Inside the Mind of Aaron Levie: Founder and CEO of Box

Product Hunt
Product Hunt
Published in
9 min readFeb 1, 2016

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If Aaron Levie had five hands, there would be a coffee cup in each one. In fact, given how much has happened in his 30-year-old life so far, we’re surprised he doesn’t have an IV of caffeine attached to him at all times. Aaron is the CEO of Box, a content management and collaboration platform he cofounded in 2005 and took public in January 2015.

@Levie is also a must follow on Twitter for all things tech and cloud.

Elon Musk was recruiting for Tesla’s autopilot program

Aaron recently joined us for a community LIVE Chat. He shares what his daily routine is like, who he admires, advice for founders, and the biggest misconception about Box. Below are some of the highlights, and you can read the full Q&A on Product Hunt.

What do you do to prepare for the day to ensure maximum productivity?Cuan-Chai Megghross

Generally, I wake up and read email in bed for about 30 minutes—bad habit, I know, but it allows me to knock out most key issues right away (P.S. iPhone 6+ is super helpful). Then I head into work (sometimes I have to Uber to get more work done in the car), and grab 2 cups of coffee when I arrive at the office. From there, it’s usually 7–8 hours of meetings with various teams, after which I try and take a nap for ~20 minutes, grab dinner, and I’m back at it for another 4–5 hours.

Also, I keep a list of about 50–60 things that are ongoing topics/issues/challenges/tasks in the business that I need to resolve. They range from “email X customer” to “figure out next year’s product roadmap.”

What are some of the most important things that you think most first-time founders overlook, but shouldn’t? Similarly, what are some things you think most founders pay too much attention to, but shouldn’t?Javier Torrez

As a founder/CEO, I have often tried to figure out if I was cut out to be a “CEO” vs. just a “founder.” I would compare myself to other CEOs and try and see if I would be able to get good at all the things they had gotten good at; the challenge is there’s really not a prototypical CEO.

The key definition for success as a founder/CEO is that you can surround yourself with people who can fill in the gaps of what you’re not good, and hopefully accelerate the things you are good at. It’s really, really hard to get good at everything, so it’s best to know what you’re GREAT at (and this will move around and change over time, likely) and hire and work with other GREAT people to cover everything else.

What type of struggles and roadblocks did you face building Box in the very beginning?Cuan-Chai Megghross

Initially our biggest challenge was that we didn’t know what we wanted to be when we “grew up.” We started as a consumer product that also worked for businesses, and eventually (about 1.5 years into the business) we determined that balancing these two very different worlds and use-cases wasn’t going to lead to world domination. So we went back and forth a ton in the early days, but ultimately decided to “listen” to the market and go after a space where we felt we could best innovate (and compete). That was the enterprise market.

What’s the biggest misconception you see in the press about Box? Jason Hitchcock

That we somehow “sell storage.” We obviously use storage to store files (it would be hard to run Box otherwise), but all of our value proposition is in our software layer. The vast majority of our R&D time and innovation goes toward data security, workflow, content management, collaboration, etc. — that’s ultimately what customers pay for, not the storage. And in fact the very trend that most people think could be bad for us — Amazon lowers its storage prices, etc. — is GOOD for us, as we leverage them in some parts of our stack.

Box’s stock price hit an all-time low today even though you guys seem to be headed in a good direction. How frustrating is this for you?Cam Secore

The market is crazy right now, but the key is to not focus on the stock market (or your stock price) in the near-term. You have to have conviction around what you’re building and make sure you’re executing for the long run. All the best companies in the world have dealt with either being somewhat misunderstood (see Netflix, Facebook, etc.) or dealt with crazy stock market volatility, and they’ve had to get through it. The cool thing is having worked at Box for 11 years now, we’ve dealt with MUCH greater challenges. Like raising our Series B. :-)

In terms of data and storage what will we have in 10 years that no one would believe today?Harry Stebbings

I think 10 years from now, we won’t be thinking about “data storage.” Just as you don’t think about storage when you use Wikipedia or Facebook or Youtube, you won’t be thinking about it for *anything* in 10 years. The economics are simply getting to a point where you will be able to store, share, and manage any amount of information in the cloud — what you’ll pay for are the differentiated or value-added services that do powerful things to that data, not the right or act to store it.

