Aaron Levie, CEO, Box 
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


 Brainstorm Tech 2022: Thinking Outside The Box

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Brainstorm Tech 2022: Thinking Outside The Box

how's everybody doing? Sweet they're they're awake. Right more coffee guys. Um Okay my first question is very important. Okay did you figure out the light switches in your hotel room last night? We we figured them out. I don't know if anybody everybody staying at the ST regis great hotel but like there's literally like 17 different lights that you have to coordinate and and I like some of them are completely hidden so like it literally takes about a half hour to actually get to your hotel room in this uh this environment. It's tough it's tough. Aaron tweeted last night about how this should be Elizabeth Warren's top priority is mandating this and chargers are I think the two important things that we can solve chargers are her priority apparently. Who here follows Aaron on twitter raise your hands. Okay. Okay. Okay so um 2.4 million followers on Twitter do you count? Do you like I mean I think Alana has established that most of those are bots now so I it doesn't really easily 95%. Um Actually he was he was tweeting back and forth with you last night about the light switches and he had a light problem also I think so I actually didn't totally understand his tweet. It was about these red and green led lights but then actually I ended up actually one of the L. E. D. Lights end up keeping me awake. So that's very funny figured out I love that you tweeted back at him like let's focus here people this is about light switches so okay I promise we'll get to like more you know. Yeah we will. We will. But um but I think it's it's really one thing I find really interesting about you is that um you somehow managed that like I read your tweets, I follow you and I am somehow interested in like anything from enterprise software and cloud and light switches. And of course you you throw in a lot of other stuff that that is much more substantive and not that the cloud is about about politics and so what like how did this even, how did you develop this voice on twitter? And do you like do you do you censor yourself? Do you have someone help you with your Oh the things I actually want to tweet never end up showing up. So I like tell us about one tweet that you like you were like no I'm not gonna well I actually delete probably like 1/5 of my tweets because because the replies just start getting too angry and then I just like okay this is I can't ruin my saturday like this. So um but no I mean I mean I think we all have basically the same thoughts and I've just unfortunately decided I'll put them on the internet. So um so that's sort of the thing that I did okay and when it comes to like some of the heavier stuff that polarizing, you know you've you've spoken out about turns out actually my crypto tweets are the most polarizing, so not gun control, no, actually gun control at this point, like I get a couple random trolls, but crypto is where you get destroyed. So you can talk about based on anything political at this point and you're far better off than talking about Web three. Okay, well since you since you brought up Web three, I didn't mean to, I really didn't mean can we talk about cloud computing? We will we will. I promise. Um No, but but another of your recent tweets and I promised you guys I did this is all just um no, I won't I won't only fixate on your tweets, but it's a good way to like, you know, you're very prolific. So I think it's a good way to get some into like some of your your mind. Um not a 4/5 of it I guess is the fifth you delete and so on. On the crypto side. One of your recent tweets said something about how we're all talking about entering a crypto winter. But when was the crypto summer? When did that actually take place? Why? Why are you such a hater when it comes to what? 3? Um I actually didn't mean to be a hater. It's funny. Um the I sort of just stumbled into apparently being a hater, but um I pay attention to basically every tech trend that emerges um you kind of have to if if you're obviously in this audience or or or in any kind of tech company, because you want to know like, well where's the future going and um, and you have to try and make the right types of bets for your organization or your team or, you know, whatever you're working on. And so every time there's a new big wave of technology, whether it's VR or AI or you know, obviously cloud computing or, you know, many of the sort of sub genres of those technologies, you want to understand, what is this going to have an impact, meaningful impact on on my business or my product, and how do I adapt to it? And so that led me to obviously studying Web Three as an example, because there was a lot of, you know, great commentary about this could be the future of a decentralized, much more open and equitable uh, you know, kind of internet platform And and that that is actually extremely exciting. So philosophically, I'm actually very aligned to the ideals of of of Web three. But then when you kind of drill into it a bit more on both the technical dimension, as well as more of the kind of economic and human behavior and incentive dimension. It really, I struggled to sort of think through how this would actually play out