♪ ♪ >> he is an uncommon breed in the world of enterprise technology. aaron levie is known for his colorful sneakers, his magic tricks and ironic tweets. but there is no underestimating his ambition to dominate business. he started building websites when he was 13, and met the kids who would become his cofounders in middle school. but unlike places like facebook and twitter where early infighting is legend, all four cofounders still work there a decade later.

joining me is box ceo and cofounder aaron levie. blue sneakers. what are the sox? >> cloud socks. >> you grew up in seattle. what kind of kid where you? >> i spent far too long on the internet. not a large volume of friends. most of those that were my friends i found it box with. we were growing up in the shadow of microsoft. >> did you idolize jeff bezos and bill gates? >> i knew the bill gates story by heart. what's cool about microsoft, you could go and they would let you be a product tester.

a lot of people in high school would go to microsoft, and they would give you a free mouse. >> you met your cofounders in middle school. >> dylan smith, the first cofounder of box, has been our chief financial officer. we played trumpet together in middle school. neither of us were any good at that. in middle school and high school, i did things on the internet was josh, and later in high school is some kids. >> tell me have box began. >> 10 years ago, not a lot of innovation was happening. it was hard to do basic things. share files, access data from anywhere, collaborate and work with other people. i was in college at the time, and the idea was, what if you could have hard drives in the cloud where you put all your files, then access it from the internet and any device you want to work from? >> tell me about the early days, fondest memories. >> mark cuban was an angel investor in box. that was done by a cold e-mail we sent to mark in 2005. he sent us a $350,000 check to people he never met. that gave us the idea, maybe we should pursue this full-time,

which led to us proposing the idea to our parents that we would drop out of college. they got freaked out, but we had to do it and pursue this mission. we dropped out, then we convinced our other two friends to also drop out of college. we all huddled together in berkeley -- >> this is when you moved to the garage. >> a renovated garage in berkeley that my uncle had built. i'm not sure it was legal at all. we would spend 17 hours a day just working on the software, the business model, marketing. just four of us living in the same places. pretty disgusting, actually. [laughter] probably more akin to a sweatshop. but we built the company. >> you tweeted a picture of the garage -- where we slept, worked, built. what was each of the cofounder''

roles? >> we each bring different skills. we had the software skills, the hardware and networking skill. the finance administration, legal, business operation skills, and i focused on the product side. >> in the early days, what did you fight about? >> the fighting, the bickering as founders -- the nice thing is it all fell back on that trusted relationship that let us work through it. we didn't have the same kind of early founding battles other companies ran into, because we had been friends for in some cases a decade before we even started the company. >> facebook have lawsuit. twitter, tales of infighting and backstabbing. what makes box different? >> when you play trumpet with your cofounder at the ripe age of 11, you have a rooted friendship that bickering and frustrations from building a

company tend to not be able to break. >> has keeping the team together been a priority? >> we spend a lot of time together still. once a year -- >> did one of you ever think, maybe i want to move on? it has been 10 years. >> it has been 10 years. i have no idea if my cofounders have those moments, but none that i have been told about. >> what is it like, becoming a ceo at the age of 19, when your peers are in college partying, not starting businesses? >> it is generally just worse than what your peers are doing. [laughter] it's not very illustrious to be a ceo of a two-person company. people from a distance looked like they were having a lot more fun.

it is more fun to go out than to be on your computer 14 hours a day during college. >> what is the myth of aaron levie, and what is the reality? >> i am early with myths. i don't know what will emerge. but the reality is that it is a simple idea. our job is to build software that previously enterprises didn't think was possible to create. >> how is the aaron levie sitting in front of me today different from the 19-year-old ceo? >> i had a lot more issues with add and stuck. >> 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 using drones to manage agriculture. you don't know how these

technologies will intercept with the real world, so you have to go out to actually understand. the view is that it is silicon valley versus the rest of the world, when it's actually silicon valley being integrated into the rest of the world. ♪

>> you drink a lot of coffee. >> i do. >> you take a nap every day. what is this, spain? >> you forgot the three months of vacation. >> but really, you take a nap and you work more in the evening. tell me about that. >> it is really just a best practice. right around 7:00 p.m. or so you take a 25-minute power nap, then you wake up fully recharged, and that lasts another five hours or so. that's where i get to go design what we are going to do next, what are we behind on, what do we need to think about next? >> and you have a diary -- >> a diary. >> a aaron levie only diary.

