Aaron Levie Quotes

Execute like there's no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.

Startups often win because it's easier to see what comes next when you don't have to worry about maintaining what came last.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee.

The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.

Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.

Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.

I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.

Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.

I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.

Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.

The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something.

My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.

You'll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it's being done right now.

Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.

We're enamored with the concept that there's always a price. But sometimes, your goal is to build a great company, not sell it.

Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.

If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.

Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.

I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it's important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It's best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.

They can bring the technology in, then you can sell to the enterprise when they want to have better control, better security... you still have the same biz model as a traditional enterprise sw company, but the way to get into the company is through the end user.

In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology... and you can build software then, around the user.

All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work

Sometimes things are the way they are and can't be changed, other times it's because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.

The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.

I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.

All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.

My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.

If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to?

The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.

You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.

Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.

Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.

I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead.

Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.

In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.

The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.

We didn't really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.

Steve Jobs is the most epic entrepreneur of all time. He served as a guiding light for any emerging businessperson who wanted to learn how things should get done. He'll be looked at as one of the best business leaders of all time, and certainly one of the best tech entrepreneurs.

I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.

My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.

The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what's best for the customer, without ever having to ask.

I don't use many apps. I use naps.