YouSaid · the spoken record

Aaron Levie

lines on the record: 128
first: 2018-07-07
most recent: 2018-07-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We haven't had to deal with the issue of like, you know, is our AI being used for drones in other countries? So dodge a bullet on that being too early from a scale standpoint.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it would matter what the use cases are. That would be pretty core. But I think we're definitely getting into an arena where you're having these really interesting, difficult questions that companies are facing I think maybe we're just fortunate that our government operation is so nascent and so we got lucky on that we haven't had to deal with oracles”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's in maybe my nature to already be outspoken on these types of topics. And I think it's, so we obviously are very focused on trying to drive a much better dialogue on the immigration front and hopefully ultimately policy change. I don't think we're going to see anything the extra years.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recruiting. And then we use that as a way of hopefully creating a little bit more of an opening in the valley for individuals that would not have thought that they would do it. They'd have a career in Silicon Valley. They're in school in Atlanta or DC and the logical opportunities to go to Coca-Cola or go to...”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company, but then us be able to hear the lessons and issues that different groups are facing, and how do we better support immigrants? How do we better support our Latinx population? And how do we make sure that that is much more tied to the culture and the company? I think it's making sure that we hold teams accountable to the diversity within the ranks of their organization. We look at metrics every single quarter as to the population of each individual function within boxes, sales, marketing, engineering, et cetera, to ensure that we think it's trending in a much better direction where we can get to 50-50 from a gender standpoint at least in the next few years. And then additional programs on the recruiting side. We created a fellowship program called Box Business Fellows, where we go to HBCUs and try and have people come to Box for a week and learn about all of the roles in our company, not just the engineering side, but all the business roles, sales, finance.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'd say a few things that we've done well. I think that we've implemented the Rooney rule, basically, which is for any leadership hire director and above, so not just our executive staff, but the population that is a few hundred leaders within Box, we make sure that we have a couple underrepresented candidates in any single, before we're able to hire anybody. And that's dramatically changed the mix of candidate pool that we look at. And it has changed and impacted the director hiring, which then goes on to change the hiring that they will then do in their own team. Because now you have a leader that might be a woman or a person of color. So that's one area. We have tried to put a huge focus on internal inclusion. So focusing on our employee resource groups and the organizations internally that are meant to drive much more community within the”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Joelle is deeply focused on these issues, and she was a lawyer by training and did a lot of public interest law and kind of employee lawsuits and whatnot and kind of realized that there's a legal dimension to this, which is like, let's sue when the harassment has gotten so bad, but also there's a cultural dimension, which is like, why don't we just fix the underlying practices that cause harassment and cause these diversity issues? So, you know, a lot of my own evolution personally and thinking through this has obviously kind of come and been influenced by her and this. But again, it's sort of how you hire, how you attract talent, how you retain talent, and then the culture that you're driving from an inclusion standpoint and every one of those dimensions matters.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of people Seen that happen. Yep. So you've got to make sure that you don't have very, very small pockets of underrepresented groups that are sort of like not fully integrated within the rest of the culture and the organization, which obviously also means you have to get to critical mass and your organization has to look a lot more like the broader population. So I don't think there's a silver bullet other than it being a focus and priority of...”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're blaming on the pipelining quotes for those that didn't see that on the podcast. So I think it fundamentally is to be the focus of the CEO, the leadership team in the organization, which means you have to evolve your hiring practices, you have to evolve your recruiting programs. You have to think about internal promotion and equitability across people.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the problem has been a lack of focus and prioritizing of this issue by leadership teams, CEOs, et cetera. I think that we could definitely blame the pipeline, although I don't know if you've fully read Brotopia from Emily, but it was actually really interesting because today we're blaming the pipeline, but we caused the pipeline problem to get created decades ago. Yes. So it's like, well, yeah, I mean, we created the very problem that we're now facing.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pull from all over the world. The majority of, I don't know if, yeah, probably 1,200 or so are in Silicon Valley, and then the rest are distributed throughout the US and other countries.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Massive diversity issues. So I was going to say, so you have this sort of like multinational challenges of like the democracy at risk and there's nation states attacking states and cybersecurity. And then you have very local issues like housing. And what are we doing for our local community? And then diversity and inclusion, like why are these companies so hard to get into and so closed off and why are we not able to impact the leadership ranks of these companies from a diversity inclusion standpoint? So it's, you know, I think there's a lot of stuff where it's like, we got to get our houses in order. And that is taking on a variety of different work streams. Some are cultural, some are policy, some are technological, some are broader community things. I don't know that I think what we just need is a consistent pushback on our companies. And we need to continue to see a path for”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And may one day I be in a position where I don't think you're ever going to want to go think about Mars. You and I can stay here.