>> the range of industries, what you have to learn is that it is very vast. you have to keep track of it somewhere. >> this is something only you see. >> these are my personal things. >> how big is box today? >> we have 1100 employees, 240,000 businesses that actively use the product. 39,000 companies paying for the enterprise edition. 27 million users. >> you recently rolled out box for industry, health care, retail, entertainment. how is that going? >> in every industry we were serving there was some edge of our product or use cases that was far more advanced and innovative than we ever imagined. a month ago we had box for

industry, which today covers health care, media, retail. we are announcing other industries over the next months that will take box into more regulated industries that we think are very right for change. it will serve every major industry. >> you see so much change and disruption in enterprise technology right now. larry ellison stepping down as ceo of oracle. hp splitting up, ibms struggling. when it comes to incumbents versus startups, how does it play out? >> every couple decades you have this changing of the guard, as it were. startups that are really optimizing disruption have the

opportunity to take advantage of that and potentially build the next era of ibm and hp and microsoft. at the same time, you have incumbents that have a lot of cash, led by smart and astute leaders who understand the change. the changes are because they know they are being disrupted. >> peter thiel said that hp is a bet against innovation. >> it is certainly a provocative statement. in terms of relevance, you have leaders of these companies that are recognizing that their previous strategy would have led to irrelevance, and they have to change that. we have the view that everything is zero-sum. ibm doesn't have to lose for apple to win or for salesforce to win. >> what about microsoft, a company you grew up with? >> there are specific product areas that could potentially be harmed by this transition, but them as an entire company at the macro level doesn't necessarily have to lose. >> so companies like microsoft, google, amazon are dropping the price of cloud storage. how much of a threat is that the box? >> we love that. the same unit of storage is a

40th of the price it was 10 years ago on the supply side of our business. the cheaper storage gets, the more we can deliver unique experiences. >> you recently took on $150 million of funding. why did you take that money? >> as you may have seen, we filed to go public at the end of march this year. a week after we filed, there was a bit of a market correction in the tech space. so you saw a bit of volatility, and a lot of high-growth technology companies. we decided it was a bad time to bring a new company to market. we had amazing support from some late stage investors that were willing to support the company

as a private company, so we took that money on to allow us to continue to invest in the business model and building out box without necessarily 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 it, but you will definitely be one of the first people to hear about it once we share any updates. >> how much have you wondered, wondered, did we make a mistake, did refile too soon? >> what is obvious is we should not have filed when we did, because we don't with a lot of distractions because of the filing. i think that whether that was, a lot of news reports, the cycle that had to happen around the business that we brought on because of the filing, that was absolutely a distraction to what our core focus is and has been,

which is execution and the business. that life is too short to have any regrets, so we have remained in full execution mode. >> i'm curious what that moment was like for you. you open your books to the world. somebody calls box a house of cards. >> that is an extreme phrase. we are competing against the biggest companies on planet in the technology industry. to do that, you have to make a significant investment. in our case that is in research and development, infrastructure, our ability to go to market and reach customers. >> is a criticism that you are spending more on sales and marketing, acquiring customers, then you are making. >> every dollar we acquire of revenue is recurring annually, so our job is to keep customers happy and successful and compound that dollar over time. the new investments had outpaced the revenue scale, so now we are more in a stage where the

revenue, we are focused on growing that. but we don't have as many of the new significant investments, because we did a lot of international expansion, bills built out the enterprise sales force. >> how much of the thought about selling box versus going public? >> we want to sell our software, but we spend about 0% of our time thinking about selling. >> china is a critical market, that a lot of the technology business has trouble going to read what is your strategy on china? >> absent learning chinese, mandarin, my challenge is how to explore working in that market in a big way. what you will see is as partnering over time with key players in the space. i would not expect us doing anything really big in china in the near future. >> there's a company you may

have heard of called dropbox. your name box is in dropbox. you overlap to a certain extent in certain business. how big of an inconvenience has dropbox been for you over the last however many years? >> inconvenience is a unique word. i think they are a very innovative company. we obviously are a fierce competitor from a business standpoint, the business part of the market. but i think the world is better with them. >> wide you think you can offer business customer something better than they can? >> when you go after enterprise, it is hard to balance a strategy where you are world class on the consumer side and also world-class for a life sciences or financial services company. those are very different problems. at box, we don't have any distractions.

we are 100% focus on the enterprise. between peter thiel and marc andreessen in my tweet volume. ♪

>> silicon valley is sometimes criticized for being too audacious, too arrogant in thinking we can change the world. is that fair? >> it used to be that there was a cycle of disruption within silicon valley, where software companies disrupted themselves. we are having to interact with so many new markets in so many ways. first that starts out, we can solve this problem better than anyone else. sometimes that believe is right, and sometimes it's not. when it is not, we look ludicrous for it. the outside world is excited about working with silicon valley.

something we don't get a perspective for as often as i think we could or maybe should. we live in our own bubble, and the view is silicon valley versus the rest of the world, when it is really silicon valley being integrated into the rest of the world. for the first time we are not in this isolated universe. there's no tech industry. there is tech-enabled everything. it is an unbelievably interesting time to be the same kind of retailer that five years ago you thought was going away because of the internet. there's companies emerging to develop new technologies to take your customers. 10 years ago you thought amazon would destroy your entire industry. now you are on the upswing because we want all new

experiences of how we shop. >> so you think there is no such thing as the tech industry? or in the future, the tech industry won't be so defined? >> it will be less defined. it will be seen as the software layer of every other industry. >> your tweets are widely followed. some are funny. thanks for the good material. in response to concerns you would rein in your tweets in response to going public, you tweeted out a picture of a missouri law firm. >> i don't know how the law firm felt about it. [laughter] >> tweeting as much as you do -- why do you do it? >> one myth is i generally only tweet once a day. >> you are way behind marc andreessen. >> i'm sort of between peter thiel and marc andreessen.

it is the one out my pr team doesn't control for me to share my thoughts on the technology industry. >> i wonder, why aren't you more scared? >> it might partly be generational. i grew up in chat rooms. i'm sure i will season the stupid one day that i wake up and pull a donald trump or something, then regret the rest of my life. >> how much is strategy? >> it is less strategic than you might think. hi brain is all over the place, so it is very representative of the random notions i have. >> i have had the benefit of seeing you do magic. >> i am less active now as a magician. >> how has that affected your career? >> have you ever been to a magic conference? >> no. >> do you think the tech industry has diverse problem? there is something called the international brotherhood of

magicians. it was a fun experience when i was a teenager. i would say it is pretty likely. >> you would not say yes? >> it is the path we are on. >> would you ever start something new? >> if this continues to go as it is, i hope to be here for quite some time. >> you want to be the larry ellison of cloud storage? >> because what we do is transcending industry, transcending platforms and devices and ways you can work with information, there's really no limit to what will be possible in the market broadly.

we have a wide palette to work with for many years. >> aaron levie, ceo of box. thank you so much. great to have you. ♪

>> welcome to "money clip," where we have the best stories, the most important people, and smart people in business news. i am pimm fox. bill gates and his wife will give the progress report on how he and his wife are changing the world. the markets are washing central banks. -- watching. intech, pc pioneer michael dell sees the future of technology, but it is from the snowcap