>> abuncommon breed in the world of intermriez technology. levy is known for his colorful sneakers, magic tricks, tweets.ic but there's no underestimating his ambition in dominating the cloud.s to the he started building websites when he was 13 and met the kids co-foundersecome the as far back as middle school. but unlike places like facebook tales of early in fighting are legend, all four co-founders still work there together a decade later. 1.0, box on studio

ceo and co-founder, aaron levy. doing? are you >> thank you. >> what are those? socks? >> cloud socks. cloud socks for the enterprise. >> i like it. >> you grew up in seattle. were you?of kid >> probably not atypical of sort of certainly people that have -- that are in the tech industry. so spent far too long. time on the internet, not sort of large volume of friends. and most of those that were my friends, founded box with. the shadowwing up in of microsoft. idolize jeff bazos and bill gates? >> everybody knew the bill gates by heart. of cool that microsoft you can go and they'll give you a product tester. of people in high school would go to microsoft and test give you a ucts and free mouse in the end of it. >> you met your co-founders in the middle school. that.me about

>> sort of the first co-founder of box. officer.ancial we played trumpet together in middle school. good at that.were throughout middle school and high school, i did a lot of stuff on the internet with jeff later in high school with cam. >> tell me how box began. ten years ago.t not a lot of innovation was happening. eally, really hard to do basic things like how do you share your files. how do you access your data from anywhere. you collaborate and work with different people. i was in college at times when was how can idea you have these sort of hard drives in the cloud that would et you put all of your file unless the hard drives and access it from the internet and you want to work from. >> tell me about the early days, fondest memories. cuban was an angel investor in box. that was just done by a cold sent to mark back in 2005. e sent us a $350,000 check and

some people he had never met. that gave dylan and myself an this we should pursue fulltime. and that led to us proposing the idea to our parents we were going to drop out of college. they subsequently got freaked out. we had to do it to pursue the mission. ourropped out and convinced other two friends sam and jeff to drop out of college and we berkeley. ether in >> you moved to the garage. renovated garage in up.keley my uncle built not sure if it was legal at all. 16, 17 hours a day just working software, the business model, marketing. four of us working, eating, places, in the same disgusting, actually. if you want to know, it's to a ly more akin sweatshop but this is how you build companies. a picture of that garage saying box's first office slept, ars ago where we

worked, thought, and built. when it came to each of your co-founders, what was each of your roles. got lucky collectively because we bring a different kind of skill to the table. skills.the software the hardware and networking skill. we have the, you know, the administration, legal, business operation, skill. the and i focussed on product side. >> when you say you fought, what did you fight about? what were the issues that came out? >> the sort of fighting and the bickering as founders. is that it thing all fell back on a -- that ussted relationship that let kind of work through that and didn't have the same kind of battles that other companies have run into because been friends with decades. > lawsuits, twitter, tales of in-fighting and back stabbing.

unique.e box what makes you different. >> you play trumpet with your co-founder, you have a rooted friendship that -- you know, bickering and frustration from building a company tend to not be able to break. keeping the team together been a priority? >> yeah. we sort of -- we spent a lot of time together still. and once a year, for instance, we do our own off site just the us. of >> has any of us had a moment where you thought, i don't know, i don't know if i want to keep this, maybe i want to move on. it's been 10 years. >> it's been 10 years. i have no idea. my co-founders have had those moments but none that i've been about. >> what's it like becoming a ceo at the age of 19 when your peers in college, party, and ertainly not starting businesses. >> been worse than what your peers are going to -- you know, i want's not very illustrious to be a ceo of a twof will person company. ofgot me excluded from a lot

parties at the time. from a distance, looked like they were having more fun. generally more fun to go out computer 14 ur hours a day in college. >> what's the myth of aaron levie and what is the reality? >> i'm still early with myths. so i don't know what myths have emerged. reality is that it's a simple idea. our job is to build software that previous enterprises didn't create. possible to > how is aaron levi ex-sitting in front of me today different than the 19-year-old ceo. >> i was grabbing my hair more. issues with add and stuff. >> you're on the road a lot. company.global how do you structure your time? >> 50% of my time is on the road. are out enterprises everywhere. you go out to a farm to use your to manage agriculture business. business.know how

you don't know how the technologies are going to intersect with the real world. you have to go out on the road and understand customers directly. the view is it's silicon valley versus the rest of the world, when it's them being integrated to the rest of the world. ♪ ♪ ♪. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

