Name: Box’s CEO Sees a Bright Future Ahead
Uploaded: 2016-08-15
Duration: 4 min 21 s
Description: Aaron Levie explains what’s next for his company.

Aaron, you are the cofounder and CEO of an amazing entrepreneurial success story, from dorm room to the New York Stock Exchange. What's next for Box? We've done very little in the grand scheme of what is possible of empowering how companies work in the future. Today, most people that go into organizations, they do into work, they log into their computer software. And they still have incredibly complex, slow, cumbersome experiences with their technology. But the future to us is fundamentally changing how people are able to work, and leverage their information and all the data that they work with. You're full of so many great ideas. Do you see Fox continuing as an independent company or, As so many people like to say. Yeah. One of these big tech giants is going to come and scoop up Box. Well, certainly my preference is that we build this out as an independent company. That was why we went public. We went down this path because we wanted to build a very long standing company. We've been doing this 11 years, but we imagine the world and how much change is going to happen in the next decade, and beyond. And we want to be a part of that, and build a company that can help Power the way that people work in the future. So we like to stay independent. Can you differentiate yourself, given all the competition that's out there? Apple, Amazon, Google? Yeah, so our job is actually, in fact the more competition, ironically, that there is, the better off our strategy is in how it works. So, our job is to Fundamentally leverage the fact that the world is very competitive and heterogeneous and it's very dynamic. And make sure that our customers still can have an incredible experience for being able to share and collaborate across all these different platforms. So, even is the world have gotten theoretically more competitive in our market Customers you know continue to come to us because they want something that's going to be simple and set across all the different technologies that they're working with. Let's talk about some of the other ways that you might differentiate yourself. So going international. I understand that you're beginning to move into Europe. How important is it for box to go global? Yeah, I mean, this is fundamental to our business. So, work is being done everywhere. It's across a much larger, much more global supply chain and network than it ever has been. And our technology, our IT environment in most enterprises, Doesn't actually reflect how global business is actually becoming because our technology is very silent, very isolated it's stays in one country, it stays for one side of people. So our job is actually provide a software layer that helps [ INAUDIBLE ] work no matter where you are in the world, but importantly be able to meet the privacy and regulatory and compliance requirements of each of those industries you're working in. As you see things Brexit and all the concerns about all that, that doesn't make you think maybe we should hold off for now? No, while we are against Brexit philosophically, from an architecture standpoint, from a data regulation standpoint That actually is exactly why we have box zones. As the world gets potentially fragmented different laws, different privacy policies, different legal requirements, we still wanna make sure our customers can work at a global scale without that actually making their, Their introducing more friction into their technology. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about going public. Okay. So, it's been. I kinda prefered globalization more but we can talk about public if you want. Alright, let's talk a little bit about going public. Okay. So, it's year since you had your IPO. Year and half. Wall Street has not been very kind to your company. Does it still feel good to be a public company? I'm very happy to now be beyond that private, kind of unicorn phase of a company. We We've benefit actually, quite a bit by being public our customers we've been a lot of transparency to your customers. Our customers understand that we're building a long term sustainable viable business that's very important for enterprises that are spending on IT. They wanna be able to know that they're working with the vendor that it's gonna around for the long run And we don't need to raise more capital. So we'll be achieving capital break even by the end of this year. We don't need to do anymore outside financing. So yes, it would be great if your stock price only went up in perpetuity. But the reality is, at different times, at different stages in a market Some investors are going to understand the strategy and why we're investing the way we are, some investors won't understand that, and I think that's ultimately what creates your stock price.

Box’s CEO Sees a Bright Future Ahead

Aaron Levie explains what’s next for his company.