Silicon Valley heavyweights are trying to fix the lack of diversity in tech - here's how

Following is a transcript of the video.

Steve Kovach: Shifting gears a little bit I want to talk about diversity and gender issues in the Valley. I don't know if you've read it but I was really into this book by Emily Chang from Bloomberg, "Brotopia." One of the things they talked about in there was, it's kind of a slow moving thing you guys have released diversity numbers before, pretty much in line with a lot of your peers in the Valley. One of the solutions presented in that book, I'm curious for your take on this, is the gender pay gap issue. How it's one of those things sure, recruiting might take time, years even, and I know you're involved in efforts to help out with that and we can talk about that. But when it comes to gender pay isn't that something that can be fixed now? You can literally just flip a switch?

Drew Houston: Oh absolutely.

Kovach: Talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that.

Houston: I would say more broadly, we've always, Arash and I, have always wanted--

Kovach: Arash your co-founder?

Houston: My co-founder and I have always wanted Dropbox to be a great place to work for everyone. And we certainly believe that two people doing the same work should be compensated the same way. So I agree. There are certain, while as an industry we have a long way to go there are certainly things that are directly within companies' control and so by all means, within our company we take a close look at equity between, or gender pay equity, and I think every company should.

Kovach: And on the diversity end this week it came out that you're part of this new initiative that I think is pretty interesting. This idea that if you're a start-up seeking funding you won't accept the money unless there's good representation from the VC firm. Talk about what that's called and how you got involved in that.

Houston: Yeah, it's called Founders for Change and I think, along the same lines, we want so much of America, so much of Silicon Valley is based on this idea of equal opportunity and I think all of us want the Valley and tech to be a place where that is true. We want it within our companies and we want that same equal opportunity when it comes to our investors. It's a large group of founders. We got introduced to it through Sequoia who is our first venture capital backer. I think it's a really, I think it's great that the founders and the community can come together and try to move things forward.

Kovach: And is the idea here to start it with maybe smaller startups who are building themselves from the ground up? Is that why you're doing it through VC firms?

Houston: I think if all the founders can come together as a community and agree this is the world we want to live in and this is what we want our funding landscape to be. That's something that we hope the investment community would pay attention to.