♪ stephanie ruhle: it has been five years since haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake. >> we lived one of the worst moments in our history. it was an armageddon-like situation. stephanie: the government says the country is moving forward. that haiti is open for business. >> we want to do more. we want to attract more businesses. that will change an entire region in terms of job creation. maybe what we are doing today will show the government that they need to come here and help the people to have roads, to have electricity, to have running water. stephanie: there are people living in the streets, and the

country still has horrible infrastructure problems. >> when you come in and look at the situation, haiti is closed for business. stephanie: but some say there are huge opportunities to be had. >> if you invest here, the returns would be very, very good. stephanie: can private investment save haiti? >> we have a beautiful people. and we would like for them to be able to benefit from what god has given us in haiti. today, they are not. ♪ stephanie: haiti. most likely, the name sparks an image in your mind, and it is probably not a good one. even before the magnitude 7.0 earthquake rocked the country on january 12, 2010, life in haiti

was pretty bleak. founded by former slaves in 1804, haiti has suffered through a series of oppressive governments, including the notorious duvalier, father and son presidents. according to the world bank, most haitians survive on less than $2.50 a day. it is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. the earthquake pushed the country to the very brink. fmr. prime minister lamothe: five years ago, we lived one of the worst moments in our history. all the public administration was knocked down. we had over 200,000 people that passed away. it was an armageddon-like situation. stephanie: the haitian government was unprepared and unable to do much but ask for international help. lamothe: after the earthquake, it was mostly humanitarian emergency relief. it was a question of getting to the victims and providing them with water, shelter, blankets. once that was taken care of, now we have to go to the nationbuilding. ♪ stephanie: half a decade has passed. the rubble has been cleared.

most of the aid agencies have gone home. haiti has a democratically-elected president. and the country has a new slogan. "haiti is open for business." lamothe: why do we say the country is open for business? because a lot of investors are looking around the caribbean to invest. stephanie: laurent lamothe was appointed prime minister in 2012. a former telecommunications ceo, lamothe set out to transform haiti's image. from a poor, aid-dependent country to a land of lucrative opportunities. what industries should come here then? if you were to say, this is a business that would thrive in haiti, what is it? lamothe: manufacturing, for example. we are one of the top five t-shirt manufacturers. i do not know if you knew that. we have over 1000 construction sites around the country. over 70% is hiring local workers. in terms of tourism attraction we are seeing traction now with

large investors coming in. the marriott hotel will open its doors. stephanie: the marriott hotel is being funded by an irish billionaire who calls himself haiti's number one salesperson. denis o'brien: well, we are investing $45 million. we will probably lose money for the first six to nine months and then we will turn a profit. so, we will get a good return on investment here. no problem. stephanie: the marriott is in downtown port-au-prince, right next door to denis o'brien's company headquarters. digicel, haiti's major mobile carrier. digicel operates in 33 countries. but haiti is its largest market, accounting for roughly 1/3 of its 12.8 million customers. when you got here in 2006, what made you think this would be a good place to invest? o'brien: well, we did not do that much due diligence. we just drove around in a taxi and we were watching, you know looking at people, and none of

them had a phone. then we said to ourselves, that is the opportunity. so we spent a lot of money -- probably about $1.2 billion -- so far on infrastructure here in this country for telecoms. stephanie: when you speak to american ceos, and you try to sell them on haiti, and they say to you, "look at the track record. it does not make sense. that country has problems right, left, and center." what do you tell them? o'brien: i just tell them my own experience. so we are the largest foreign direct investor in the country. we have had absolutely no issues setting up our business. no red tape. our business has performed well, and it has been a very good investment. so, our experience is the example for everybody else. ♪ stephanie: o'brien is also investing in haiti's children. o'brien: we just finished this program where we have built our 150th school. stephanie: so that is philanthropy, not business. o'brien: well, it is investing in a country and not robbing the place. and doing something very, very impactful.

