Joining me, aaron levie. Blue sneakers, i appreciate that. The socks . Aaron those are cloud socks. Emily i like it. You grew up in seattle. Aaron not normal for people in the Tech Industry. I spent far too much time on the internet, not a large volume of friends. Most of my friends i founded box with. We are growing up in front the shadow of microsoft. Emily did you idolize bill gates . Aaron everybody knew the bill gates story by heart. You could go be a product tester. A lot of people in high school would go to microsoft and test products and the give you a free mouse. Emily you met your cofounders in middle school . Aaron the cofounder the chief financial officer, we played trumpet together in middle school. Neither of us were good at that. Throughout middle school and high school i did a lot of stuff on the internet with just an later intrahigh school with sam good. Emily tell me how it began. Aaron 10 years ago, not a lot of innovation was happening. It was difficult to do basic things so i was in college at the time and the original idea was what if you can have these hard drives in the crowd cloud that would let you put all these files on the hard drive and access it from your internet. Emily tell me about the early days. Aaron mark cuban was an angel investor, that was done by a cold email we sent mark. He sent us a 350,000 check people he never met, so that you must the idea that maybe we should pursue this oldtime which led to us proposing the idea to the parents that we would drop out of college and they got freaked out, but we had to do it and pursue the mission, we dropped out and we convinced our other two friends to drop out of college, we all huddled together in berkeley. Emily aaron it was torture of us eating and sleeping in the same places. It was more akin to a sweatshop but this is how you build companies. Emily you tweeted that this is where we slept, worked fought pivoted and built. What were each of your roles. Aaron we got lucky because collectively we each bring a different kind of skill to the table. We had the Software Skill and the hardware and the networking skill, the finance administration, networking and i focused on the product side. Emily what did you fight about . Aaron we had all the fighting and bickering as founders. But the nice thing is that it all fell back on that trusted relationship that let us work through that. We did not have the same kind of early founding battles that other companies have run into. Because we had been friends for, in some cases, a decade before we even started the company. Emily at facebook you had lawsuits, at twitter, tales of infighting and backstabbing. What makes box unique . What makes you guys different . Emily when you play trumpet with your cofounder at the ripe age of 11, you have a rooted friendship that bickering and frustration from building a company cannot break. Emily has keeping the Team Together been a priority . Aaron yes. We spend a lot of time together. Still. Once a year, for instance, we do our own offsite. Emily have any of you had a moment where you thought, i do not know if i want to keep doing this, i might want to move on . It has been 10 years. Aaron it has been 10 years. I have no idea if my cofounders have had those moments, but none that i have been told about. Emily what is it like becoming a ceo at 19 years old, when your peers are in college, studying partying . Certainly not starting businesses. Aaron it is worse than what your peers are going through. Its not very illustrious to be a ceo of a twoperson company. It got me excluded from parties. At the time. People, from a distance, look like they were having a lot more fun. It is generally more fun to go out than be on a computer 14 hours a day during college. Emily what is the myth of aaron levie and what is the reality . Aaron i think i am still early for myths. I do not know what myths have emerged. The reality is that it is a simple idea. Our job is to build software that previous enterprises did not think was possible to create. Emily how is aaron levie sitting in front of me today different from the 19yearold . Aaron i think as the 19yearold ceo, i would be grabbing my hair more. I had more issues with add. Emily i know you are on the road a lot. This is now a global company. How do you structure your time . Aaron i spend about 50 on the road. It turns out that enterprises are everywhere. Until you go out to a farm who is going to use drones to manage their agricultural business, you dont actually know how these technologies are going to intersect with the real world. And so you have to go out on the road and actually understand customers directly. The view is that it is Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world. When actually Silicon Valley is being integrated into the rest of the world. Emily you drink a lot of coffee. Aaron i do. Emily you take a nap every day. Aaron i do. Emily what is this, spain . Aaron you forgot the three vacations i take every year. Emily but really, if you take a nap and work more in the evening. Tell me about that. Aaron it is the best practice right around 7 00 p. M. Or so you take a 25 minute power nap and you wake up fully recharged and that lasts for about another five hours. That is me time. That is when i design what we are going to do next. What are we behind on . What do we need to start thinking about . That is when everybody gets inundated by emails from me. Emily you have a diary . Like a personal, aaron levie only diary. Aaron the range of Different Industries and what you have to learn about is very vast. You have to keep track of that somewhere. Emily this is something only you see . Aaron yes, i would not want you to see it. So these are sort of my personal things. Emily how big is box . Aaron we have 1100 employees. We have 240,000 businesses that actively use the product. About 39,000 companies are paying for our enterprise edition of the service. 