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

“Yeah. So, I mean, we use them at box. We have a couple thousand employees. So certainly there's nothing about Google Suite or Gmail that doesn't scale the large enterprises. I think that there's just a sort of a traditional approach that corporate IT has, which is, okay, we're going to be using Microsoft's Exchange and Outlook, and we're going to use that in the cloud from Microsoft. So it's more, there's a new set of technologies Google has. Some enterprises have it, but a lot of S&Bs is really where the focus is.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made a big push into this. Google's made a huge push. I think we're seeing more success from Google on the computing side. So really on the infrastructure space and things like Google? Yeah, just cloud computing, sorry. And what Diane has been driving. I think on Google Suite, like Google Docs, Gmail, et cetera, what maybe you can consume.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's just really a yacht, I think. He's not even in a pool. And we basically see that the future of IT is going to come down to, do customers want innovation from best of breed vendors and us all to work together, which means even working with Microsoft and Google and these incumbents. It doesn't mean that it's going to be Microsoft all of a sudden disappears. I think this is where we on the startup side get it wrong. Like Microsoft is going to be a dominant force in technology effectively in perpetuity. The question is, will there also be a space for best of breed technologies that can deliver innovation around that?”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we made I think that's a good pool analogy. So we are all swimming in the same direction in a giant pool. And basically there's another pool next to us, which has no lanes. And it's just one giant sort of shark-infested water.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. In any case, so you want to each of them work together so that you have the workday element, the sales, because you all are in sort of similar lanes, but differently. Yeah, I think we basically cool, but different lanes.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like that word. Yeah, you know, very different than Balmer style in terms of the organization. But we kind of see a juncture that the enterprise market is sort of facing right now. We're either going to repeat the, I think, mistakes of the 90s and 2000s, which is you give all of the power to two or three or four companies, and we know the names of those companies, the Oracles of the world and Microsoft's of the world. Or we as the enterprise industry and big companies say, I'd actually rather have innovation coming from a multitude of vendors, Slack, and workplace by Facebook and ServiceNow and Workday and Salesforce. And I want those technology companies to be really, really deeply integrated with one another. And the benefit that I'm going to get as an enterprise IT buyer is I'm going to get constant innovation in each sort of swim lane, in each sector.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are very good. And Satya's a really great leader, and he's got a great set of team Blowman. It's been incredible to see how he's, in just a matter of years, completely transformed. Not quite as far as.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Copying beautifully Yeah, it's helpful if you don't break down my talking points so significantly. It's better if you just believe all of my corporate marketing message. So, you know, I think that the”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they have gone public. And I mean, we probably wish it was just a head to head battle, but the reality is you have Microsoft, you have Google, you have a lot of more traditional companies like EMC and others. This is where actual spend is going for how companies manage their information and their data. So our job as a startup, but a public startup is to make sure that we are out innovating the much larger incumbents in this market and delivering a much better user experience, being fundamentally more open and integrated with the rest of the technology ecosystem, which is not something that Microsoft is particularly suited for. And then make sure that we can constantly out innovate the bigger competition. So our competitive advantage fundamentally as a startup is that we can move faster, we can get closer to customers and better serve them and be much more open and interoperable with the rest of their technology landscape.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that it's important. Obviously, the Silicon Valley dynamic is it feels like it's a box versus dropbox environment. I think that both of us would recognize that the market is obviously far bigger than us.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like, why in the workplace are you using worse technology than in our personal lives when we actually spend way more money on technology in the workplace? And there's a variety of reasons, just like the legacy enterprise software vendors never cared about user experience and all these factors, but now finally... They had them locked in, you had monopoly control of data. It didn't really matter. The buyer was an IT buyer, not the end user. And the end user really had no power to affect the kinds of decisions that were being made in the software development process. And that's all changed in the past couple of years.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the market kind of realized like, oh shit, the market is really, the money is going to be in the enterprise. And we fortunately had over a decade head start on that. But the trend of consumerization of enterprise technology or this idea that...”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the consumer. And then you bought that blazer there. And then I started buying suits and started looking more serious. Started dyeing my hair gray. And then now I have too much.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, folklore is always good. So, well, we started the company focused on basically independent of the market. Who cares? We were 19 and 20. We didn't think about whether you were a business or an individual or a consumer. So we just focused on people. What happened was our business model changed within about a year and a half of launching where we said we don't think there's a viable business. Yeah.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you certainly had a consumer movement that sort of impacted how technology worked in the enterprise. And we were a part of that movement. And when we founded the company 13 years ago, we didn't really think about consumers or enterprises. We just said, hey, people, they want to be able to share and collaborate. And whether you use this in a business environment or a consumer environment, you always feel.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is only growing by the day The Safe place for them. I think people look at these in terms of consumer products. That's how they first got introduced to a lot of stuff that is in the workplace sort of lagged for a long time and now it isn't. But you sort of mention it, you think of it like a Facebook work or that in that case or anything else that you're using. And it's also a mentality I think a lot of Silicon Valley companies had. Like, oh well. And like, oh, well, you got billions of dollars of investment. Screw you. Right. Whether you work or not is really is my choice as a customer.