Aaron how you doing . Emily how you doing . Aaron good, thank you. Emily blue sneakers today, i appreciate that. What are the socks . Aaron these are cloud socks. Emily ok. Aaron official cloud socks. For the enterprise offer industry. Emily i like it. You grew up in seattle. Aaron yes. Emily what kind of kid were you . Aaron probably not atypical of, certainly, people in the Tech Industry. So, i spent far too long, far too much time, on the internet. Not, sort of, large volume of friends. Most of those that were my friends i founded the company, i founded box with. We were growing up in the shadow of microsoft. Emily did you idolize jeff bezos and bill gates . Aaron yeah, everybody knew the bill gates story kind of by heart. Whats cool about microsoft is that you can actually go and they let you be a product tester. So a lot of people in high school would actually go to microsoft and test out new products and then they would give you like a free mouse at the end of it. Emily ok, you met your cofounders in middle school. Tell me about that. Aaron so, dylan smith, kind of the first cofounder of box whos now our chief financial officer, we actually played trumpet together in middle school. Neither of us were any good at that. And then throughout middle school and high school though, i did a lot of stuff on the internet with jeff and later in high school with sam ghods. Emily tell me how box began. Aaron if you go back about ten years ago, not a lot of innovation was happening. So it was really, really hard to do basic things like, how do you share your files, how do you access your data from anywhere how do you collaborate and work with other people . I was in college at the time. And the original idea was what if you could have these sort of hard drives in the cloud that would let you put all your files in these hard drives and then access it from the internet and any device that you wanted to be able work from. Emily so tell me about those early days. Like, fondest memories. Aaron one was mark cuban was an Angel Investor in box. And that was just done by a cold email that we sent to mark back in 2005. So he sent us a 350,000 check to people he had never met. So that gave dylan and myself the idea, maybe we should pursue this fulltime. Which led to us basically proposing the idea to our parents that were going to drop out of college. They subsequently got freaked out. But we had to do it and pursue the mission. We dropped out. And then we convinced our other two friends, sam and jeff, to also drop out of college. And we all huddled together in berkeley, and emily this is when you moved to the garage . Aaron we moved to this garage this renovated garage in berkeley that my uncle had built up. And im not sure that it was legal at all. We would spend 16 hours a day, 17 hours a day, just working on the software, on the Business Model, on marketing. It was just four of us living, working, you know, eating, sleeping in the same place. It was pretty disgusting actually. [laughter] if you really want to know, it is probably more akin to a sweatshop. But this is how you build companies. Emily you tweeted a picture of that garage. Saying boxs first office 8 years ago where we slept worked, fought, pivoted, and built. When it came to each of your cofounders, what was each of your roles . Aaron we got really lucky, i think, collectively, because we each bring a different kind of skill to the table. So we had sort of the software skill, the hardware and networking skill. We had the finance administration, legal, Business Operations skill. That was dylan. And i focused really on the product side. Emily so when you say you fought, im just curious. In those early days, what did you fight about . What were the issues that came up . Aaron we had all the sort of fighting and all of the bickering as founders. But the nice thing is that it all fell back on, again, that trusted relationship that let us kind of 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 so obviously at facebook you had lawsuits, twitter, you know, tales of infighting and backstabbing. What makes box unique . What makes you guys different . Aaron when you play trumpet with your cofounder at the ripe age of 11, you have a rooted friendship that, you know, bickering and frustrations from building a company tend to not be able to break. Emily has keeping the Team Together been a priority . Aaron yeah. We spend a lot of time together. Still. Once a year, for instance, we do our own offsite, just the four of us. Emily have any one of you ever had a moment where you thought i dont know, i dont know if i want to keep doing this, maybe 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 the age of 19, when your peers are in college, partying . Certainly not starting businesses. Aaron it is generally just worse than what your peers are doing. So [laughter] its not very illustrious to be a ceo of a twoperson company. It got me excluded from a lot of parties at the time. And people it looked, from a distance, looked like they were having a lot more fun. And because it is generally more fun to go out than to be on your 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 with myths. So i dont know what myths have emerged. But the reality is that its a really simple idea. Our job is to build software that previously enterprises didnt think was possible to create. Emily how is aaron levie sitting in front of me today different from than 19yearold ceo . Aaron i think as the 19yearold ceo, i would be grabbing my hair more. I had a lot more a lot more issues with add, so. Emily i know you are on the road a lot. This is now a global company. How do you structure your time . Aaron i probably spend about 50 of the time on the road, because it turns out that enterprises are everywhere. Until you go out to a farm who is going to use drones to manage their agriculture business, you dont actually know how these technologies are going to intersect with the sort of real world. And so you have to go out on the road and actually understand that customers directly. Emily right. Aaron the view is, its sort of Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world. When its actually Silicon Valley being integrated into the rest of the world. Emily you drink a lot of coffee, apparently. Aaron i do. Emily you take a nap. Aaron i do take naps. Emily every day. Aaron i try to. Emily what is this, spain . I mean aaron this is you forgot the three months of vacation i take every year. Emily no, but really, you do. You do take a nap. Aaron i do take a nap. Emily and you work more in the evening. Tell me about that. Aaron yes. Its really, um, just 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 another about five hours or so. And then its me time. That is where i get to go design, sort of, what are we going to do next . What are we behind on . What do we need to start to think about . That is generally when everybody gets inundated by emails from me. Emily and you have a diary, right . Like a personal, aaron levieonly diary. Aaron the range of Different Industries and what you have to learn about from their technology is just very vast. And so you have to keep track of that somewhere. Emily and this is something that 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 today . Aaron we have about 1,100 employees. We have 240,000 businesses that actively use the product. About 39,000 companies are sort of paying for our enterprise edition of the service. 