Aaron Levie hated college. The classes, the schedule: It wasn’t his thing. If he had liked them, it’s possible he wouldn’t have founded Box, the company of which he is Chief Executive Officer, two decades later.
It’s been a long time since Levie wrote to several prominent early Internet-era founders asking for help with their online storage business with no real hope of responses, only to have secured a six-figure check from Mark Cuban that helped launch the business toward the rarefied air in which it now resides. It’s a journey from replacing thumb drives to releasing your own Artificial Intelligence agent, as Box did in May, including a special Box AI Agent for Microsoft 365. And, for what it’s worth, those early days of begging for investments have long been put in the past, the debts having long been paid.
That’s not bad for what Levie calls “two people on computers in Seattle” on a summer break, throwing idea after idea at the metaphorical wall until something stuck. But then Levie faced a problem – a good problem, but a tough one nonetheless. Can you expand and keep the soul of the company intact? Levie was skeptical, but eventually relented, and “got compelled by this idea that maybe we could like not lose our consumer ethos as we go enterprise.”
The rest is history, and it’s a rich text. The company has made 20 acquisitions in its two decades, each to help accelerate the company’s product growth, but it’s never been growth for the sake of growth. Whether it’s expanding his team or his company’s horizons, Levie has been focused on topline talent and quality more than bottom-line gains. And it’s worked.
“Maybe the lesson for any startup out there is to always just keep the quality bar incredibly high,” he said, “not only of what you build, but of the team that you have.” While the classroom might not have been the source of this lesson for Levie, it has been a driving force for his business and beyond.