.

Amazon, Google, whatever.

It was kind of nuts to me that there was no way to do that.

Even implementing all these things or these mechanisms are great around the kinds of things we've been talking about, but they're still very manual and human mediated and the only real technology is still a memo or an email or a spreadsheet.

So I think there's a huge opportunity to in a world where now All of work is like fully digitized meaning, like you know, your AI agents or whatever can sort of see and hear and read and write just like a human can.

That's a very big change in the world from pre-COVID where...

No matter how smart your AI system is, if it doesn't have sort of like missing cell coverage, like if it doesn't know what happens in the real world, or if the real action is happening there and the system is blind to it, then that'd be a problem.

But after COVID, that's kind of fixed.

And then with a large language model where it's like, and then large reasoning models, multimodal models whatever, but just like these large models you basically have sort of cognition in a bottle or sand that can think.

And so I think that it'll be so much.

I'm really excited about the kinds of organizations you can build and, you know, have a.

I think we'll see like many 10 X things in terms of like a team of 10 people can do what used to take a team of a hundred.

Um, and either make small teams perform big or make big teams feel small.

I think the whole practice of management is going to be completely different, where a lot of the repetitive aspects are going to be automated.

And so I'm super excited about opening my laptop in 2030 and having a much more sane and calm and focused experience.

And hopefully we're going to have a lot of stuff well before.

We basically turned Dropbox into this lab for distributed work after COVID and hopefully have a lot of this stuff long before that.

Cool.

Drew, thanks for doing this.

Awesome.

Thank you continuing to try to grow the show, and so we really appreciate anyone's support and continuing to help us do so.

Thanks everyone for joining and we'll see you next week with another great guest on the logo bartlett show.

Have a great weekend.

[The Evolution of Dropbox and the Future of AI: A Conversation with Drew Houston]-[EP 119: Drew Houston (CEO, Dropbox): Reflections on the 17+ Year Battle Against Big Tech]

📋 Summary

Navigating the AI Era: Reflections from Dropbox CEO Drew Houston

Embracing the AI Paradigm Shift

Dropbox Dash: Solving the Knowledge Search Crisis

Cultivating a 'Memo-First' Culture

Lessons in Leadership and Resilience

The Future of Work

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Evolution of Dropbox and the Future of AI: A Conversation with Drew Houston]-[EP 119: Drew Houston (CEO, Dropbox): Reflections on the 17+ Year Battle Against Big Tech]

📋 Summary

Navigating the AI Era: Reflections from Dropbox CEO Drew Houston

Embracing the AI Paradigm Shift

Dropbox Dash: Solving the Knowledge Search Crisis

Cultivating a 'Memo-First' Culture

Lessons in Leadership and Resilience

The Future of Work

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📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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