>> you drink a lot of coffee, apparently. >> i do. >> you do take a nap? every day? >> i try to. >> what is this, spain? valley. licon >> the three vacations i take every year. and you work. ap >> take a nap. >> work more in the evening. >> yes. really just a best practice so right around 7:00 a 25-minuteyou take power nap and you wake up fully lastst for d that another five hours or so. then it's me time. design sort of what are we going to do next, what re we behind on, what do we think about it? that's when everybody gets inundated by e-mails from me.

a diary? personal aaron levie only diary. >> the range of different industries and what you have to learn about from their just very vast. you have to keep track of it somewhere. >> this is something only you see? no, i would not want you to see it. these are personal things. today? big is box >> 1100 employees. 240,000 businesses actively using the product. companies have sort of paying for the enterprise of the service. 27 million users. >> you rolled out box for industries, for health care, retail, media, entertainment. how's that going. what's next? > what we started to see happening is that in every industry we're serving, there kind of edge of our product or edge of their use cases that were sort of far more innovative than we ever imagined that could be done with the platform and

technology. we announced box industries which today covers health care, media, retail. announcing a number of other industries in the next couple of months that will take know, in some cases more regulated industries that we think are very ripe for change. it will serve every major industry. >> you're seeing so much change in the world of interprize technology right now. larry elson stepping down as the ceo of oracle, hp splitting up, ibm struggling. when it comes to incumbents versus startups, how does it play out? so every couple of decades, you have this sort of changing as it were. startups that are optimized for disruption is going to build that and take care of the ibm and hp and microsoft. at the same time, you have incumbents that have a lot of cash. they are led by incredibly smart

leaders that understand the change. the changes you see are driven ecause they know they're being disruptive. >> peter steele said to me it's not a technology company. a bet against innovation. >> i think that's a very -- it's a provocative statement. think in terms of relevance, you have -- you have eaders of these companies that are recognizing that their strategy would have led to erelevance and they had to change that. view that everything is zero sum. ibm doesn't have to lose for force to in or sales win. >> what about a company like microsoft, a company you grew up with. i think there are product areas that could potentially lose or be harmed by some of transition. but then there's the entire company at the macrolevel doesn't necessarily have to lose. so companies like microsoft, google, amazon, they're dropping price of cloud storage. how much of a threat is that to box. >> we love that.

is now unit of storage a 40th the price as it was ten years ago. our e supply side of business. so the cheaper that storage gets that we have and he more we can deliver unique experiences. >> you took on $150 million of to.ding from go companies now value $2.4 billion. why do you take that money. seen.u've we filed to go public in march of this year. a week basically about after we filed to go public, there was a bit of a market the tech stock space. so you saw a bit of volatility, volatility. of and a lot of sass and kind of hydrotechnology companies. not the best it's time to, you know, sort of bring a new company to market. and we had amazing support from private markets, growth, sort of investors, tbg and go to in this case willing and interested in supporting the

as a private company so we took that money on to allow s to continue to invest in growth, continue to invest in the business model and billing public. ithout going >> what is the status of the ipo. >> we're still on file. we can't share because we're technically not able to talk too much about that. you definitely will be one of the first people to hear about it once we share any updated thinking. >> how much have you wondered, did we make a mistake? soon?e file too >> what is -- what is obvious is that we should not have filed did.we because we certainly dealt with because of traction that filing. and so i think whether that of them the news reports and the cycle that hasn't happened around the on because brought of the filing that was a distraction to the core focus is and has been in execution and up the business.

life is too short to build up a particular act. i was curious. see your finances. o'mall lick called box a house of horrors. an extreme phrase. e're competing against the biggest companies on the planet. so to do that, we have to make a significant investment. case, that's an investment in research and infrastructure and sales team and the ability to go to market and reach the customers. criticism that you ear spending more on sales and marketing than what you're making. changing that? how has that change? >> every dollar in revenue is a ollar that's recurring annually. our job is to keep customers happy and successful and time.nd it over we're unveiling the s-1 and unveil the new investments

outpaced the revenue scale. and so now i think we're more in is age where the revenue focussed on growing that, of course, and that's compoundening. the new n't have significant investments because we've done a lot of international expansion. out a lot of the enterprise sales force. efficiency g that play out over time. >> how much have you thought stayinglling box versus independent or going public. >> we want to sell the software. spent pany ourselves we 0% of the time thinking about. >> it's a critical market that a business . technology have trouble getting into. strategy. r >> absent learning chinese or how rin, my challenge is does it go? it's been for working in the -- in the market in a big way. i think what you'll see is partner over time with -- with key players in the space. but i wouldn't expect us doing

