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
interesting next ifs
If every customer is using your product "correctly", you'll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.
technology building platforms
Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
keys building distinction
Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.
mind building lost
Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds.
technology benefits kind
The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
building software enterprise
If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.
years use definitions
Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed - just in the last 5 years.
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.
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.
thinking iphone ecosystems
All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.
sleep unfortunate
It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
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.
faults loud meetings
I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.
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.