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't do like a life changing kind of thing. I can't be uprooted right now. You like Earth. I have too many priorities right now and I have a job and you can't take time off from Mars at the moment.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what you should do? I have a career job. I have a job where I just chief risk officer. Just go to these companies”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apocalyptic ways to use that. I had a lot of discussions with him years ago about this, and they were very brush offy. Like, oh, you are so negative or they said that to me at one point when I complained about it. I was like, aren't you anticipating?”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More of the optimistic scenarios of like, well, what if family members were more connected all around the world? And what if you could stay in touch with somebody you went to college with 30 years ago? And so then you're like, oh, shit, but the real world is way more serious than that. There are way more apocalyptic ways to use things.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you're like 20 years old and you're like, I'm going to build a cool startup that can solve how people like socially network with each other. You're not thinking about, well, what if Russia hacked this thing? And so then it's in the core ethos of the company, you didn't have that deep paranoia of, and skepticism thinking through every possible way that this could break. You're really thinking through.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just goes one thing. And I mean, being a founder and at least knowing some of the origin process for how companies get created, you generally are only thinking of the positive things when you're starting.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a completely hypothetical way, but then to see it happen for real, you start to realize, oh shit, like, what have we created here? And so I'm sure that to some extent it's bullshit to say, okay, we're all of a sudden surprised by this impact. But I think what we're seeing is all these sort of new compounding layers of ways that these platforms are impacting the world.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's bullshit. Okay. So actually, I'm down with that being bullshit. Maybe I'm not. I think the problem is these things are not binary. It's this increasing kind of boiling frog issue of like, okay, like, you know, Zuckerberg knew the impact of Facebook when they did that one thing where 90 years ago, beacon, thank you. So like, yeah, he knew the impact. Like, wow, I could actually hurt people's personal lives if we publish things that people didn't know we were publishing. But I don't know that they ever did a whiteboard scenario saying, okay, let's imagine that you have this nation state that's trying to impact our election. What are the hundred ways that you could manipulate an election in the US? And how many degrees could that become away from that nation state? So you wouldn't even know that it was coming from them. And it could be actually sort of routed through somebody else. Like, you know, these are fun, you know, conversations to have.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, that's good. Well, I like him. But I think that the situation we're in right now is, I think an awakening of how much responsibility the valley has and basically how the role of these technology platforms Kind of have an impact on our democracy and on how the world just literally functions. And I think it's companies like Facebook and Google's and others are waking up to their role in society in a much more extreme way, in a less intellectual way, because I think it's always intellectually people have known it, but now it's like you can feel it.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, 10 million editors that can do all of the different controls and abuse kind of claims. But I think something needs to change. I don't think we're in a good spot. And I think it needs to continue to evolve.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of his fortune. I don't know what you do if you're Jack and you have this incredible democratizing force that can and has brought a lot of good around the world at the same time you have all these other challenges that you deal with, maybe like magically machine learning helps with this. Maybe you just have to hire it 10,000 editors.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He could. He could. That would be close to a lot of he was dealing with a lot of harassment, he would just buy Twitter and shut it down. He doesn't mind.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would be certainly one approach to private equity is just you buy things and you shut them down. You just pray, you get returns from that.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really? I don't know that shareholders are really. I know if it was private, I'd be like, oh, okay. Okay, this is sort of the benevolent.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think me aside for a second, I think that Twitter is, on one hand, it's an amazing platform because it's given anybody a voice anywhere around the world. That's awesome. I don't think anybody would say, okay, Arab Spring or just underrepresented communities that now have a much broader voice. That's awesome. At the same time, you also can see that it's a cause of harassment and it's a cause of a lot more anger and negativity in some areas. I don't know how you solve that. I don't know how you get I don't, well, and then now you don't have this medium.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's up in Seattle. Oh, wow. So it works with like three year olds. So that's the level of help that she tends to give me. I see. Okay, good. Well, that's perfect.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She'll just be like that. That tweet wasn't funny. Oh, it just wasn't funny. Yeah, it wasn't funny or didn't make any sense. I'd be like, yeah, you're right. Or she'll be like, you misspelled something. And I'm like, fuck. So then I have to go delete it. I get a lot of real-time texts from my mom on Twitter. Yeah, yeah.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to maintain that sort of policy oriented structure just given the amount of the climate that we're in. But that's my general approach. And then again, just try not to overthink it too much. You know, I delete tweets sometimes that are just stupid. Yeah, I don't like, I'll type something and then my mom will text me and she'll be like, that was really stupid. And I'll be like, you're right, mom. And then I delete it.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do. I think during the election cycle, I think I got a little bit more casual in nature on some of the Trump stuff. But in general, I think that I have to have, we try and focus on policy as opposed to the politician.