bravo. bravo. stephanie: tell me, what are we seeing here? o'brien: that is our competitor. stephanie: from the helipad on the roof of the digicel building, it is easy to believe that haiti is open for business. but it is hard to ignore the view in the street not far from digicel's gates. what is this, people buy ice here? jean bernard: so people get ice -- stephanie: how much would a piece of ice like that cost? jean bernard: 100 gourde, which is like $2.50. a piece of ice in the house is a luxury. stephanie: when i am walking down the street, and someone says $2 to buy a block of ice because no one has refrigeration in their home, it makes me think people are not being given a fair living wage. o'brien: you know, everywhere in the world, people work for a wage, ok? if they are not happy with the wage, they do not work. most of the time, ok? in this case, people feel, for the first time, if they come and work for a company like us, you get very well-paid.

so, i do not know what more companies can do. stephanie: just getting to work is hard in haiti. there is no publically funded transportation system, and the roads are crumbling. in fact, all of haiti's infrastructure is a mess. are you getting ahead of yourself with this open for business idea? you need running water. you need a sewer system. you need plumbing. you need electricity and wi-fi. why would a business come here if you don't have the basic elements? lamothe: we have to consider the success one project at a time. building back one building at a time is progress for a country that has been rocked by instability and lack of movement in the past. stephanie: but haiti may not be able to escape the ghosts of its rocky political past. in december, just days after we spoke with him, prime minister lamothe was forced to step down because of infighting between two major political parties. the government shakeup is yet another setback for the people.

and the turmoil will likely scare off some potential investors. change comes slowly in haiti. coming up, what happens when a multibillion dollar beer company meets with a small haitian farmer? why would you want to give your livelihood away to a company that three years ago, you did not even know who they were? >> as time goes by, we see that this program is going to advance us more. ♪

♪ stephanie: every country has its national drink, and haiti is no exception. rene hooft graafland: beer is a

very local product. you see that in all countries. so, the closer you are to the consumers, the better it is. stephanie: rene hooft graafland is the cfo of heineken. the dutch brewing company has owned a small part of the brasserie nationale d'haiti, or, as it's known locally, brana since the early 1970's. haiti's only beer, prestige, is brewed here, and so is a popular non-alcoholic malt beverage called malta h. the earthquake knocked the brewery off-line for two months. that is when heineken upped its stake in brana to nearly 100%. hooft graafland: after the earthquake, this brewery needed a lot of investments and reinvestments. and the owners at that time were not prepared or not capable of putting that money up front. and then we said, this is for us a good way to step in.

stephanie: hooft graafland was in haiti this past december to reopen the brewery after a $100 million renovation. this new production line churns out 20,000 bottles of prestige an hour. the plant runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. it's a capital investment heineken is hoping will pay off in the long term. right now, haitians don't buy a lot of beer or soft drinks. they simply don't have the disposable income. which is why heineken is making another kind of investment. in people. an hour's drive from the brana brewery, the countryside is covered in a crop that resembles corn with oversized tufts. all right, so show me how you harvest. this is sorghum, a grain that has been grown and eaten in haiti for almost a century. and you serve this to your family?

how do you prepare it? telusmon apres-diece: i mill it, i clean it, i cook it like any other food. and then i separate it plate by plate to my family. stephanie: but sorghum is no longer going just to these farmers' dinner plates. since the earthquake, heineken has invested $3.4 million into a program to teach small farmers better ways to grow and store their sorghum. these farmers say in the last year, their crop yield has doubled. now they are able to sell part of their crop to heineken's brana factory to make malta h. michel monnin: at the long term, we hope to reduce the maximum of importation and creating this new local solution with this local market and a local supply chain. stephanie: who is the buyer of the drink? monnin: haitians. the peasants themselves. stephanie: so it would make sense, if they become more productive, then they can afford the drink. monnin: exactly. stephanie: full circle.

full circle. jean enock: i used to plant in a scattered way. but now i use just two or three seeds per hole because of the new information. stephanie: farmer jean enock says his biggest expense now is hiring enough men to help him pick his 12 acres of sorghum by hand. are you worried that brana could take advantage of you? you are becoming almost like an employee to brana. before, you were your own independent farmer. telusmon apres-diece: no. now we have a system. we are following procedures we learned. it's good. the system is giving us a better harvest. i plant less and harvest more. stephanie: why would you want to give your business, your livelihood, away to a company that, three years ago, you didn't even know who they were? apres-diece: everything is done according to procedure. and we see the procedure as better. as time goes by, we see that this program is going to advance us more. stephanie: do you like the malt beverage that sorghum makes? jean enock: yes. it makes our heart happy. it makes our heart happy when we drink it.

