Name: How Four College Dropouts Started a $1.7 Billion Tech Company
Uploaded: 2016-08-17
Duration: 3 min 17 s
Description: Box CEO Aaron Levie explains.

Aaron, Yes. As a kid, you already knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I understand that when you were a teenager, you had already started something like 12, 13 companies. What did you know about yourself? I mean, why were you so fixated on being a entrepreneur? I got really into the Internet when I was sort of 10 or 11 years old. And it was incredibly exciting to feel like you could build something that was virtual that would actually go and have a real world impact. And I could do that literally, from my bedroom when I was 12 or 13. When you started Blocks with your highschool friends, you were around 20. I was 20. My friends were 19. Okay. All right. What kinds of skills and personality does it take for someone to really go the distance and start a company. We benefitted from just a willful ignorance and overconfidence in our abilities and what we could go do. If I looked at us, Ten or eleven years ago and given all of the information I have now I would not have believed in us. We were four people going after Microsoft and EMC and some of the worlds largest companies and it just made no sense that we were doing that like mathematically we were bound to lose. What was the scariest part of starting from nothing? I don't think we were ever scared. And maybe the scariest thing was simply just leaving our friends from college, and dropping out of college. But, even on the dropping out side, that's not so scary, cuz you can take a leave of absence, you can go back if it doesn't work. So, I don't think we were ever scared. I think it was much more we knew we were on an adventure that was gonna be no matter what, we would take away incredible experiences and learnings from that adventure. And you got lucky very early on because you got At a some financing from Mark Cuban- Yup. The billionaire businessman. He owes you a $ 350, 000 cheque. Yes. And then after that more money started to pour in. Yeah. But what advice can you give to someone- It didn't feel like those pouring at the time. All right. It was hard fought- Fair enough. It's a hard fought dollars. But what advice can you give to somebody about how to raise money- Yeah. If they have a A good idea to start a viable business. I would say in general, it is an order of magnitude better if you can have a working product and a product that has customers, and has people that are using it, than going in with just purely an idea. This day and age the cost of starting a company is so low that there's very little excuse to not having a work in product or technology. It's no question. It's very hard to start a company and to raise the money. What's the, The biggest and most common mistake that you see other entrepreneurs make? I know of many examples, many founders, many startups where they got started because the environment was so hot and there was so much venture capital that they didn't get started and they didn't go after a space that they personally were deeply passionate about, they cared about. And so it ultimately didn't work because they didn't have the long- term vision for what they were doing. So I would just highly recommend that you make sure that you're building a solution to a problem. That you ultimately care a lot about. And that you're not doing things just because Silicon Valley is a really kind of a hot and exciting place right now. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]