in a way that was matched and married to the what the proponents were talking about. And so if you kind of just look at the technology itself, it's, you know, super interesting for, you know, trading, uh, you know, limited amounts of data, uh and and, you know, passing money and and things of value back and forth, not super effective if you had to, you know, scale a global, you know, scale internet service, um, and decentralize it meaningfully using a Blockchain. So, so a lot of the technical architecture didn't really make a lot of sense. And then the economic challenges were, uh, were those of of just, I think what we're now seeing kind of blow up, which is a lot of the value was built on, on, you know, other people believing that that something had value and then then paying more for it and eventually that kind of runs out. Um and and so a lot of the dynamics of various crypto projects didn't seem to have sort of strong network effects. In fact, they kind of have anti network effects where the larger they get, the more people want to bail because you've already made your profit. And so then you bail. Uh and then you sort of unwind the value of that project. And so for for again, a variety of reasons, it just didn't feel like it was going to play out as the uh as, you know, some some kind of you. And so then you kind of look at the whole macro picture of technology and you think about all, I mean, the prior panel you think about all the things we can do in health care, transportation, communication, entertainment, retail, you know, commerce, education And you have so much of a, you know, large landscape to go and innovate in and you know, a lot of what we were seeing was, you know, in Web three would not impact any of those things. It's really for, you know, trading things that that we ostensibly, you know, kind of are creating value around. So it felt like a little bit of a mismatch between the hype and what the impact will ultimately be able to be. You do you do think though that the the concept of decentralized innovation is has some, I think that the internet already does. That that's the power of the web. The web is a decentralized medium that lets anybody build a company and start an idea and if you want to go totally off the grid and not use amazon web services or google you can totally do that. And so I think we actually have a sufficiently decentralized network um I think the idea of having more openness, more protocols, more open source, those are all fantastic ideas. I think token izing those with with sort of somewhat opaque incentive schemes, I don't think actually plays out in practice in the way that we think it will. Okay, I'm going to do like hard pivot to box because there isn't a good segway web really anything naturally. Okay um Alright so um tell us just a little bit about the last couple of years and the shifts at at box and sort of how you um have you've led the company through all this mess? Yeah. Well which mess are you referring to the pandemic? You know if you want to talk to you about products too? But internally, you know I know you have a lot of thoughts on the future of work. So what have you learned along the way and how to lead today? Yeah. Okay because we even had we had activists, we had our own mess um kind of you know we know we like to create our own dramas sometimes. So uh so you know we started the company in in 2005 and the original idea was make it easy and secure to access and share information from anywhere that was like the premise of the company. And so in the very sort of business plan of the idea of the business, we had remote work as sort of central to why why, you know we were starting the company was make it so in the future you could just work from anywhere and access your data from anywhere. So as the pandemic, you know kind of ripped through, you know the basically every country it was very easy for us to respond to that um operationally because our company was sort of built for this type of environment and then strategically it was it was built to serve customers in this type of situation. And so um what we did is we step back and we said okay how how should we make sure that our product roadmap is now really oriented toward what is no longer a visionary idea of the future. Um I. E. Hybrid work or remote worker working from anywhere but now actually a necessity for every corporation and um and you know we spent Basically a decade and a half trying to convince everybody that the future was work anywhere at any time 24/7 you can access information from anywhere and now that was no longer a strategic advantage for companies, it was just like definition early how you worked. So we we basically you know we looked at our whole product strategy we we got into a number of new markets um as a result of the pandemic and where we thought work was gonna be changing. Um And uh and now we're gonna well into that road map of just trying to reimagine how our company is gonna want to work with all of their data in a secure way with more automation with more intelligence, with more collaboration from again any device anywhere anytime. So has selling actually gotten making the pitch gotten easier to large companies? Yeah I mean we're basically you know the pitch is sort of now established and it's sort of the default, it's you don't have to pitch cloud computing