27 million users. Emily you recently rolled out box for industries. For health care, retail and media and entertainment. How is that going and what is next . Aaron we started to see that in every industry we were serving there was some edge of our product or edge of their use cases that was far more advanced and innovative than we had ever imagined that could be done with our platform technology. About a month ago, we announced box for industries that today covers health care, media, retail, but we will be announcing another couple of Industries Next month that will take box into regulated industries that we think are ripe for change. It will serve every major industry. Emily you are seeing so much change and disruption in the world of enterprise technology. Larry ellison stepping down as the ceo of oracle. Hp splitting up. Ibm struggling. When it comes to incumbents versus startups, how does it play out . Aaron so, every couple of decades, you have this sort of changing of the guard as it were. Startups that are really optimized for that disruption have an opportunity to take advantage of that and potentially build the next era of ibm and hp and microsoft. At the same time, you do have incumbents that have a lot of cash. They are led by incredibly smart and astute leaders that understand this change. The changes you are seeing are driven specifically because they know they are being disrupted. Emily peter teel said to me for example, hp is not a Technology Company anymore. It is a bet against innovation. Aaron that is a provocative statement. But i think in terms of relevance, you have leaders of these companies that are recognizing that their previous strategy would have lead to irrelevance and they have to change that. We have this view that everything is zero sum. Ibm does not have to lose for apple to win. Or for salesforce to win. Emily what about microsoft . A company that you grew up with. Aaron there are specific product areas where we could potentially lose or be harmed by some of this transition, but there is an entire company at the macro level that does not necessarily have to lose. Emily so Companies Like microsoft, google, amazon are dropping the price of Cloud Storage. How much of a threat is that . To box. Aaron we love that. The same unit of storage is now a 40th of a price and it was 10 years ago. On the supply side of our business. The cheaper storage gets, the more data we can store for a customer and the more we can deliver unique experiences around the content. Emily you took on 150 million in funding from tpg. The company is now valued at 2. 4 billion. Why did you take that money . Aaron as you may have seen, we filed to go public in march of this year. Basically, a week after we filed, there was a bit of a Market Correction in the tech stock space. So you saw a bit of volatility in a lot of highgrowth technology companies. We decided it was not the best time to bring a new company to market. And we had amazing support from some private Market Growth latestage investors. Tbg and coutu in this case. They were willing and interested in supporting the company is a private company. We took that money on to allow us to continue to invest and grow, invest in the Business Model and build up box without going public. Emily how much have you wondered did we make a mistake and file too soon . Aaron it is obvious that we should not have filed. We dealt with a lot of distraction because of the filing. Whether that was a lot of news reports that happened around the business, obviously we did bring on because of the filing. That was absolutely a distraction to what our core focus is and has been. Which is execution and building up the business. But you know, life is certainly too short to have regrets. We have remained in and continue to be an execution. Emily im curious. It was called a house of horrors. Aaron that is an extreme phrase. Were competing against the Biggest Companies on the planet. In the technology industry. To do that, you have to make a pretty significant investment. In our case, that is an investment in research and development, infrastructure, sales team, and our ability to go to market and reach these customers. Emily the criticism was that you are spending more on sales and marketing to acquire customers than you are making. How has that changed . Aaron the thing scale gives you, because we are a recurring revenue Business Model that was the other thing lost in the mix. Every dollar that we acquire of revenue is a dollar that is recurring annually. And so our job is to keep our customers happy and successful. And compound that dollar over time. We happened to unveil our s1 at a point when new investments had outpaced the revenue scale. And so now, i think, we are more in the stage where the revenue is focused on growing. That is compounding. We dont have many of the new significant investments because we have done a lot of the international expansion. We built out a lot of the Enterprise Sales force. And so youre starting to see that efficiency play out over time. Emily how much have you thought about selling box . Versus staying independent or going public. Aaron we want to sell our software to a lot of companies. The company itself, we have spent about 0 of the time thinking about it. Emily china, this is a critical market that a lot of u. S. Technology businesses have trouble getting into. What is your strategy for getting into china now . Aaron absent learning mandarin, my challenge has been how do we go and explore working in the market. What you will see is a partner over time with key players in the space. But i would not expect us doing anything real big in china in the near future. Emily there is a Company Called dropbox. Aaron yes, i have. Emily your name. The name box is in the name dropbox. You overlap