emily: 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. there is no underestimating his ambition to dominate the fight -- the flight of business in the cloud. he started building websites when he was 13 and met the kids who would become his cofounders as far back as middle school. but unlike places like facebook and twitter, where tales of early infighting are legend, all four of box's cofounders still work there a decade later. joining me now is aaron levie.

aaron: how are you doing? emily: good. how are you doing? aaron: those are cloud socks. emily: you grew up in seattle. aaron: yes. emily: what kind of kid were you? aaron: not too atypical of people in the tech industry. i spent far too long, far too much time, on the internet. not a large volume of friends. most of those that were my friends founded the company with me. we were growing up in the shadow of microsoft. emily: did you idolize jeff bezos and bill gates? aaron: everybody knew the bill gates story by heart. what's cool about microsoft is that you could actually go and be a product tester. a lot of people from high school would actually go to microsoft and test new products and they would give you a free mouse. emily: you met your cofounders in middle school.

tell me about that. aaron: the first cofounder of box, our chief financial officer, we actually played trumpet together in middle school. neither of us were good at that. throughout middle school and high school, i did a lot of stuff on the internet with jeff and later in high school with sam. emily: tell me how box began. aaron: if you go back about 10 years ago, not a lot of innovation happening. it was really hard to do basic things like, how do you share your files and access data from anywhere, and how do you collaborate and work with other people. i was in college at the time. the original idea was 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. emily: tell me about those early days. fondest memories. aaron: one was mark cuban was an angel investor in box. and that was just done by a cold e-mail we sent to mark back in 2005. he sent us a $350,000 check to

people he had never met. 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 got freaked out. we had to do it and pursue this mission. we dropped out. and then we convinced our other two friends, sam and jeff, to also drop out of college. we all huddled together in berkeley. emily: this is when you moved to the garage? aaron: 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, 17 hours a day, just working on the software, the business model, marketing. it was just four of us, 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. emily: you tweeted a picture of that garage.

saying box's first office 8 years ago where we slept, worked, thought, pivoted and built. when it came to each of your cofounders, what were your roles? aaron: we got lucky. collectively. because 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. i focused on the product side. emily: what did you fight about? the fighting all and bickering as founders. but the nice thing is that it all fell back on that trusted relationship that let us work through that. we did not have the same kind of early founding battles that other companies have run into. because we had been friends for, in some cases, a decade before we even started the company. emily: at facebook you had lawsuits, at twitter, tales of infighting and backstabbing. what makes box unique?

what makes you guys different? emily: when you play trumpet with your cofounder at the ripe age of 11, you have a rooted friendship that bickering and frustration from building a company cannot break. emily: has keeping the team together been a priority? aaron: yes. we spend a lot of time together. still. once a year, for instance, we do our own off-site. emily: have any of you had a moment where you thought, i do not know if i want to keep doing this, i might want to move on? it has been 10 years. aaron: it has been 10 years. i have no idea if my cofounders have had those moments, but none that i have been told about. emily: what is it like becoming a ceo at 19 years old, when your peers are in college, studying, partying? certainly not starting businesses. aaron: 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. at the time. people, from a distance, look

like they were having a lot more fun. it is generally more fun to go out than be on a computer 14 hours a day during college. emily: what is the myth of aaron levie and what is the reality? aaron: i think i am still early for myths. i do not know what myths have emerged. 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. emily: how is aaron levie sitting in front of me today different from the 19-year-old? aaron: i think as the 19-year-old ceo, i would be grabbing my hair more. i had more issues with add. emily: i know you are on the road a lot. this is now a global company. how do you structure your time? aaron: i spend about 50% on the road. it turns out that enterprises are everywhere. until you go out to a farm who is going to use drones to manage their agricultural business, you don't actually know how these technologies are going to intersect with the real world.