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like, haha, there was a whole trending Twitter thing, but it's like, whoa. No, thank you. You take some time off today? No, I didn't, but I was annoyed. Yeah, and I mean, the I was more irritated than the mission criticality of these types of services is only growing by the day. We're used in hospitals. We're used in medical procedures. We're used in disaster relief. We're used in movie companies that have to be able to collaborate in real time on a script. So if you go down or you're not secure or you don't have the right compliance, you have no ability to go serve your customer. So that is a big issue. This is the foundation of everything we do is security, robustness, reliability, all of the things that ensure that a large regulated company can have a safe place for them.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slack went down. It was like, ha ha, there was a whole trending Twitter thing, but it's like, whoa, I use this for my business. No, thank you. Like, it's not a joke and it's not like, well, do you take some time off today? No, I didn't. But I was annoyed. I was like, you know, I would be very annoyed if my hour went off or my water went off or whatever, you know, whatever I use. And so it was interesting to me that everyone was looking at like a consumer product like, oh, ha. Yep. But it really is something I use for my business. It was interesting. Yeah. And I mean, I was more irritated. No, the.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lift It's And one of the things that you have to sell them on? Because one obviously was you were a small company, security. These are the areas you're dealing with are not small. And your company hadn't been particularly plagued by that, but many others in the space have this idea of security in general. And then also that you're, like today, Slack went down.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a bunch of practices, we have a bunch of behaviors, we have a bunch of sort of ways that our culture and work styles have evolved for 20, 30, 50, 100 years if you're a company that's been around for 100 years. And all of a sudden, this whole digital thing happens and now you have Airbnb attacking your industry. You have Netflix that attacking your industry. You have Lyft and Uber that are attacking your industry, depending on which space you're in. And all of a sudden, you have to modernize the way that you serve your customers. You have to modernize your internal work styles. You have to modernize the way you do product development. You have to modernize the ways that you collaborate. And if you're in the Fortune 500, you're looking for partners that can kind of help you through this journey. And this is how we sort of see our role in the environment.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Salesforce Workday. I mean, we're a part of obviously a much bigger movement. And so a lot of that sales work is being done for us. But I think the crux of the moment we're in right now as both a company and in the space is the Fortune 500, which is basically a proxy for any large business around the world, is dealing with this challenge of, okay,”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have a lot of, you have decades and decades of legacy technology that companies had to manage in their data centers. In our particular category, there's probably 30 to 40 or 50 billion dollars being spent every year on all of this technology, but in the customer's data center. What we're trying to go to companies in the Fortune 500 and say, listen, we can deliver a much simpler way to manage your information. You're going to be able to collaborate and work in a much more modern way, and you're going to be able to stay secure. You're going to be able to stay compliant. You're going to be able to handle all the privacy requirements that any large multinational, which we still got used to.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the heart. Yeah. Deeply. And you have things. I know more than that. You have things. And you have very specific. So Which they shouldn't really do themselves, which most people did, homegrown kind of stuff.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sort of started out by selling end user file sharing and collaboration, and now we've been building a much broader platform Which you have to, so you have to have a platform, obviously, these days. And so the whole idea is can we be an end to end platform that helps companies manage and secure their most important information? At the heart. Yeah, at the heart, but really being able to secure and manage that content, which is obviously a space that you know and love deeply. And you have things. You have things like GDPR and you have very specific industry regulations. And then you have data residency. And then you have cybersecurity challenges. And so companies are dealing with this just massive nightmare of like, how do I both modernize the way that my organization works and the way we collaborate, the way that we accomplish our daily tasks with all of the new challenges that...”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AMGEN and Coca-Cola and General Electric all use box to be able to manage and secure their data and content. We're going through a little bit of an evolution where”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm glad that you included others in that. So, you know, it was a rough ride because we got really unlucky that the moment we filed to go public, there was a lot of, there was a kind of like a very brief correction in SaaS valuations. And we got that right at the center of our IPO process. Plus, we were known for burning a lot of cash. And the reason for that was we were building out a pretty significant enterprise sales force and doing a lot of deep engineering on the scale of our platform with the intent of making sure that any Fortune 500 company, a bank, a hospital, life sciences company would be able to actually deploy box across the entire organization. So you have to have a certain amount of that enterprise scale to be able to get there. And that was where we were spending our money on the singular bet that we were going to go and power the Fortune 500 and how they work and share and collaborate. And so fortunately, a number of years later from that, we now have about 69% of the Fortune 500 is customers. So companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we have to talk about it and a lot more scrutiny we're aiming for and guided to a little over $600 million in revenue this year on a path to about a billion in revenue in the next few years. So all the fun and joys of being a public company. We are cash flow positive. Yeah, yeah, there's like nine forms of profitability in the valley. We're in the middle tier. You're not direct.”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We probably just had gone public, but three years later been public. I think we've done something on the order of 13 earnings calls. So that's been a pretty good experience. A little over 500 million in revenue last year were”
2018-07-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Box CEO Aaron Levie · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT