How CEO Aaron Levie Scaled Box to a $3.4B Enterprise-Focused Cloud Platform

Aaron Levie dropped out of college 13 years ago to start Box, a content management platform for enterprises. Today, it’s a public company with a $3.4 billion market cap. Talkdesk sat down with Levie to learn more about his success building and scaling the enterprise-focused cloud platform from basement to market leader.

Box, which recently celebrated its third year as a publicly traded company, is often compared to Dropbox, which filed for IPO in February 2018. When asked about the difference between the two, Levie has been known to use the comparison that Dropbox is to Netflix as Box is to Salesforce—they have completely different end users with uniques demands for the platform.

“We are laser focused on Cloud Content Management. We are disrupting a combined $40B industry, which encompasses file storage, productivity and collaboration, enterprise content management systems and innovating in app dev environments,” said Levie.

To build the platform, Levie focused a lot of energy on understanding the mindset of the enterprise developer.

“Most companies don’t understand developers. They think of the buyer as an executive who writes the check, but with developers, there must be an emphasis on how you innovate on a continual basis and add value to the developer’s process of building an app,” said Levie.

Getting inside the mind of a developer was essential to Box’s success.

“First and foremost, a maniacal obsession on the developer is the core essential ingredient. You have to focus on developer needs and fundamentally understand how they can obtain the most value from your platform. This includes everything from the quality and completeness of the APIs and SDKs to the documentation, tutorials, sample code, reference apps and ability to get started to a commercial pricing model. Your model must allow for a developer to start off quickly and inexpensively and also be able to scale as their application volume scales.”