Dropbox’s CEO Perfectly Summed Up Why Forcing Office Work Feels Like a Thing of the Past
Is the office becoming the new mall? According to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, it just might be.
Business Insider reported that in a recent episode of Fortune's Leadership Next podcast, Houston drew a comparison that hit home for a lot of remote workers: bringing people back to the office full-time is a bit like trying to drag them back into malls and movie theaters. Not because those spaces are bad, but because the world and the way we live and work has simply changed.
“There’s nothing wrong with the movie theater,” Houston said, “but it’s just a different world now.”
He’s not wrong. The pandemic didn’t just reshape our habits, it reshaped our expectations. We got a taste of flexibility, and many of us aren’t willing to go back to rigid routines, especially when it doesn’t serve our productivity or creativity.
Houston made the case that remote work isn’t about ditching collaboration or culture, it’s about ditching inefficiency. “It is unproductive if you just sort of try to photocopy what you're doing in the office onto Zoom,” he said. “We don’t have to do this. We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week to literally be on the same Zoom call they could’ve joined from home.”
And let’s be real. Most hybrid mandates don’t feel like innovation. They feel like rewinding a VHS tape.
Instead of jumping on the return-to-office bandwagon, Dropbox has embraced what it calls a Virtual First model. Since 2020, the company has made remote work the default with a 90/10 rule: 90 percent remote work, 10 percent in-person gatherings. Think focused work from anywhere, punctuated by intentional, energizing off-sites, not endless meetings in the same old boardroom.
The result is a reimagined work culture that puts trust at the center.
“You need a different social contract,” Houston said. “If you trust people and treat them like adults, they’ll behave like adults. Trust over surveillance.”
It’s a philosophy that’s catching on with remote-first professionals and forward-thinking companies alike. And it aligns perfectly with the direction many of us already know makes the most sense. Remote work should be the new professional baseline, rather than a “perk.”
Houston’s message is a breath of much needed fresh air in the RTO media hype. It recognizes that the structure we need today doesn’t look like what we had in 2019. And calls out the friction in trying to force the progression of flexible work backwards rather than forward.
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