and so you have to go out on the road and actually understand customers directly. 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. ♪

emily: you drink a lot of coffee. aaron: i do. emily: you take a nap every day. aaron: i do. emily: what is this, spain? aaron: you forgot the three vacations i take every year. emily: but really, if you take a nap and work more in the evening. tell me about that. aaron: it is the best practice -- right around 7:00 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 do we need to start thinking about? that is when everybody gets inundated by e-mails from me. emily: you have a diary?

like a personal, aaron levie only diary. aaron: the range of different industries and what you have to learn about is very vast. you have to keep track of that somewhere. emily: this is something only you see? aaron: yes, i would not want you to see it. so these are sort of my personal things. emily: how big is box? aaron: we have 1100 employees. we have 240,000 businesses that actively use the product. about 39,000 companies are paying for our enterprise edition of the service. 27 million users. emily: you recently rolled out box for industries. for health care, retail and media and entertainment. how is that going and what is next? aaron: we started to see that in every industry we were serving there was some edge of our product or edge of their use cases that was far more advanced and innovative than we had ever imagined that could be done with our platform technology. about a month ago, we announced

box for industries that today covers 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. emily: you are seeing so much change and disruption in the world of enterprise technology. larry ellison stepping down as the ceo of oracle. hp splitting up. ibm struggling. when it comes to incumbents versus startups, how does it play out? aaron: so, every couple of decades, you have this sort of changing of the guard as it were. startups that are really 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 this change. the changes you are seeing are driven specifically because they know they are being disrupted. emily: peter teel said to me for example, hp is not a technology company anymore. it is a bet against innovation. aaron: that is a provocative statement. but i think 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 this view that everything is zero sum. ibm does not have to lose for apple to win. or for salesforce to win. emily: what about microsoft? a company that you grew up with. aaron: 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. emily: so companies like microsoft, google, amazon are dropping the price of cloud storage. how much of a threat is that? to box. aaron: we love that.

the same unit of storage is now a 40th of a price and it was 10 years ago. on the supply side of our business. the cheaper storage gets, the more data we can store for a customer and the more we can deliver unique experiences around the content. emily: you took on $150 million in funding from tpg. the company is now valued at $2.4 billion. why did you take that money? aaron: as you may have seen, we filed to go public in march of this year. basically, a week after we filed, there was a bit of a market correction in the tech stock space. so you saw a bit of volatility in a lot of high-growth technology companies. we decided it was not the best time to bring a new company to market. and we had amazing support from some private market growth late-stage investors. tbg and coutu in this case. they were willing and interested in supporting the company is a

private company. we took that money on to allow us to continue to invest and grow, invest in the business model and build up box without going public. emily: how much have you wondered did we make a mistake and file too soon? aaron: it is obvious that we should not have filed. we dealt with a lot of distraction because of the filing. whether that was a lot of news reports that happened around the business, obviously we did bring on because of the filing. that was absolutely distraction to what our core focus is and has been. which is execution and building up the business. but you know, life is certainly too short to have regrets.

we have remained in and continue to be an execution. emily: i'm curious. it was called a house of horrors. aaron: that is an extreme phrase. we're competing against the biggest companies on the planet. in the technology industry. to do that, you have to make a pretty significant investment. in our case, that is an investment in research and development, infrastructure, sales team, and our ability to go to market and reach these customers. emily: the criticism was that you are spending more on sales and marketing to acquire customers than you are making. how has that changed? aaron: the thing scale gives you, because we are a recurring revenue business model -- that was the other thing lost in the mix. every dollar that we acquire of revenue is a dollar that is recurring annually. and so our job is to keep our customers happy and successful. and compound that dollar over time. we happened to unveil our s-1 at a point when new investments had outpaced the revenue scale. and so now, i think, 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. and so you're starting to see that efficiency play out over time. emily: how much have you thought about selling box? versus staying independent or going public. aaron: we want to sell our software to a lot of companies. the company itself, we have spent about 0% of the time thinking about it. emily: china, this is a critical market that a lot of u.s. technology businesses have trouble getting into. what is your strategy for getting into china now? aaron: absent learning mandarin my challenge has been how do we , go and explore working in the market. what you will see is a partner over time with key players in the space. but i would not expect us doing anything real big in china in the near future. emily: there is a company called