10 years from now, we won’t be thinking about “data storage.” — Aaron Levie

What do you see as the role of design in enterprise software?Tommy Kuntze

This has been an *extremely* low priority for enterprise software vendors in the past. It turns out that companies are really good at doing what their customers value (read Innovator’s Dilemma), and in the past, customers didn’t value great design or UX. The reason for this was that the BUYER of enterprise software was different from the USER of enterprise software, which meant enterprise software companies never had to get good at this.

Now with the rise of consumer technology in the enterprise, CIOs/IT buyers are waking up to the fact that they have to implement technology that can be used, adopted, and loved by their employees. And if you don’t have great UX, you will lose over time. This I think is going to drive the market to become far more UX and design oriented, and you’re already seeing it in the startup ecosystem right now in the enterprise. Employees of enterprises rejoice!

Was there a specific turning point for you in the “early stages” that really made you decide or realize that this company was going to be big? Was there a tipping point?Derek Martin

It’s less that there was one specific tipping point (I wish I could be more dramatic) and more that every 6–12 months the belief that what you’re doing could actually work, and that the market is far bigger than you thought, continues to compound: Either a big new customer comes on board (like GE signing on for 300,000 employees), or closing an initial round of funding, or solving some new really hard technology problem, etc. But you have to always remain deeply paranoid and make sure you’re still innovating faster than everyone else, and getting ahead of the market. You’ve never fully made it.

What’s your take on goal setting and planning?Steven De Blieck

Set extremely large goals (way higher than you should be able to reasonably achieve), but make sure you have backstops in case you don’t achieve them. Have a fundamental mission that can last 5–10 years, have a rough product and strategic north star that looks out around 2–3 years, and have specific quarterly goals (that will change every quarter, likely) and tactics that lead you in the right direction.

If you could change one decision that you have made in your past regarding Box, what would it be? Preston Long-Lamoure

Listening to our early customers even more earlier on — we wavered a bit too much in the initial years on our strategy, and we could have moved much faster in the first 1.5–2 years.

How do you make sure leaders in your company make the right decisions? Do you have any leadership principles or decision making processes in place? Amir Pakzadian

That’s a tricky one. Sometimes for really complex decisions we have to get into a room and hash out — that doesn’t mean we’re going to collectively make the “right” decision, but it does mean whoever is making the decision is going to hear all the possible view points. Other times, we give someone a bunch of authority and they can make the decision how they choose, but their responsibility is to check back in and show progress on how things are going.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to always make sure people are making the right call, but there is always a way that you can reduce risk if you’ve made the wrong call, and be able to adapt quickly when that happens. That’s what we try and focus on.

What’s the best advice you would give to an entrepreneur in college looking to start a startup?Alex Rodriguez

Always focus on the customer! (Some of) our customers knew what we should be doing years before we did, we just had to be listening to the right ones, in the right ways, and build technology in such a way that they would never have thought of, but for the problems that they had thought of.

What has been the most memorable or surprising moment of your career to date? Emily Hodgins

I’m fortunate that there have been a lot of memorable moments — one of the more fun ones was interviewing Tim Cook at BoxWorks last fall, though! And doing a “board meeting” on the court of a Mavericks game when Mark Cuban initially invested.

Aaron Levie and Tim Cook at BoxWorks 2015 (yes those are cloud socks)

What do you think is the most common misconception about enterprise, B2B businesses that young people overlook too often that you wish they didn’t? Javier Torrez

I think that enterprise software looks unsexy from afar because there are of things you have to do that don’t relate purely to “innovation”. You often have to build a sales force; you have to meet with customers, sometimes in suit; sometimes you have to move a little less quickly because if your product breaks it could mean mission critical processes (or even lives if you work in healthcare) are at risk.

These aren’t the most SEXY things of all time. But what can be sexy is when you think about the potential you can have in impacting how the world works: can you build software that helps life sciences firms develop new treatments to diseases? Can you build software that helps flatten the supply chains of the world’s biggest companies, making them move faster and get the products people love to market faster? Can you build software that powers how the entertainment industry works? Maybe I’m delusional (probably am), but I think these are certainly more sexy than building yet another photo sharing app.

Check out the full Q&A with Aaron Levie on Product Hunt.

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