Aaron Levie Quotes

The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.

You'll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

Read these 3 books - Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.

Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.

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.

We didn't really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.

I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it's important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It's best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.

Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.

There's a lot of pride that business owners have. It's actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.

They can bring the technology in, then you can sell to the enterprise when they want to have better control, better security... you still have the same biz model as a traditional enterprise sw company, but the way to get into the company is through the end user.

The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.

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.

I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.

The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.

You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.

In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.

I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.

The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what's best for the customer, without ever having to ask.

My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it's not the healthiest way to live, but it's all I really have time for.

All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.

I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.

I think because of the iPhone and the fact that we now have a ubiquitous internet, our creativity in the startup space is 10 times different. Every single industry, every single market, is going to be technology-driven in some way. There's an infinite opportunity for startups because now you can go and solve problems that previously looked like they had nothing to do with technology.

Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.

Too little process and you can't get good work done. Too much process and you can't get any work done. Most companies never find the middle.

Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work

Startups often win because it's easier to see what comes next when you don't have to worry about maintaining what came last.

A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can't separate those two things.

Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed - just in the last 5 years.

When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.

If people don't think the odds are against you, you're doing it wrong.

In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.

I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.

In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology... and you can build software then, around the user.

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.