Aaron Levie, CEO of Box

<p>Aaron Levie is the founder and CEO of Box, the cloud content management and file sharing service for businesses. If you work in the modern business world, then you have almost certainly used Box to save and share documents. In this episode, Byron and Aaron talk about how he and his co-founders first built the company in 2004, why they decided to serve enterprises over consumers, and insights on building an a C-Suite, culture, and transitioning into being a CEO of a public company.</p> <p><strong>Top highlights from this episode include:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>How Aaron and his founding team approached their pivot to the enterprise:</strong> “By ‘06 and ‘07, we asked ourselves: ‘What if we let an enterprise deploy a hundred or a thousand users and we’ll just charge per seat? It’ll be a monthly recurring business model and we’ll have all the IT and the security features that they need?” Aaron said. “We’ll sell this as an enterprise software product with a bottoms-up distribution motion with a sales team that works off of those customers. And so in a matter of a few weeks, maybe to a month or two, we designed the business model that has stuck with us to this day. In ‘06 and ‘07, this model pivoted the company, and made sure that we had a kind of a modern enterprise software model that was bottoms-up, consumer-driven, but also focused on selling to large enterprises and to the Fortune 500.”</li> <li><strong>Why all feedback is always useful to consider:</strong> “I can look back now with the benefit of hindsight and I’d say 95% of the feedback that we got from the investors that turned us down was actually correct,” said Aaron. “Either it took us longer to realize it, we didn’t get it, maybe we didn’t answer in real time in the right way. Maybe we didn’t portray actually why we agreed because we were taken aback by the feedback. Take feedback from everybody you can, because oftentimes you can synthesize it and take just the bits and pieces across all of the people that will give you constructive or critic