51 - Aaron Levie, Box CEO: A College Dropout Builds a Billion-Dollar Cloud

It’s a familiar story in tech history: college friends stumble onto a big idea, drop out to pursue it, build a company, make mistakes, and eventually take that company public and make millions of dollars. That’s Apple, that’s Microsoft, that’s Facebook – and that’s Box.  

Aaron Levie is the cofounder and CEO of Box, a company founded at the dawning of the cloud era. The basic idea: Wouldn’t it be great if we could store all kinds of digital files on the internet and teams could work on them at the same time, instead of emailing them around? 

The answer is yes. That would be great. And Levie and his friends built a company now worth nearly $3 billion proving it.  

The cloud thing seems obvious now, but when Levie was 20 years old and co-founded Box 12 years ago, it was far from it. I started covering him and the company in the early years of that journey, and I sat down with him days ago at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to catch up. At the wizened old age of 32, Aaron’s got a fresh take on advice he should have heeded, and where Silicon Valley needs to go next.