Suggestions
Aaron Levie
CEO of Box - The Content Cloud
Aaron Levie: From College Dropout to Successful Entrepreneur
Aaron Levie is the co-founder and CEO of Box, a leading enterprise cloud company. Born in Boulder, Colorado in 1984, Levie grew up in Mercer Island, Washington before attending the University of Southern California.2
While studying at USC, Levie came up with the idea for Box, an online file storage and collaboration platform, as a college business project in 2004.2 He incorporated the company in 2005 with his friend Dylan Smith and secured initial funding from investor Mark Cuban after a cold email pitch.12
Levie dropped out of USC during his junior year in 2005 to focus on growing Box full-time.12 The company pivoted from a consumer service to an enterprise cloud platform in 2007, which proved to be a key strategic move.2
Under Levie's leadership, Box has grown to over 14 million paid users and is valued at an estimated $4 billion.1 The company went public on the NYSE in 2015.2 Today, Box counts 40% of Fortune 500 companies as paying customers.2
Levie has been recognized as a thought leader in the enterprise software space, speaking at industry events and contributing articles to publications like The Washington Post, Fortune, and Forbes.2 He advises founders to maintain control of their destiny by keeping expenses low and getting close to revenue equaling expenses.4
With his signature wit and insight, Levie continues to steer Box's growth as CEO, drawing on the lessons learned from his journey as a college dropout turned successful entrepreneur.13
Highlights
Very cool to see the amount of innovation coming out of Google right now across advanced technologies. We’re starting to see the pay off from 10+ year bets, combined with a clearly dialed up level of execution. Good for the ecosystem to have everyone on their best game.
The Grok button now being on every post is a clever new UX pattern for AI that could be broadly useful across the web. Being able to provide instant analysis to anything with zero friction dramatically increases the ability to go deep on any topic.