anymore, you don't have to pitch remote work anymore. You don't pitch digital transformation anymore. Now it's the nuances of what are you adding to uh you know, to the I. T. Architecture that that wasn't possible for and are our single mission is that we think there's a tremendous amount of data that is being created all around the world that's incredibly valuable and right now it's fragmented across lots of different systems and so our platform is meant to go and simplify that problem to help companies actually get more value out of all of the data and the content that they're working with. Okay question for erin and about his tweets, can we keep the tweets out of it or? Okay. He's also very eager to talk about twitter and the deal. So if you Hi dom um Aaron, good to see you again, I'm doing well, doing well. Um I'm just curious uh with starboard, you know, having dealt with activist shareholders myself. Yeah, it wasn't fun Pandora but um just curious what's your take on that that you brought it up and I thought it was. Yeah, I really didn't mean to bring it up when we when we edit that out of the um so yeah well so it was it was very much a learning experience um and uh you know, it's definitely not something that I would recommend anybody want, you know, want to go through, but, but, you know, I'm actually of two minds. Um, actually really, really like that. We have a form of capitalism that allows shareholders to participate, you know, as actively as as they see fit. And there's a nice game theory because, because, uh, you know, those shareholders will only do as much as they think other shareholders will support. Um, and so you, you sort of have, like, there's a nice system to it. Um, and in this case, we had a shareholder that we actually work pretty collaboratively with, and eventually, we sort of divergent views of where we wanted to take the company long term and kind of our strategy versus theirs. Uh, and, um, and so, unfortunately couldn't then negotiate any further. We couldn't kind of align on, on a path. And so then I had to go to an actual proxy fight where, you know, basically everybody gets to vote. And, um, and unfortunately we, we sort of handily won the vote, but in the process, you know, it's a year long of, you know, engagement of just constant back and forth and debating, you know, lots of minutia about the business. Um, and, you know, what, what happened in a phone call between you and the act. I mean, it's kind of bizarre, the level of depth gets into, um, when actually really, it's like a fundamental vote of, you know, do you like this strategy or do you like the activist strategy? Uh, and so learned a ton, uh, mostly how to try and avoid, you know, getting into the situation in the first place. And, um, but I do, I like the element of capitalism that that sort of affords us disability where shareholders have a voice. Um, and, and can, you know, sort of sway companies obviously in the case of maybe pandora or other, you know, companies that, that maybe didn't play out as positively, um, from a strategic standpoint. So we've seen plenty of examples where that can veer companies completely off course, um, which is incredibly, you know, um, you know, disheartening. Okay. So it was a learning experience experience. Okay, one more quick question for you. You, you missed the session we had here last night because you were too busy tinkering with the light switch at your hotel. Um, but we had this very heated discussion on, you know, the, the tech exodus or supposed tech exodus way from Silicon Valley. Um, what, what has kept you in Silicon Valley? And I remember by the way, the first time I met you, you guys were still in the building with fries were fried electronics rest in peace. Was, so you've been there for a while. What was that a pandemic loss or was that before? The pandemic? That was okay. Um, so, uh, you know, I mean, a lot of, a lot of reasons why we're still, I'm, I'm personally still in the valley, you know, friends, the weather, uh, nostalgia. So I think there's a long list of those things. I do think that the push for hybrid or remote work is a boon for just the globe, you know, the fact that anybody anywhere can participate in, in, you know, technology companies, uh, that, that, you know, normally would have been very, very constrained to a very limited amount of geography. I think this is a great thing for, for society, for business, for technology. Um, I, you know, a friend, uh, sort of considers it a great way to export hopefully better cultures to companies all around the world if you have a company that is not very innovative that maybe, you know, oriented around micromanagement and, you know, you know, not, not a lot of transparency, not a lot of collaboration. Um, you know, they now have to compete with a company that will, will hire people remote and uh, and everybody has to sort of upped their game because we've now sort of exported, exported, you know, hopefully more modern ideals about business and, and how companies and cultures work. So I see that as a great thing and um, uh, but you know, for me personally, it's, it's hard to beat the bay area. Well, um, we're really happy you came to ask. Thank you. Good to see you on stage, not just on twitter was like the first time. So good to be out of the house. It's been getting really kind of crazy out there. Thanks.