stephanie: heineken's brana buys the grains directly from the farmers and ships it back to the port-au-prince brewery. monnin: you don't need to take a donkey and go for miles to try and sell your sorghum. we'll come and get it right here. stephanie: brana gets all of its sorghum from haitian farmers. 300 tons since the program started. and sells over 100,000 bottles of malta h every day. heineken is betting its investment in local farmers will boost sales even higher. hooft graafland: they are all pieces of one big puzzle. ultimately, we need to get this economy going. farmers who earn more money will be consumers at the other side.

stephanie: so if the farmers make more money, they drink more beer? hooft graafland: not only drink more beer, they will use more soap, they will buy more soup, they will buy stuff. so this will be a bigger market when the economy is getting better. stephanie: coming up -- >> every job is important. and i will fight for every job that i can create. stephanie: can the textile industry save haiti with jobs? ♪

♪ stephanie: this is canaan. a slum to the north of haiti's capital, port-au-prince. it was empty before the earthquake. now, about 100,000 people live here in makeshift shelters. in the bible, canaan is the place chosen by god for the israelites. but life in haiti's canaan is grim. charles henri baker: maybe what we are doing today will show the government that they need to

come here and help the people of canaan. to have roads. to have electricity. to have running water. stephanie: charles henri baker is a haitian politician. he has run for president two times and lost. he says canaan proves haiti is still struggling. [speaking in french] stephanie: baker is also a successful businessman. his company, pb apparel, makes uniforms and medical scrubs for the u.s. market in a massive factory in port-au-prince. the president and the current administration want us to believe that haiti is open for business. is it? baker: no. we have the most expensive port in the nation, in the world. my labor is getting more expensive. my rent is more expensive. my banking fees are more expensive. stephanie: according to the world bank, difficult access to permits, credit, and electricity

make haiti one of the hardest countries to do business in. baker: when you come in and you look at the situation, haiti is closed for business. it is not open for business. stephanie: textiles, like the uniforms produced in baker's factory, make up 90% of haiti's exports. and almost all go directly to the united states. haitian textile manufacturers account for 10% of gdp and employ over 36,000 people. baker: right after the earthquake, the first thought that came to our mind -- we had 990 employees. how do we help them? i borrowed $120,000 from my customers and bought food. stephanie: baker estimates that each of his employees supports another 10 people. if his workers sat idle, thousands were at risk. so baker opened his factory doors one week after the earthquake. baker: these are the realities of this country. so every job is important, and i

will fight for every job that i can create. stephanie: the earthquake caused an estimated $38 million in damage to haiti's apparel industry. rep. charlie rangel: when there is a crisis, the whole world looks to us. stephanie: the united states tried to revive the textile industry by passing the hope and help acts just four months after the disaster. they allowed for the duty-free import of some haitian products to the u.s. do you believe the hope and help act has worked? baker: the way we thought it would help, no. it has created about 10,000 jobs. it should have created 100,000 to 200,000 jobs within a five year period. and this has not happened. stephanie: research shows about 28,000 jobs were created by the hope and help acts. and, while that is not enough for baker, it is enough to keep some in the apparel industry optimistic. richard coles: the international community, including the united states leading the efforts, have done a lot of efforts. it is like seeds that have been planted and we start seeing the

fruits coming out. stephanie: richard coles owns multiwear, a factory where 2,000 people make hane's t-shirts. coles: haiti is the most competitive source for the apparel industry. if you take cost, we are the most competitive, from far especially with hope-help. there are some garments that are exempt 35% duties, which makes us unbeatable. stephanie: still, it is a relatively low cost and motivated labor force that makes haiti so attractive. minimum wage is about $5.00 a day. ask people on the street what they need most, and you will likely hear "jobs." can we even ask the question is minimum wage fair here? or is the first thing we need to focus on just getting all these people jobs? coles: it's a very sensitive question. you do not want to have people working on sewing machines that are just survivors. when they go out, they barely have money in their pockets. you want them to be consumers. it is about the industry being more productive and paying

people much more than minimum wage. stephanie: coles says he pays his workers twice the minimum wage. where do you actually see haiti in five years? realistic. coles: if we are smart enough to work -- i am not talking you politics, i am talking haiti. i think haiti will be, in five years, on the right track for success. stephanie: is haiti smart enough to do that? coles: haiti is getting mature. i have faith. stephanie: bringing a divided country together may prove to be haiti's biggest challenge. but, if there is one thing everyone can agree on, it's that haiti is not yet capitalizing on its potential. baker: haiti is a beautiful country. we have a beautiful people. and we'd like for them to be able to benefit from what god has given us in haiti. today, they are not. stephanie: coming up, using haiti's pristine beaches to attract tourism and investors. ♪

♪ stephanie: immediately following the earthquake, what did this look like here? gary philoctete: devastated. a lot of rubble. this is how we started here. cleaning rubble. so that people could transition back to their communities. stephanie: about 100,000 people had been living in this 2 square mile area of port-au-prince, called delmas 32, when their poorly-constructed homes collapsed in the earthquake. today, the jp haiti relief organization, known as j/p hro is rebuilding the neighborhood. the actor, sean penn, founded j/p hro just days after the earthquake hit in 2010. philoctete: our mission is to save lives and build a sustainable program with the haitian people quickly and effectively. we will continue to build the program with the haitian people. not for them, but with them.

stephanie: the haitian government and the world bank have given nearly $9 million to fund the relocation and construction program. so far, over 5,000 families have been placed in new homes. philoctete: this is a model that can be replicated. we ensure that we have good contractors from the private sector to help the construction and we ensure that people in the community participate in the process. stephanie: the project also acts as a kind of trade school. local haitians are taught construction skills they can turn into jobs. 2/3 of haiti's workforce is unemployed or underemployed. and while the redevelopment projects like the j/p hro program will create some jobs, the government is betting tourism will be the country's golden ticket. ♪ stephanie villedrouin: the president, when he took power,

he said, we don't want more aid, we want investment. therefore, we actually invested in sectors as tourism that can bring revenues to the country. stephanie: stephanie villedrouin is haiti's tourism minister. it is her job to get the global hospitality industry to develop the country's coastline into a tourist destination. she's focused on a tiny island 6.5 miles off the coast, where the government wants investors to create luxury resorts. villedrouin: ile-a-vache is where we started some tourism projects. so we are building a runway airport, a port, and a main road. stephanie: until the airport is built, the only way to get to ile-a-vache is by boat or helicopter. the government has spent $40 million developing the island.

so far, no foreign investors have signed on. but carnival is investing in a different haitian island. the world's largest cruise line intends to develop a $70 million port on tortuga island, off haiti's northern coast. villedrouin: carnival is one of our biggest achievement. they are going to be starting building in 2015. they are going to create jobs right away on the first phase of the construction. stephanie: the deal with carnival has the potential to bring over 600,000 tourists to haiti annually. you have the most extraordinary beaches and mountains and waterfalls. but i wouldn't feel comfortable being in a country where i know there's areas, that if i didn't have a handler, a fixer, i couldn't get out. villedrouin: well, in each country, there is the bad neighborhood and the good neighborhoods. you are going to bring your visitors, you can tell them this is the areas they can have access without any problems. now we have the specialized police department for tourism, and they are mostly all around. they are in front of hotels, they are in different parts where normally usually tourists

go. stephanie: to help us navigate through the streets in towns of haiti, we hired a local entrepreneur. this is bayard jean bernard. bayard jean bernard: ok guys, so welcome to haiti. stephanie: jean bernard was our fixer. he is a local who speaks the language and helps foreign journalists move around the country. jean bernard was a student at haiti's only film school when the quake hit. he and his classmates went out into the street and started filming the carnage. they posted the images on the internet. jean bernard: we need to say that there is a problem here, we need help. stephanie: news organizations covering the quake started hiring jean bernard to take them around haiti. jean bernard: i started to work like a fixer. more jobs came out, and i met more journalists. stephanie: five years after the quake, the president's campaign

