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“The goal is to find ways to unlock more of our brainpower through a multidisciplinary approach between computing and management,” says Houston. Schwarzman College of Computing.ĭuring the discussion, Houston also spoke about his $10 million gift to MIT, which will endow the first shared professorship between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as provide a catalyst startup fund for the college. 14 with Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Stephen A. Houston talked about his experience leading Dropbox through a public health crisis and how Covid-19 has accelerated a shift to distributed work in a fireside chat on Oct. For a lot of it we were just taking it as we go.” “It’s surreal, there’s no playbook for running a global company in a pandemic over Zoom.
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In the early days of the pandemic, Houston says that Dropbox reacted as many others did to ensure that employees were safe and customers were taken care of. “It felt like I was announcing a snow day or something.” When the cloud storage firm Dropbox decided to shut down its offices with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, co-founder and CEO Drew Houston ’05 had to send the company’s nearly 3,000 employees home and tell them they were not coming back to work anytime soon.
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