27 million users. Emily you recently rolled out box for industries. For health care, retail, media and entertainment. How is that going and what is next . Aaron what we started to see happening is in every industry that 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, which today covers health care, media, retail, but we will be announcing a number of other industries over the next couple of months that will take box into more regulated industries that we think are very ripe for change. It will serve every major industry. Emily you are seeing so much change and disruption in the world of Enterprise Technology right now. 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 thiel, for example, said to me hp is not a Technology Company anymore. It is a bet against innovation. Aaron i think that is a certainly 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 that they have to change that. We have this view that sort of everything is sort of zero sum. Ibm does not have to lose for apple to win. Or for salesforce to win. Emily what about a company like microsoft . A company that you grew up with. Aaron i think there are specific product areas that could potentially lose or be harmed by some of this transition, but then 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 the price as it was 10 years ago. On the supply side of our business. So the cheaper that storage gets, the more data that we can store for a customer, and the more we can deliver unique experiences around their content. Emily you recently took on 150 million in funding from tpg and coatue. The company is now valued at 2. 4 billion. Why did you take that money . Aaron as you may have seen, we have filed to go public in march of this year. And then basically about a week after we filed to go public, there was a bit of a Market Correction in the tech stock space. So you saw a bit of volatility quite a bit of volatility and a lot of sass in kind of highgrowth technology companies. So we decided it wasnt the best time to bring a new company to market. And we had amazing support from some private Market Growth latestage investors, tbg and coutue in this case. They were willing to and interested in supporting the company as a private company. We took that money on to allow us to continue to invest in growth, continue to invest in the Business Model and building up box without necessarily going public. Emily how much have you wondered did we make a mistake did we file too soon . Aaron what is obvious is that we should not have filed when we did. We dealt with a lot of distraction because of that filing. I think whether that was a log of unfortunate news reports and the cycle that has happened around the business that we brought on because of the filing. That was absolutely a distraction to what our core focus is and has been, which is, you know, execution and building the business. But, you know, life is certainly too short to have any specific regrets. So we have learned. We have been and remain in just full execution mode. Emily im curious about what that moment was like for you. Because you open your books to the world. Everybody can see your finances. Somebody like om malik calls box a house of horrors. Aaron yeah, thats an extreme phrase. We are competing against really the Biggest Companies on the planet in the technology industry. And so to do that, you have to make a pretty significant investment. In our case, that is an investment in research and development, in infrastructure in our sales team, in our ability to actually go to market and reach these customers. Emily the criticism was that you are spending more on sales and marketing and acquiring customers than you are making. How are you changing that or how has that changed . Aaron the thing that scale gives you is that because we are a recurring revenue Business Model which i think is another thing that was 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 customers happy and successful. And compound that dollar over time. We just happened to unveil our s1 at a point where, again, the new investments had outpaced the revenue scale. And so now, i think, we are more in a stage where the revenue is were focused on growing that of course, and that is compounding. But we dont have as 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. Versus going public. Aaron we want to sell our software to a lot of companies. But the company itself, we spend about 0 of our time thinking about over the past few years. Emily alright. China, obviously this is a critical market that a lot of u. S. Technology business have trouble getting into. What is your strategy on china now . Aaron sort of absent learning chinese or mandarin my challenge has been how do we go explore working in the market in a big way. And i think what you will see is probably us partner over time with key players in the space. But i would not expect us doing anything really big in china in the near future. Emily there is a company you may have heard of called dropbox. Aaron yes, i have. Emily your name the name box is in the name dropbox you do overlap to a certain extent in terms of business, customers. How much of an inconvenience has dropbox been for you . Over the last however many years . Aaron you know, inconvenience is a unique word. I think they are an innovative company. Drew is obviously an incredible leader. We obviously are a fierce competitor from a business standpoint. In 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, 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, very different types of problems. At box, we dont have any distractions. We are 100 focused on the enterprise. Aaron i am sort of between peter thiel and Mark Andreessen in my tweet volume. Emily Silicon Valley is sometimes criticized for being too audacious, too arrogant, and thinking that 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 constantly sort of 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 when its not correct, it ends up looking ludicrous and we look obnoxious for it. Right . The outside world is unbelievably fascinated with and excited about working with Silicon Valley in this wave of disruption. Something that we do not get a perspective for as often as i think we could or should emily you mean because we are living in our own bubble . Aaron we live in our own bubble. The view is it is sort of Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world. When it is actually Silicon Valley being integrated into the rest of the world. And for the first time where we are not sort of in this isolated universe of its its own industry. theres no Tech Industry. Theres sort of tech enabled everything. 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 is a tremendous number of companies that have emerged that are trying to help you develop new experiences to get to your customers. Right . 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 its going to be less defined, is the idea. You might have Silicon Valley. But, youre going that should be seen as the sort of Software Layer of every other industry. Emily your tweets are widely followed. Semifunny. Aaron thank you. Semifunny. Yes. Emily thanks for the good material. In response to concerns that you would reign in your tweets after you filed to go public, you tweeted a photo of a Missouri Law Firm. And gave a shoutout to your new twitter followers. Aaron actually, im not sure how the Missouri