is "haiti is open for business." do you believe it? jean bernard: i don't know if the business is here already but haiti is open itself. they want business to come. haitians, they need jobs. stephanie: but jean bernard says what haiti needs most isn't business or jobs. haiti needs love. jean barnard: if you've never had love, you cannot give love to people. and haitians have a love problem. some haitians don't want to see the other haitians rise up, but this is a small mentality. once we get out of this, the country will rise up. stephanie: haiti's needs are obvious. to turn the country around, the government must stabilize. investors must not exploit a poor population for profit. and the international community cannot forget about haiti until the next disaster. lasting change will require much

more than just an "open for business" slogan. ♪

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. but there is no underestimating his ambition to dominate the flight of business to the cloud. he started building websites when he was 13 and met the kids who would become his co-founders 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 co-founders still work there together a decade

later. joining me today on "studio 1.0," box ceo and co-founder aaron levie. aaron: how you doing? emily: how you doing? aaron: good, thank you. emily: blue sneakers today, i appreciate that. what are the socks? aaron: these are cloud socks. emily: ok. aaron: official cloud socks. for the enterprise offer industry. emily: i like it. you grew up in seattle. aaron: yes. emily: what kind of kid were you? aaron: probably not atypical of, certainly, people in the tech industry. so, i spent far too long, far too much time, on the internet. not, sort of, large volume of friends. most of those that were my friends i founded the company, i founded box with. we were growing up in the shadow of microsoft. emily: did you idolize jeff bezos and bill gates? aaron: yeah, everybody knew the bill gates story kind of by heart. what's cool about microsoft is that you can actually go and they let you be a product tester. so a lot of people in high school would actually go to microsoft and test out new products and then they would give you like a free mouse at the end of it. emily: ok, you met your co-founders in middle school. tell me about that.

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

to people he had never met. so that gave dylan and myself the idea, maybe we should pursue this full-time. which led to us basically proposing the idea to our parents that we're going to drop out of college. they subsequently got freaked out. but we had to do it and pursue the mission. we dropped out. and then we convinced our other two friends, sam and jeff, to also drop out of college. and we all huddled together in berkeley, and -- emily: this is when you moved to the garage? aaron: we moved to this garage this renovated garage in berkeley that my uncle had built up. and i'm not sure that it was legal at all. we would spend 16 hours a day, 17 hours a day, just working on the software, on the business model, on marketing. it was just four of us living, working, you know, eating, sleeping in the same place. it was pretty disgusting actually. [laughter] if you really want to know, it is probably more akin to a sweatshop. but 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, fought, pivoted, and built. when it came to each of your co-founders, what was each of your roles? aaron: we got really lucky, i think, collectively, because we each bring a different kind of skill to the table. so we had sort of the software skill, the hardware and networking skill. we had the finance administration, legal, business operations skill. that was dylan. and i focused really on the product side. emily: so when you say you fought, i'm just curious. in those early days, what did you fight about? what were the issues that came up? aaron: we had all the sort of fighting and all of the bickering as founders. but the nice thing is that it all fell back on, again, that trusted relationship that let us kind of 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: so obviously at facebook you had lawsuits, twitter, you know, tales of infighting and backstabbing.

what makes box unique? what makes you guys different? aaron: when you play trumpet with your co-founder at the ripe age of 11, you have a rooted friendship that, you know, bickering and frustrations from building a company tend to not be able to break. emily: has keeping the team together been a priority? aaron: yeah. we spend a lot of time together. still. once a year, for instance, we do our own off-site, just the four of us. emily: have any one of you ever had a moment where you thought i don't know, i don't know if i want to keep doing this, maybe i might want to move on? it has been 10 years. aaron: it has been 10 years. i have no idea if my co-founders have had those moments, but none that i have been told about. emily: what is it like becoming a ceo at the age of 19, when your peers are in college, partying? certainly not starting businesses. aaron: it is generally just worse than what your peers are doing. so -- [laughter] it's not very illustrious to be a ceo of a two-person company. it got me excluded from a lot of

parties at the time. and people -- it looked, from a distance, looked like they were having a lot more fun. and -- because it is generally more fun to go out than to be on your 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 with myths. so i don't know what myths have emerged. but the reality is that it's a really simple idea. our job is to build software that previously enterprises didn't think was possible to create. emily: how is aaron levie sitting in front of me today different from than 19-year-old ceo? aaron: i think as the 19-year-old ceo, i would be grabbing my hair more. i had a lot more -- a lot more issues with add, so. emily: i know you are on the road a lot. this is now a global company. how do you structure your time? aaron: i probably spend about 50% of the time on the road, because it turns out that enterprises are everywhere. until you go out to a farm who is going to use drones to manage their agriculture business, you

