Aaron Levie Quotes & Sayings

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

I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast. — Aaron Levie

Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption. — Aaron Levie

You can look at the cost structure of an incumbent company and discover: where are they not going to be able to drop their prices ... because that business model is fundamental to the existence of the company. — Aaron Levie

If you think about the market that we're in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that's happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. — Aaron Levie

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

My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff. — Aaron Levie

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

Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong. — Aaron Levie

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done. — Aaron Levie

The dynamic with social is you tend not to have products with 30% market share. It's all or nothing. Email works because we have open standards that let you communicate across any email client. — Aaron Levie

If you're waiting for encouragement from others, you're doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it's probably too late. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

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

The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product. — Aaron Levie

We're going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms. — Aaron Levie

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

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. — Aaron Levie

It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep. — Aaron Levie

All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago ... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible. — Aaron Levie

Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first. — Aaron Levie

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

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

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. — Aaron Levie

I'm obsessed with speed. I'm always asking myself, 'Why can't we do things faster? Why can't it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?' — Aaron Levie

My acronym is WWSJD: What Would Steve Jobs Do? — Aaron Levie

Always look for these changing technology factors- any market that has a significant change in the underlying raw materials ... or enabling factors, is an environment that is about to change in a very significant way. — Aaron Levie

Sometimes things are the way they are and can't be changed, other times it's because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter. — Aaron Levie

In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small. — Aaron Levie

It's not accidental that products get worse over time; it's because companies stop paying attention to them. They stop caring as much about maintaining the same quality they did when they were just trying to fight for survival and no one would pay attention unless they had the best technology. — Aaron Levie

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

Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it. — Aaron Levie

The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value. — Aaron Levie

If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'What's the party going on right now that I should be going to?' — Aaron Levie

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

Execute like there's no tomorrow, strategize like there will be. — Aaron Levie

I'm certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me. — Aaron Levie

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something. — Aaron Levie

The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it. — Aaron Levie

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

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem. — Aaron Levie

I don't use many apps. I use naps. — Aaron Levie

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

Steve Jobs is the most epic entrepreneur of all time. He served as a guiding light for any emerging businessperson who wanted to learn how things should get done. He'll be looked at as one of the best business leaders of all time, and certainly one of the best tech entrepreneurs. — Aaron Levie

Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at. — Aaron Levie

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

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. — Aaron Levie

Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

We're enamored with the concept that there's always a price. But sometimes, your goal is to build a great company, not sell it. — Aaron Levie

The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap. — Aaron Levie

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead. — Aaron Levie

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience. — Aaron Levie

Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's. — Aaron Levie

Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds. — Aaron Levie

If you don't go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in. — Aaron Levie

Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don't need salespeople. — Aaron Levie

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

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. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee. — Aaron Levie

I think I'm the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ - I'm pretty annoying, but driven. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

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

Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it's being done right now. — Aaron Levie

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

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

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

If every customer is using your product "correctly", you'll never learn anything interesting about what to do next. — Aaron Levie

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. — Aaron Levie

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around. — Aaron Levie