to a certain extent in terms of business. How much of an inconvenience has dropbox been for you . Over the last however many years . Aaron inconvenience is a unique word. I think they are an innovative company. Drew is an incredible leader. We are a fierce competitor from the business standpoint. The business part of the market. But i think that the world is better with them. Emily why do you think you can offer business customers Something Better than they can . Aaron i think that when you go after the enterprise it is really hard to balance a strategy where you are worldclass on the consumer side and also be worldclass for a hospital or a Life Sciences company or a Financial Services institution. Those are just very different types of problems. At box, we dont have any distractions. We are 100 focused on the enterprise. I am between peter thiel and Mark Andreessen in my tweet volume. Emily Silicon Valley is sometimes criticized for being too audacious, too arrogant, and thinking we can change the world. Is that fair . Aaron it used to be that there was a cycle of disruption within Silicon Valley where Software Companies disrupted themselves. We are going through an evolution where we are having to interact with so many new markets in so many different ways. And at first that starts out as, we can solve those problems better than anybody else. Sometimes that belief is right and sometimes that is not. Sometimes we look obnoxious for it. Right . The outside world is unbelievably fascinated with and excited about working with Silicon Valley during this wave of disruption. Something we do not get a perspective as often as we could or should. Emily because we are living in our own bubble . Aaron we live in our own bubble. The view is that it is Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world. It is actually Silicon Valley being integrated into the rest of the world. For the first time, we are not in this isolated universe. It is its own industry. It is an unbelievably interesting time to be the same kind of retailer that five years ago you would have thought was going away because of the internet. There are a tremendous number of companies that have emerged that are trying to help you develop new experiences for your customers. 10 years ago you thought amazon was just going to destroy your entire industry, and now you are on the upswing because we want all new experiences of how we are going to go shop. Emily so you think there is no such thing as the Tech Industry or in the future the Tech Industry wont be so defined . Aaron i think it will be less defined, is the idea. You might have Silicon Valley. That should be seen as the sort of Software Layer of every other industry. Emily your tweets are widely followed. Semi funny. Aaron thank you. Emily thank you for the good material. In response to concerns that you would rein in your tweets after deciding to go public, you tweeted a photo of a missouri law firm. And gave a shout out to your new twitter followers. Aaron im not sure how the law firm happened. Emily hopefully you will not get sued over it. Aaron im sure we sent them some traffic. Emily tweeting as much as you do, why do you do it . Aaron one myth that i can dispel is that i generally tweet only once or twice a day. Emily you are way behind Mark Andreessen. Not 100 tweets a day. Aaron i am between peter thiel and Mark Andreessen regarding my tweet volume. It is one outlet that my pr team does not control for me to be able to just share my thoughts on the technology industry. Emily i guess i just wonder why arent you more scared . Aaron that might be generational. I grew up in chat rooms. Im sure i will say some things that i wake up to in the morning and pull a donald trump or something, regret tweeting for the rest of my life. Emily how much of it is strategy . Aaron it is less strategic than you might think. Because my brain is all over the place. It is actually very representative of the random notions that i have. Emily ive had the benefit of seeing you do magic. Aaron i am less active now as a magician. Emily that is a very hard thing to learn. What have you learned from that . How has it affected your career . Aaron magic is weird. Have you been to a magic conference . Emily no. That sounds like an interesting experience. Aaron you think the Tech Industry has a diversity problem . There is something called the International Brotherhood of magicians. I do not think about anything except what not to do. It was a fun experience in my teenage years. Emily will box still become a Public Company . Aaron that is the path we are on. I would say it is pretty likely. Emily you wouldnt say yes . Aaron i would say that it is the path we are on. Emily would you ever start anything new . Or is this it . Aaron is this continues to go as it is, i will be doing this for quite some time. Emily do you want to be Larry Ellison . Of Cloud Storage . Aaron it does not seem like he has had a horrible life. Because of what we do, it transcends industry and different platforms and devices, ways you will work with information, there is no limit to what is going to be possible in our market, broadly. We have a very wide palette to work with. Emily aaron levie, ceo of box. Thank you very much. Aaron emily, thank you. Emily great to have you. Andemily he is known as text turnaround guy. Blackberry Ceo John Chen has worked in enterprise technology. It he took the Enterprise Software maker from death to 5. 8 billion as a powerhouse. He is taken on an impossible job. He is leading blackberries come back. It how did he become the fixer . My guest today on studio 1. 0 is john chen. The bay area is where you call home. It you technically live here. John my family lives here. I live all around. We have headquarters in canada. Emily how much time do you spend here . John i tried spent about a week a month in waterloo. Bet