don't actually know how these technologies are going to intersect with the sort of "real world". and so you have to go out on the road and actually understand that customers directly. emily: right. aaron: the view is, it's sort of silicon valley versus the rest of the world. when it's actually silicon valley being integrated into the rest of the world. ♪

emily: you drink a lot of coffee, apparently. aaron: i do. emily: you take a nap. aaron: i do take naps. emily: every day. aaron: i try to. emily: what is this, spain? i mean -- aaron: this is -- you forgot the three months of vacation i take every year. emily: no, but really, you do. you do take a nap. aaron: i do take a nap. emily: and you work more in the evening. tell me about that. aaron: yes. it's really, um, just 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 another about five hours or so. and then it's me time. that is where i get to go design, sort of, what are we going to do next? what are we behind on? what do we need to start to think about? that is generally when everybody gets inundated by e-mails from me. emily: and you have a diary,

right? like a personal, aaron levie-only diary. aaron: the range of different industries and what you have to learn about from their technology is just very vast. and so you have to keep track of that somewhere. emily: and this is something that 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 today? aaron: we have about 1,100 employees. we have 240,000 businesses that actively use the product. about 39,000 companies are sort of paying for our enterprise edition of the service. 27 million users. emily: you recently rolled out box for industries. for health care, retail, media and entertainment. how is that going and what is next? aaron: what we started to see happening is in every industry that 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, which today

covers health care, media, retail, but we will be announcing a number of other industries over the next couple of months that will take box into more regulated industries that we think are very ripe for change. it will serve every major industry. emily: you are seeing so much change and disruption in the world of enterprise technology right now. larry ellison stepping down. as the ceo of oracle. hp splitting up. ibm struggling. when it comes to incumbents versus start-ups, how does it play out? aaron: so every couple of decades, you have this sort of changing of the guard as it were. start-ups 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 thiel, for example, said to me hp is not a technology company anymore. it is a bet against innovation. aaron: i think that is a -- certainly 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 that they have to change that. we have this view that sort of everything is sort of zero sum. ibm does not have to lose for apple to win. or for salesforce to win. emily: what about a company like

microsoft? a company that you grew up with. aaron: i think there are specific product areas that could potentially lose or be harmed by some of this transition, but then 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 the price as it was 10 years ago. on the supply side of our business. so the cheaper that storage gets, the more data that we can store for a customer, and the more we can deliver unique experiences around their content. emily: you recently took on $150 million in funding from tpg and coatue. the company is now valued at $2.4 billion. why did you take that money? aaron: as you may have seen, we have filed to go public in march of this year. and then basically about a week after we filed to go public, there was a bit of a market correction in the tech stock space. so you saw a bit of volatility -- quite a bit of volatility and a lot of sass in kind of high-growth technology companies. so we decided it wasn't 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 coutue in this case. they were willing to and

interested in supporting the company as a private company. we took that money on to allow us to continue to invest in growth, continue to invest in the business model and building up box without necessarily going public. emily: how much have you wondered did we make a mistake did we file too soon? aaron: what is obvious is that we should not have filed when we did. we dealt with a lot of distraction because of that filing. i think whether that was a log of unfortunate news reports and the cycle that has happened 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, you know, execution and building the business. but, you know, life is certainly too short to have any specific regrets. so we have learned. we have been and remain in just full execution mode. emily: i'm curious about what that moment was like for you. because you open your books to the world.

