>> is known for his magic tricks and his ironic tweet. started building websites it was as far and back as middle school. the cofounders still work there together a decade later.

ceo andme today is the cofounder. >> how are you doing. thank you. those are cloud socks. >> i like it. what kind of kid were you? those infferent than the tech industry. spent too much time on the internet and not a large volume of friends. foundedmy friends, i box with >> you idolize jeff bezos and bill gates. >> everybody knew the bill gates story by heart. what's cool about microsoft is areiling a product or you that you can actually go and be a product tester.

a lot of people from high school would go to microsoft and test new products and they would give you a free mouse. >> tell me about that. >> the first cofounder of box, our chief financial officer, we actually played trumpet together in middle school. neither of us were good at that. i did a lot of stuff on the internet with justin and later in high school. >> tell me how box began. >> not a lot of innovation happening. it was really hard to do basic things like sharing files and accessing data from anywhere, and how do you collaborate and work with other people. i was in college at the time. what if you could have these sort of hard drives in the cloud that would let you put all your files in these hard drives and access it from the internet and the device you wanted to work from. >> tell me about those early days. >> one was mark cuban was an angel investor in box. that was done by a cold e-mail we sent to mark back in 2005. they sent us a $350,000 check. that gave dylan and myself the

idea that maybe we should pursue this full-time. it led to us putting the idea to our parents that we're going to drop out of college. they started to freak out. we had to do it and pursue this mission. we dropped out. we convinced our other two friends to also drop out of college. we all huddled together at berkeley. >> this is when you moved to the garage? >> we moved to this renovated garage in berkeley that my uncle had built up. i'm not sure it was legal at all. we would spend 16 hours a day just working on the software, the business model, marketing. we were just eating, sleeping in the same place. pretty disgusting, actually. if you really want to know, it is more akin to a sweatshop. this is how you build companies. >> you tweeted a picture of that garage. >> where we slept, worked, and built.

>> when it came to each of your cofounders, what were your roles? >> we got lucky. we each bring a different kind of skill to the table. we had the software skills, the hardware, networking skills. we had the finance, administration, legal, business operations skills. we focused on the product side. >> in those early days, what did you fight about? >> the sort of fighting and all of the bickering as founders. the nice thing is that it all fell back on that trusted relationship that let us work through that. we did not have early founding battles that other companies have run into. that was because we had been friends for, in some cases, a decade. >> facebook, twitter, tales of infighting and backstabbing. what makes box unique?

>> when you play trumpet with your cofounder at 11 years old, you have a friendship that bickering and frustration from building a company cannot break. >> has keeping the team together been a priority? >> yes. we spend a lot of time together. >> have any of you had a moment where you thought you did not want to keep doing this? it has been 10 years. >> it has been 10 years. i have no idea if my cofounders have had those moments, but none that i have been told about. >> what is it like becoming a ceo at 19 years old, when your peers are in college, studying, partying? >> it is worse than what your peers are going through. it's not very illustrious to be a ceo of a two-person company. it got me excluded from parties. it looked like they were having

a lot more fun from a distance. it is generally more fun to go out than be on a computer 14 hours a day during college. >> what is the myth of aaron levie and what is the reality? >> it's still early for myths. the reality is that it is a simple idea. our job is to build software that previous enterprises did not think was possible to create. >> how is aaron levie sitting in front of me today different from the 19-year-old? >> i would be grabbing my hair more. i had more issues with add. >> i know you are on the road a lot. how do you structure your time? >> it turns out that enterprises are everywhere. you go out to a farm who is going to use drones to manage their agricultural business, you don't know how these technologies are going to intersect with the real world.

you have to go out on the road and actually understand that. >> the view is that it is silicon valley versus the rest of the world. when actually silicon valley is being integrated into the rest of the world. ♪

>> you drink a lot of coffee. >> i do. >> you take a nap. every day. >> i do. you forgot the three vacations i take every year. >> it is the best practice -- right around 7 p.m. or so -- you take a 25 minute power nap and you wake up fully recharged and that lasts for about another five hours. that is me time. that is when i design what we are going to do next. what are we behind on? what i need to start thinking about? that is when everybody gets inundated by e-mails from me. >> you have a diary? >> the range of different

industries in what you have to learn about is very vast. you have to keep track of that somewhere. >> this is something only you see? >> yes, i would not want you to see it. these are my personal things. >> how big is box? >> we have 1100 employees. we have 240,000 businesses actively using the product. 39,000 companies are paying for our enterprise edition of the service. 27 million users. >> you recently rolled out box for industry? >> we started to see that in every industry we were serving there was some edge of our product or edge of their use that was far more advanced and innovative than we had ever imagined that could be done with our platform technology. today, we cover health care, media, retail, but we will be

announcing another couple of industries next month that will take box into regulated industries that we think are ripe for change. it will serve every major industry. >> you are seeing so much change in the world of enterprise technology. larry ellison stepping down. hp splitting up. ibm struggling. when it comes to incumbents versus startups, how does it play out? >> every couple of decades, you have this sort of changing of the guard as it were. startups that are optimized for that disruption have an opportunity to take advantage of that and potentially build the next era of ibm and hp and microsoft. at the same time, you do have incumbents that have a lot of

cash. they are led by incredibly smart and astute leaders that understand the change. the changes you are seeing are driven specifically because they are being disrupted. >> hp is not a technology company anymore. it is a bet against innovation. >> that is a provocative statement. in terms of relevance, you have leaders of these companies that are recognizing that their previous strategy would have lead to irrelevance and they have to change that. we have a view that everything is zero sum. ibm does not have to lose for apple to win. >> what about microsoft? a company you work with. >> there are specific product areas where we could potentially lose or be harmed by some of this transition, but there is an entire company at the macro level that does not necessarily have to lose. >> companies like microsoft, google, amazon are dropping the price of cloud storage. how much of a threat is that?

