Aaron Levie
Aaron Levie
Aaron Winsor Levieis an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of the enterprise cloud company Box...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth27 December 1985
CountryUnited States of America
technology done enabling
Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
technology years enabling
All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
moving college years
My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.
fighting entrepreneur survival
Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.
weekend night play
My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.
three asking brilliant
I'm obsessed with speed. I'm always asking myself, 'Why can't we do things faster? Why can't it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?'
thinking odds people
If people don't think the odds are against you, you're doing it wrong.
real believe opportunity
I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.
faults loud meetings
I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.
thinking would-be kind
I think I'm the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ - I'm pretty annoying, but driven.
sleep unfortunate
It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
mom teacher dad
My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.
inspiration technology entertainment
I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.
meaningful adversity technology
I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.