everybody can see your finances. somebody like om malik calls box a "house of horrors." aaron: yeah, that's an extreme phrase. we are competing against really the biggest companies on the planet in the technology industry. and so to do that, you have to make a pretty significant investment. in our case, that is an investment in research and development, in infrastructure in our sales team, in our ability to actually go to market and reach these customers. emily: the criticism was that you are spending more on sales and marketing and acquiring customers than you are making. how are you changing that or how has that changed? aaron: the thing that scale gives you is that because we are a recurring revenue business model -- which i think is another thing that was 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 customers happy and successful. and compound that dollar over time. we just happened to unveil our s-1 at a point where, again, the new investments had outpaced the revenue scale. and so now, i think, we are more in a stage where the revenue is -- we're focused on growing that of course, and that is

compounding. but we don't have as 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. versus going public. aaron: we want to sell our software to a lot of companies. but the company itself, we spend about 0% of our time thinking about over the past few years. emily: alright. china, obviously this is a critical market that a lot of u.s. technology business have trouble getting into. what is your strategy on china now? aaron: sort of absent learning chinese -- or mandarin -- my challenge has been how do we go explore working in the market in a big way. and i think what you will see is probably us partner over time with key players in the space. but i would not expect us doing anything really big in china in the near future. emily: there is a company you

may have heard of called dropbox. aaron: yes, i have. emily: your name -- the name box is in the name dropbox -- you do overlap to a certain extent in terms of business, customers. how much of an inconvenience has dropbox been for you? over the last however many years? aaron: you know, inconvenience is a unique word. i think they are an innovative company. drew is obviously an incredible leader. we obviously are a fierce competitor from a business standpoint. in 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? aaron: i think that, when you go after the enterprise, it is really, 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, very different types of problems. at box, we don't have any distractions. we are 100% focused on the enterprise. aaron: i am sort of between peter thiel and mark andreessen in my tweet volume. ♪

emily: silicon valley is sometimes criticized for being too audacious, too arrogant, and thinking that 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 constantly sort of 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 when it's not correct, it ends up looking ludicrous and we look obnoxious for it. right? the outside world is unbelievably fascinated with and

excited about working with silicon valley in this wave of disruption. something that we do not get a perspective for as often as i think we could or should -- emily: you mean because we are living in our own bubble? aaron: we live in our own bubble. the view is it is sort of silicon valley versus the rest of the world. when it is actually silicon valley being integrated into the rest of the world. and for the first time where we are not sort of in this isolated universe of 'it's its own industry.' there's no "tech" industry. there's sort of tech "enabled" everything. 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 is a tremendous number of companies that have emerged that are trying to help you develop new experiences to get to your customers. right? 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's going to be less defined, is the idea. you might have silicon valley. but, you're going -- 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. semi-funny. yes. emily: thanks for the good material. in response to concerns that you would reign in your tweets after you filed to go public, you tweeted a photo of a missouri law firm. and gave a shout-out to your new twitter followers. aaron: actually, i'm not sure how the missouri law firm felt about that. emily: hopefully you won't get sued over it. aaron: they didn't sue us, so. they probably shouldn't. i'm sure we sent them some traffic for new customers. [laughter] emily: but tweeting as much as you do, why do you do it? aaron: well, maybe one myth that i actually can dispel is that i generally tweet only once or twice a day. emily: so you are way behind mark andreessen. you are not at 100 tweets a day. aaron: i am sort of between

peter thiel and mark andreessen in my tweet volume. no, it's my one outlet that a pr team does not control for me to be able to just share my thoughts on the technology industry. emily: i guess i wonder, like, why aren't you more scared? aaron: that might be partly generational. i mean, i grew up on chat rooms. i'm sure i will say something stupid someday 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. emily: how much of it is strategy? aaron: it is probably less actually, strategic than you might think. because my brain is sort of all over the place. so 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's a very hard thing to learn -- aaron: yeah, some would say it's impossible. emily: what have you learned from that? or how has it affected your career? aaron: so the magic industry is very weird. have you ever 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 don't know if i learned much beyond what, maybe, not to do that would be very weird. but it was a fun experience when i was 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 yes in the sense of that is the path we are on. emily: would you ever start something new? or is this it? aaron: i think that if this continues to go as it is, i hope to be doing this for quite some time. emily: do you want to be the larry ellison? of cloud storage? aaron: it does not seem like he has had a horrible life. because of what we do is, sort of, transcends industry, transcends sort of different platforms and devices, and ways you're going to be able to work with information, there is really no limit to what is going to be possible in our kind of market, broadly. we have a very wide palette to work with over the next many many years. emily: aaron levie, ceo of box. thank you so 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 has taken 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. john, thank you so much for joining us. john: thank you for having me. emily: even