Charlie Wood on building a customer-centered team

As Dropbox’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand, Charlie shares what it takes to develop a team that keeps its focus on customers.

Charlie Wood has joined Dropbox as Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand. Read about how he’s building out his Sydney team with culture and diversity in mind, and where he thinks the next Dropbox office should be.

Where did you live before coming to Sydney for Dropbox?

Okay, you ready? I’m an Englishman with a New Zealand passport, with an English-born Indian wife, and American children, living in Australia. I left the UK fifteen years ago, then worked for Microsoft for a long time while living in New Zealand and Seattle, and finally ended up in Australia. I’ve been here for about six years.

Do you still have any British habits left?

Yes, absolutely. Music, comedy, football: probably the best three things to come out of England, really. Certainly not the weather or the food.

What Australianisms have grown on you?

Living by the beach and surfing is nice. I’m a surf life-saver which means I patrol the beach to make sure no one gets into trouble. Every year on patrol we save a few people who swim in the wrong places and get carried out. Most of it, though, is just about keeping people safe and happy — like helping out when someone gets stung by a jellyfish.

You worked at Microsoft and also founded some startups. Where do you feel more at home — in larger established organizations, or in a more entrepreneurial environment?

I’m most comfortable in between those two spots, and that’s a big reason I joined Dropbox. I have a lot of experience expanding into new markets, and love building up new teams and educating customers about new products. This phase that Dropbox is in now — scaling the startup into a large organization — is what I really enjoy.

As you grow the Dropbox team in Australia, what qualities are you looking for in the people you hire?

It’s absolutely paramount that we hire customer-centric people. Of course, they need to be smart, bright, intellectual, and get along as a team. But they should always keep focus on customers. I also want to make sure we have real diversity — of gender, backgrounds, and origins.

How would you describe Dropbox culture in three words?

Intellectual — You naturally assume all technology sector is intellectual, but I’ve never seen it the way it is at Dropbox.

Collaborative — It’s not a veneer, it is a highly collaborative organization. People are very open and eager to help.

Positive — People genuinely believe in the vision of what we’re trying to do here: to help people share, secure, collaborate.

What are some big challenges you want to tackle next year at Dropbox?

The greatest challenge for me around Dropbox for Business is education — raising the level of awareness about our business product. Everybody knows about Dropbox, but we also need to let customers know that we have business products that have industry-level standards for enterprise management, security, and collaboration.

What are you looking forward to next for yourself?

I’m heading to the Himalayas with my nine-year-old son in a few days, to participate in a development project for sherpas that live in one of the villages. Earlier in 2014 sixteen sherpas died in an avalanche on Everest, many of them came from the village of Ghunsa in Eastern Nepal. So part of what we’re doing with the Himalayan Development Foundation is bringing a bunch of investment and infrastructure into that region to help them cope with the loss.

I’ll also be donating money to the cause which gets bolstered by Dropbox’s charitable matching program. I’m also talking to other Dropboxers about different ways to get more involved with the project.

What’s something that not many people know about you?

Well, I’m a pilot, and I once took my girlfriend at the time for a weekend flight, and the engine broke down. It was a single-engine plane, so it was pretty bad — I had to put the plane down in a field which actually ended up being a pig farm. The newspaper ran the headline “Pig Farmer’s Field Saves Pilot’s Bacon.” We survived, got married four years later, and have three kids now!

So after Australia, will Antarctica be the new frontier for Dropbox?

It might be. I’m hoping for Kathmandu. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll need an office in Kathmandu.