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think Twitter is a fascinating outlet for being able to get out your thoughts. And, you know, I grew up with, I mean, internet was like core to my being growing up. And so to me, it was just like another chat forum. But with more of a, it's more of a broadcast chat forum. But yeah, I mean, unfortunately, not like a lot of methodology behind it.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that there's probably, I mean, unfortunately, there's not that much thought or process to it other than try and say what's on my mind. And, you know, if you can kind of word it in a way that people like, then you'll feel better when you get likes on it.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the funniest, I appreciate that. No, deeply funny. Deeply funny. So, how did it change? So, what did you do? Yeah, I mean, I think”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people just have incredibly low expectations for what they expect on Twitter. Really? Yeah, I don't think it's me.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where I have a very extreme hierarchy in terms of how we deliver, how we make decisions in the organization. And all of a sudden, a 21-year-old that just came out of college might have a better idea for a new product. And how does the culture of the organization begin to adapt to the fact that if you have a flatter environment where the best ideas can come from anywhere, where people need a lot more transparency so they have the information to make those types of decisions faster, what does that mean to the traditional corporate structure? What does that mean to how these companies are run and operate? And that's the exciting set of changes that are to come.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That principle is exactly what most IT organizations need to be able to have within their environment. So then the question is, okay, I'm a Fortune 500 company. I'm a CPG company. And all of a sudden, I have tools that make it easier to share in real time, make my organization much more open, much more transparent. That's fucking up the culture because I am used to an environment where information is power.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use a new tool for that. So now the question is, how do these large companies get to a point where they can have smaller teams that are much more agile, that are much closer to customers? And on one part, it's culture. So if you're the CHRO of a large Fortune 500 enterprise, you're saying, I have to change my culture and my organization to get there. But if you're the CIO on the IT side, you also have to have a modern technology stack that is like things like Slack that are going to let you have team collaboration on a similar level. At a smaller level, that is much more local and around one specific business problem or one interesting.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is not how any large company that was built in Very slow three year business processes to get a new product to market. The customer, a customer has a request or a new expectation, and then the entire giant ship has to turn just a little bit to be able to.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the synopsis of a talking point. So, you know, you obviously know this idea of Amazon two pizza teams much more modular innovation where small teams are able to work against a much broader technology stack and deliver customer innovation local to the customer. That is not how... 98% of the world works”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking point. I want a specific. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so I am enjoying this talking point. It's a good one. I appreciate that.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you begin to change the pace of innovation? How do you begin to change the speed at which you make decisions and you drive new products into market? How do you get closer to your customers? This whole idea of the digital age is like really all it just means is like business is moving a lot faster. Customers have way higher expectations. So if you don't respond, you're going to get disrupted. And so I think where enterprise software is going to have to go and where customers are demanding us to go is to say, how do I begin to work in the digital age? How do I begin to.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This will sound sort of obtuse or amorphous, but it's really this idea of what is the future of work look like. And this is like you're a company that has 100,000 employees. You have a bunch of practices. You have a bunch of behaviors. You have a bunch of business processes that have been codified after decades and decades of being successful. You're a retailer. You're a car manufacturer. You're a life sciences company.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They demand way more, and consumer expectations have dramatically changed. They've pulled those expectations in the workplace, and they're saying, no, I'm not going to fill out an expense report in some software that's 20 years old. That's just too painful. Or I'm not going to share files inside of that legacy system. So what they do is they bring in their own tool, creating a massive security vulnerability for the company. And then that's where we come in and we say, okay, we can hopefully solve this whole problem.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has workday in it, it has service now, and it has Salesforce. These things work. It has box in it. And we work together. Yeah, it used to be you didn't get fired for using Microsoft, but now I think people that do demand more”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's what we're seeing from customers. So if you look at a Coca-Cola or an Eli Lily or a Pfizer or a GE, their IT stack looks very different than it would have 10 or 15 years ago. It has workday in it. It has ServiceNow in it. It has Salesforce in it. It has box in it. And we work together. Not necessarily perfectly at all times, but we got to drive more interoperability. But the big, I think the thing that our more sort of insurgent ecosystem is going to face is can we all work together to deliver an incredible experience jointly that is as integrated as what a Microsoft or Oracle is going to be able to provide. That used to be you didn't get far from.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Him and Sergei just like floating around. No, I didn't want to get into the future. Let's not get into Sergei. Let's not go down.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, it can crash into the water. It's not that dangerous And the hover car. Yeah, you're right. I've seen it. You haven't seen it. Okay. I don't understand this. I have a time machine. It's still buggy, though. All right. You can sort of see his arm pop out of the cloak”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't have a lot of focus. Yeah, I mean, certainly flying cars probably is a little bit more exciting than doing corporate security.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT