aaron levie has ambition to dominate business to the cloud. he kids who would be his cofounders as far back as middle school. unlike facebook and twitter where early in fighting is

legend, all for still work there together. box ceo and cofounder aaron levie is joining me today. what are these socks? >> these are cloud socks. >> you grew up in seattle, what kind of kid were you? >> probably not atypical typical of the kind of kid in the tech industry. far too much time on the internet. not a large volume of friends and most people who were my friends, were the ones i founded the company with. bezos anddolize jeff idolizees -- did you jeff bezos and bill gates? >> yes. i used to test products for microsoft.

>> so you met your cofounders in middle school, tell me about that. our chief financial officer and be played trumpet together in middle school, neither of us were good. i did a lot on the internet with jeff. >> tell me how box began. ago,u go back 10 years there was not a lot of -- time,in college at the and the idea was that if you have these hard drives in the cloud where you put these files in the hard drives and you can access it from any device you want to work from. >> telling about the early days tell me about the early days.

>> mark cuban was an early investor, and he sent a 350,000 dollars check to people he didn't met -- people he had met. this gave us the idea to pursue this full-time. freak out our parents by dropping out of college, then we convinced our other friends to drop out of college. we all settled together in berkeley and moved to a renovated garage. i am not sure that it was legal day workingent all on the software model, marketing, everything. it was kind of disgusting, really, akin to a sweatshop. >> you tweeted a picture of the

garage. when it came to each of your cofounders, what was each of your roles? >> we got lucky because we each bring a different scale to the table. scale, -- software software skill, the hardware and networking skill, and i focused on the product side. >> what kind of issues came up? is that we allng fell back on the trusted relationship that we had that led us get through early founding battles that other companies run into. you have facebook, twitter

with tales of infighting, what makes box unique? >> when you've known each other , you have a different friendship. we spent a lot of time together still. once a year, we do our own off-site with just the four of us. >> have any of you had a moment where you thought you may not want to keep doing this? >> i have no idea if my cofounders have had these moments but none that i have been told about. to become at like ceo at 19? toit is not very illustrious

be the ceo of a two-person company. likea distance, it looked my peers were having more fun. >> what is the myth of aaron levie and what is the reality? >> i don't know what myths have emerged, but the reality is that it is a very simple idea. our job is to build software that previous enterprises didn't believe was possible to create. >> how is the aaron levie sitting in front of me today different than the 19-year-old version? then.ad more add back when you go to a farm where

there -- where they are using drones on agriculture, you don't know how this will impact the real world. the view is silicon valley versus the rest of the world, when it is really integrated.

>> you drink a lot of coffee apparently? >> i take three months of vacation a year. you take naps, and you work more in the evening. p.m., i take a 7 20 minute power nap and you wake up recharged. that last for about five hours and that is when i go think about what we are behind on,

what we need to think about. right?you have a diary, the range of different industries and what you to learn about is very vast, so you have to keep track of that somewhere? >> is that something you only see? yes, i would not want others to see it. >> how big is box today? companies are0 using our service. >> you recently rolled out box for industry, health care, media, entertainment. seeing, was that in every ember -- every industry we were serving, there were aspects that were far more

advanced than we had imagined that could be used with our product. a number ofouncing other industries over the next couple of months that will take cases, more some regulated industries. >> you are seeing lots of change in the world of enterprise technology right now, larry ellison stepping down in oracle, ibm struggling. when it comes to incumbents versus startups, how does it play out? >> every once in a while you have this changing of the guard. startups have an opportunity to take advantage of that and potentially build the next era. at the same time, you do have incumbents that have a lot of

cash. they are led by incredibly smart leaders. thiel, for example, that hp ist ibm -- not a technology company anymore, but a bet against innovation. >> you have leaders of these companies that are realizing that their previous strategies would lead to irrelevance. ibm does not have to lose for apple or salesforce to win. >> what about a company like microsoft? >> i think there are product buts that could be harmed, as a whole company they don't necessarily have to lose.

>> so companies like microsoft, google, amazon are dropping the price of cloud storage. how does that affect box? >> we love that. it is cheaper on the supply side . the cheaper the data gets, the more we can store. >> you recently took on $150 million in funding. seen, we may have filed to go public in march of this year. about a week after we filed, there was a bit of a market correction in tech stocks, so you saw quite a bit of volatility in high-growth technology companies. we decided that it wasn't the best time to bring a new company to market. from somezing support

private market, late stage investors that were interested in supporting the company as a private company. so we took that money on to be able to continue to invest in growth and the business model without going public. >> how much did you wonder, did we make a mistake, did we filed too soon? >> it was obvious that we shouldn't have filed when we did. we dealt with a lot of distractions because of that filing. reports, and the cycle that had to happen about -- had to happen around the business were distractions to our core focus. to have is too short any specific regrets. >> i am curious what that moment was like for you, because you

opened your books to the world. against thempeting biggest companies on the planet in the technology industry. so, to do that, you have to make a significant investment. in our case, that is an investment in research and development, infrastructure, and our sales team. the criticism was that you are spending more on sales and marketing. >> i think that the thing that scale gives you -- and the other thing that i think was lost in the mix was that every dollar that we acquire of revenue is a dollar that is recurring annually. at ast happened to unveil point when new investments had outpaced the revenue scale.

now we are more in a stage where compounding,are but we don't have as many of the new investments. you are starting to see that efficiency play out. >> how much of you thought of selling box, versus going public? >> we want to sell our software to companies, but the company itself we've spent no time thinking about that. >> china is a market that a lot of technology businesses have trouble getting into. what is your strategy on china? chinese,than learning my strategy is finding out how we go and explore working in that market in a big way. you will probably see us partner over time with key players in the space, but i wouldn't expect us to do anything really big in

china in the near future. >> there is a company you may have heard of called dropbox. and business overlap to a certain extent. how much of an inconvenience has dropbox been to you? >> inconvenience is a unique word. i think they are an innovative company, we are obviously a fierce competitor from a business standpoint. but, i think the world is better with them. think you can offer customers something better than they can? >> i think when you go after the enterprise it is hard to balance a strategy where you will world class -- where you are world-class on the consumer side and also on the business side.

focused onare 100% the enterprise side.

>> silicon valley is sometimes criticized for being too arrogant in thinking they can change the world. is that fair? >> it used to be, that there was a cycle of disruption in silicon valley where software companies constantly tried to disrupt themselves. we are going through an arrow or he have to interact with so many different markets. first, that starts as thinking we can solve this market better than anyone else. sometimes that is right, sometimes not.

the outside world is fascinated and excited to work with silicon valley. that is something we don't necessarily get a perspective for as often as we could or should. we live in our own bubble. the view is often silicon valley versus the rest of the world, when it is actually silicon valley being integrated into the rest of the world. , theres no tech industry is tech enabled everything. it is an incredibly interesting time to be the same kind of retailer that five years ago you would've thought was going away because of the internet. there are lots of companies that emerge trying to develop new experiences of ways to get your customer. thoughtrs ago companies amazon was going to destroy

them, but now they are on the upswing all stop -- on the upswing. in the future, you might have silicon valley, but that will be the software layer of every other industry. >> your tweets are widely followed. some are funny. in response to concerns that you would rein in your tweets if you went public, you tweeted a picture of a missouri law firm. >> they didn't sue us. i'm sure we sent them some traffic. >> why do you tweeted much you do? -- widely between as much as you do? at mark andreessen's

level. it is my one outlet that the pr team doesn't control for me to be able to share my thoughts. >> i guess i wonder, why aren't you more scared? >> i think it is generational. i'm sure i will say something stupid someday and then regret treating -- then regret tweeting. than yous strategic would think, because my brain is all over the place. i have had the benefit of seeing you do magic. >> i am less active now is in a magician.now as have you ever been to magic -- magice gekko quote

conference? there is something called the international brotherhood of magicians. it was a fun experience when i was in my teenage years. >> will box still become a public company? >> that is the path that we are on. >> would you ever start something new? >> if this continues as it is, i would like to keep this going for a long time. >> would you like to be larry ellison? >> because of what we do sort of transcends certain platforms and devices, there is no limit to what will be possible in our market. box.ron levie, ceo of

great to have you.

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