in hing really big in china the near future. >> there's a company you may have heard of called dropbox. i have. >> your name, box is in the name, dropbox. ou two overlap to a certain extent in terms of business. >> mm-hmm. >> customers. an inconvenience has dropbox been for you over the years. ever >> inconvenience is a unique word. o i think they're a very innovative company. drew is an incredible leader. from a fierce competitor business standpoint sort of the business part of the market. but i think the world is better with them. do you think you can offer the customers. to t's really, really hard balance a strategy where you are world class of the consumer side class for a orld

hospital or a life sciences company or a financial services. we're 100% focused on the enterprise. between peter and markets in my tweet volume.

. > silicone valley is -- is criticized for being too audacious, too arrogant. thinking we can change the world. is that fair? it used to be that there was disruption within silicon valley where software companies disrupted themselves. through an evolution where we're having to interact with so many new arkets and so many different ways. and at first that starts out as problem betteris than anybody else. sometimes it's right. sometimes it's not. it times it's not correct ends up looking ludicrous and we look obnoxious for it, right? the outside world is unbelievably fascinated with and excited about working with

valley and this wave of destruction. something we don't necessarily as often as i ve think we could or we should. our own we're living in bubble. >> living in our own bubble. the view is silicon valley the rest of the world when it's silicon valley being integrate in the rest of the world. for the first time where we're not sort of in the isolated it's its own industry. there's no tech industry. there's tech-enabled everything. unbelievably interesting time to be the same kind of retailer hat five years ago, the -- you would have thought was going away because of the internet. there's a tremendous number of emerged thatt have are trying to help you develop new experiences to get to your customers. right? years ago, you thought amazon was going to destroy your ntire industry and now you're on the upswing because we want all new experiences of how we're to go shop. such think there's no

thing as the tech industry or it will be less define? >> less defined is the idea. ou might have silicon valley but that should be seen as sort of the software layer of every other industry. widely tweets are followed, semifunny? >> yeah. >> thanks for the good material. in response to concerns that you tweets, you tweeted a photo of a missouri law firm new ave a shout out to the twitter followers. >> i don't know how the law firm felt about that. sued efully didn't get over it. >> didn't sue us. shouldn't. e sent some traffic or new customers. >> tweeting as much as you do, why do you do it? maybe one that i can dispel is that, you know, enerally tweet once or twice a day. >> you're like way behind mark anderson. you're not in the -- -- i'm sort of between peter and mark in my

tweet volume. it's my one outlet that the pr to doesn't control for me be able to just share my thoughts on the technology industry. wonder, why aren't you more scare? >> that might be partly generational. room. up on chat i'm sure i'll say something stupid some day that i wake up to in the morning and pull a donald trump or something. and then regret tweeting for the rest of my life. strategy?h of it is >> it's probably less stra teenlteenl -- strategic than you might think. my brain is all over the place. representative of the random notions that i have. >> i've had the benefit of sonic. you do image >> less active as a magician. learn.t's a hard thing to >> yeah. >> what have you learned from that? how has that affected your career? >> the magic industry is weird. have you been to a magic conference? interesting an experience. >> seeing the tech industry as a

there's an oblem, international brotherhood of magicians. don't know if i learned much beyond what maybe not to do that would be very weird. but it's -- it was a fun when i was in my teenage years. >> will box still become a public company? we're on.the path so i would say it's -- it's pretty likely. >> you wouldn't say yes. would say yes in the sense that that's the path we're on. >> would you start something new or is this it? >> i think if this -- if this continues to go as it is, you hope to be doing this for quite sometime. >> you want to be the larry story?n >> doesn't look like he's had a horrible life. industry and platforms and devices and ways that you're going to be able to work with information, there's limit to what it's going to be possible in our -- in our sort of market broadly. very wide pallet to work with over the next many, many years. levie, ceo of fox. thank you so much. >> thank you. >> great to have you.

>> from pier three in san francisco, welcome to a special edition of "bloomberg west: the alibaba story." alibaba's founder jack ma once said, "ebay is a shark in the ocean. we are a crocodile in the yangtze river. if we fight in the ocean, we will lose. but if we fight in the river, we will win." over the next half hour, we take you inside the alibaba group to find out how this company founded by 18 people in jack ma's small apartment has grown into a company that has grown bigger than amazon and ebay combined. the businesses of china's e-commerce giant -- rohl