dropbox. aaron: yes, i have. emily: your name. the name box is in the name dropbox. you overlap to a certain extent in terms of business. how much of an inconvenience has dropbox been for you? over the last however many years? aaron: inconvenience is a unique word. i think they are an innovative company. drew is an incredible leader. we are a fierce competitor from the business standpoint. the business part of the market. but i think that the world is better with them. emily: why do you think you can offer business customers something better than they can? i think that when you go after the enterprise it is really hard to balance a strategy where you are world-class on the consumer side and also be world-class for a hospital or a life sciences company or a financial services institution. those are just very different types of problems. at box, we don't have any distractions. we are 100% focused on the enterprise.

i am between peter thiel and mark andreessen in my tweet volume. ♪

emily: silicon valley is sometimes criticized for being too audacious, too arrogant, and thinking we can change the world. is that fair? aaron: it used to be that there was a cycle of disruption within 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. and at first that starts out as, we can solve those problems better than anybody else. sometimes that belief is right, and sometimes that is not. sometimes we look obnoxious for it. right? the outside world is unbelievably a fascinated with and excited about working with silicon valley during this wave

of disruption. something we do not get a perspective as often as we could should.- or emily: because we are living in our own bubble? aaron: >> we live in our own bubble. the view is that it 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. it is an unbelievably interesting time 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 have emerged 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 are going to go shop. emily: so you think there is no such thing as the tech industry or in the future the tech industry won't be so defined?

aaron: i think it will be less defined, is the idea. you might have silicon valley. that should be seen as the sort of software layer of every other industry. emily: your tweets are widely followed. semi funny. aaron: thank you. emily: thank you for the good material. in response to concerns that you would rein in your tweets after deciding to go public, you tweeted a photo of a missouri law firm. and gave a shout out to your new twitter followers. i'm not sure how the law firm happened. emily: hopefully you will not get sued over it. aaron: i'm sure we sent them some traffic. emily: tweeting as much as you do, why do you do it? aaron: one myth that i can dispel is that i generally tweet only once or twice a day. emily: you are way behind mark andreessen. not 100 tweets a day. aaron: 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 just share my thoughts on the technology industry. emily: i guess i just wonder, why aren't you more scared? aaron: 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. emily: how much of it is strategy? aaron: it is less strategic than you might think. because my brain is all over the place. it is actually very representative of the random notions that i have. emily: i've had the benefit of seeing you do magic. aaron: i am less active now as a magician. emily: that is a very hard thing to learn. what have you learned from that? how has it affected your career? aaron: magic is weird. have you been to a magic conference? emily: no. that sounds like an interesting experience.

aaron: you think the tech industry has a diversity problem? there is something called the international brotherhood of magicians. i do not think about anything except what not to do. it was a fun experience in my teenage years. emily: will box still become a public company? aaron: that is the path we are on. i would say it is pretty likely. emily: you wouldn't say yes? aaron: i would say that it is the path we are on. emily: would you ever start anything new? or is this it? aaron: is this continues to go as it is i will be doing this , for quite some time. emily: do you want to be larry ellison? of cloud storage? aaron: it does not seem like he has had a horrible life. because of what we do, it transcends industry and different platforms and devices, ways you will work with information, there is no limit to what is going to be possible in our market, broadly. we have a very wide palette to work with. emily: aaron levie, ceo of box. thank you very much. aaron: emily, thank you.

emily: great to have you. ♪

emily: he is known as tech's turnaround guy. blackberry ceo john chen has spent more than 30 years working in enterprise technology. famously taking the enterprise software maker sybase from the verge of death to $5.8 billion powerhouse. now he is taking on what some say is an impossible job, leading blackberry's comeback. can he prove them wrong? and just how did he become the tech industry's fixer? my guest is today on "studio 1.0" is blackberry ceo john chen. thank you for joining us. john: thank you for having me.