CEO Drew Houston on solving the biggest problem with modern work

For our seventh episode of Working Smarter we’re talking to Drew Houston, the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. 

If you’ve been online long enough, it’s likely Dropbox was your introduction to the cloud. The goal is still more or less the same—give you one organized place for all your stuff—but it’s no longer just about storing and syncing files. A hundred files on your desktop is now a hundred tabs in your browser, and Houston believes AI is what will finally bring calm to the chaos that’s been created by the tools of modern work.

For Houston, AI’s potential is so great that its arrival feels like a civilization shift. It’s also not just a professional preoccupation; AI is a personal interest too. A few years ago he decided to teach himself machine learning in his spare time—and some of the AI tools Houston now uses to run Dropbox are ones he built himself. 

Hear Houston discuss why it’s gotten so hard to find the information you need to do your job, the types of tasks we'll increasingly offload to our silicon brains, and what Dropbox is doing to help make modern work more meaningful and fulfilling.

Show notes:

• To learn more about Dropbox Dash and try Dash for free, visit dropbox.com/dash
• The two books Houston mentions are “High Output Management” by Andy Grove and “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker

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Working Smarter is a new podcast from Dropbox about how AI is changing the way we work and get stuff done.

You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. To read more stories and past interviews, visit workingsmarter.ai

This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard, namely: our producers Samiah Adams and Aja Simpson, technical director Jacob Winik, and executive producer Eliza Smith. Special thanks to Benjy Baptiste for production assistance, our marketing and PR consultant Meggan Ellingboe, and our illustrators, Fanny Luor and Justin Tran. Our theme song was created by Doug Stuart. Working Smarter is hosted by Matthew Braga.