Aaron Levie Quotes

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.

Execute like there's no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.

Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds.

When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.

Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.

A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can't separate those two things.

If you're waiting for encouragement from others, you're doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it's probably too late.

My acronym is WWSJD: What Would Steve Jobs Do?

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.

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.

The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.

Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.

That's already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.

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.

Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead.

You can look at the cost structure of an incumbent company and discover: where are they not going to be able to drop their prices ... because that business model is fundamental to the existence of the company.

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something.

Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.

Startups often win because it's easier to see what comes next when you don't have to worry about maintaining what came last.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it's important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It's best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.

The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what's best for the customer, without ever having to ask.

In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.

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.

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.

Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.

There's a lot of pride that business owners have. It's actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.

Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don't need salespeople.

The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.

Steve Jobs is the most epic entrepreneur of all time. He served as a guiding light for any emerging businessperson who wanted to learn how things should get done. He'll be looked at as one of the best business leaders of all time, and certainly one of the best tech entrepreneurs.

The dynamic with social is you tend not to have products with 30% market share. It's all or nothing. Email works because we have open standards that let you communicate across any email client.

It's not accidental that products get worse over time; it's because companies stop paying attention to them. They stop caring as much about maintaining the same quality they did when they were just trying to fight for survival and no one would pay attention unless they had the best technology.

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.

Sometimes things are the way they are and can't be changed, other times it's because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.

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.

I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.

Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.

We didn't really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.

The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.

Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.

The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.

Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.

If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.

You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent ... because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.