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.

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

My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.

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.

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

I don't use many apps. I use naps.

Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.