>> we love that. the same unit of storage is now a 40th of a price and it was 10 years ago. the cheaper storage gets, the more data we can store for a customer and the more we can deliver unique experiences around the content. >> you took on $150 million in funding. the company is now valued at $2.4 billion. why do you need that money? >> a week after we filed, there was a bit of a market correction in the tech space. you saw a bit of volatility and a lot of high-growth technology companies. we decided it was not the best time to bring a new company to market. we had amazing support from late-stage investors. they were willing and interested in supporting the company is a private company. we took that money on to allow us to continue invest and grow, invest in the business model and build out box without going public. >> what is the status of the ipo?

>> we are still on file. we are still technically not able to talk too much about that. you will definitely be one of the first people to hear about it once we share any updated information. >> how much have you wondered, did we make a mistake? did we file too soon? >> what is obvious is that we should not have filed when we did. we certainly dealt with a lot of distraction because of that filing. i think that whether that was -- a lot of the unfortunate news reports in the cycle that had to happen around the business -- obviously we brought that on because of the filing. that was a distraction to what our core focus is, execution and building the business. life is too short to have any specific regrets.

we have learned. we remain in full execution mode. >> i'm curious about what that moment was like for you. everybody can see your finances. >> that is an extreme phrase. we are competing against the biggest companies on the planet in the technology industry. to do that, you have to make a significant investment. that is an investment in research and development, infrastructure, sales team, and our ability to go to market. >> the criticism was that you are spending more on sales and marketing to acquire customers than you are making. how has that changed? >> every dollar of revenue is a dollar that is recurring annually. our job is to keep our customers happy and successful. we happen to reveal our s-1 at a point when new investments had outpaced the revenue scale.

now we are more in the stage where the revenue is focused on growing. that is compounding. we don't have many of the new significant investments because we have done a lot of the international expansion. we built out a lot of the enterprise sales force. you're starting to see that efficiency play out over time. >> how much of you thought about selling box? >> we sell our software to a lot of companies. as for the company itself, we spend about 0% of the time thinking about it. >> this is a critical market that a lot of technology businesses have trouble getting into. what is your strategy? >> my challenge has been how do we grow and explore working in the market. what you will see is a partner overtime with key players in the space. i would not expect us doing anything real big in china in

the near future. >> there is a company called dropbox. you overlap to a certain extent in terms of business. how much of an inconvenience has dropbox been for you? >> inconvenience is a unique word. i think they are an innovative company. they have an incredible leader. we are a fierce competitor from the business standpoint. i think that the world is better with them. >> why do you think you can offer business customers something better than they can? >> it is really hard to balance a strategy where you are world-class on the consumer side and also be world-class for hospital or a life sciences company or a financial services institution. those are different types of

problems. at box, we don't have any distractions. we are 100% focused on enterprise. ♪ >> silicon valley is sometimes

criticized for being too audacious, too arrogant, and thinking we can change the world. is that fair? >> it used to be that there was a cycle of disruption in silicon valley where software companies disrupted themselves. we are going through an evolution where we are having to interact with so many new markets in so many different ways. at first that starts out as, we can solve those problems better than anybody else. sometimes that is right, and sometimes that is not. sometimes we look obnoxious for it.

the outside world is unbelievably fascinated awith and excited about working with silicon valley during this wave of disruption. >> because we are living in our own bubble? >> we live in our own bubble. the view is silicon valley versus the rest of the world. it is actually silicon valley being integrated into the rest of the world. for the first time, we are not in this isolated universe. it is its own industry. to be the same kind of retailer that five years ago you would have thought was going away because of the internet. there are a tremendous number of companies that are trying to help you develop new experiences for your customers. 10 years ago you thought amazon was just going to destroy your entire industry, and now you are on the upswing because we want all new experiences of how we shop. >> you think there is no such thing as the tech industry or in the future the tech industry

won't be so? >> i think it will be less defined. you will have silicon valley. that should be seen as the sort of software layer of every other industry. >> your tweets are widely followed. >> thank you. >> thank you for the good material. in response that you reigned in your tweets after deciding to go public, you tweeted a photo of a missouri law firm. >> i'm not sure how that happened. >> hopfully you will get sued over it. >> i'm sure we sent them some traffic. >> tweeting as much as you do, why? >> one myth that i can dispel is that i tweet only once or twice a day. >> you are way behind mark andreessen. >> i am between peter thiel and mark andreessen regarding my

tweet volume. it is one outlet that my pr team does not control for me to be able to share my thoughts on the technology industry. >> why aren't you more scared? >> that might be generational. i grew up in chat rooms. i'm sure i will say some things that i wake up to in the morning and pull a donald trump or something, regret tweeting for the rest of my life. >> how much of it is strategy? >> it is less strategic than you might think. my brain is all over the place. it is actually very representative of the random notions that i have. >> i've had the benefit of seeing you do magic. >> i am less active now is a magician. >> what have you learned from that? how has it affected your career? >> magic is weird. have you been to magic conference? >> no. that sounds like an interesting experience.

>> it was a fun experience in my teenage years. >> will box become a public company? >> that is the path we are on. >> would you ever start anything new? or is this it? >> if this continues to grow, i will be doing this for quite some time. >> do you want to be larry ellison? >> because of what we do, transcend different platforms and devices, ways you will work with information, there is no limit to what can be possible in our market. we have a very wide palette to work with. >> aaron levie, ceo of box. thank you very much. great to have you. >> thank you. ♪ >> the following is a paid

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