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 though you're running blackberry in canada the bay area is where you call home. john: yes. emily: you technically live here. john: i live here. my family lives here. so i live all around. yes, it is our headquarters in waterloo, canada. emily: how much time do you spend here versus waterloo? john: i try to spend about a week a month in waterloo. we still have 5,000, 6,000 people over there in canada, between waterloo and mississauga and ottawa. we are building a site here in silicon valley. so that is -- i spend about a week or so a month here. the rest of the time, i go around the world, seeing customers, meeting with analysts, investors, partners, distributors, and so forth. so that is why i do that. emily: part of the reason you

are opening an office here is an talent, right? john: part of the reason of opening an office here is so that we can get much closer to all that is happening. at silicon valley, there are a lot of great ideas. 90% does not go anywhere. but the 10% that goes anywhere becomes the google of the world. you really have to pay attention to what is happening in our industry, so you are not so insular or focused on our own thing. we have a lot of great technology, but you can't just say, this is it, this is the universe. so i intend to really broaden it and hire a lot more people here. emily: you were born and raised in hong kong. john: mm-hmm. emily: tell me about your upbringing, your parents. john: ok, well, actually, i came from a relatively poor beginning, because my parents, although my father is quite educated, they were refugees from china. postwar, when the communists were taking over before the curtain got drawn. they escaped from shanghai to hong kong. emily: you lived in a one-bedroom apartment? john: yes, we lived in a

one-bedroom apartment for a long time. we did not even have a dining table, so to speak. a refugee, we put two suitcases on top of each other and put a piece of cloth or whatever it is over it. that was our dining table. emily: what kind of kid were you? what did you want to be when you grew up? john: i never thought about anything about what i wanted to be. i mean, i just thought that -- everybody at the time, by the way, because of the war and because of what happened historically to china and so forth -- everybody wants their kids to be scientists. that is the hong kong way, right? everybody becomes an engineer or mathematicians or whatever. doctors. just professionals, so you can have a good life. so i started off doing a lot of math. i liked math. i ended up studying engineering and have done reasonably well. emily: you went on to boarding school in massachusetts. john: yes. emily: how did that happen? one bedroom apartment, boarding school in massachusetts. john: by the time i was thinking

of my education, the higher education, my family is already in kind of a middle income family. my father was able to study english at night and accumulated some wealth. he invested in the silk business. he said, have you thought about what you are going to study? i said, probably engineering. he said, hong kong really isn't great in engineering. have you ever thought about going overseas? that's when it piqued my interest. i wanted to go to the ivy league. if you go to one of those, it enhances your chances of getting into the ivy league quite a bit. a lot of bit. not just quite a bit. so i went to prep school. emily: that must've been quite a transition.

hong kong to massachusetts prep school. john: i went from no snow to a lot of snow. it was quite a transition. it was great. it was the best thing that ever happened to me. emily: when did you learn how to code? john: i actually learned it from high school. this is one of those things that a lot of american kids do not understand. the resources this country offers are dramatic as compared to every other country around the world. i do not know if it is still true or not. but when i was in hong kong, we would never -- we might have heard of a computer, we had never seen one. we had never touched one. emily: you never saw a computer until you got to massachusetts? john: not until i came here. that was the first time i learned how to code. my last year of high school, my first year in the united states. emily: you ended up going to the ivy league. brown university. john: i went to brown. emily: electrical engineering? john: yes, electrical engineering. actually, i started my career as a manufacturing engineer. i started pretty much on the

ground floor. i went to caltech for my master's degree. and then i started working with this mainframe company called burroughs. my first job was to fix things. emily: you started your career learning how to fix things. i am sensing a theme. you worked your way up. 30 years, you became ceo of sybase. how did you do it? i mean, along the way, what did it take? john: i actually like fixing things. i think it's both a challenge and an opportunity to learn stuff. because i am kind of the old-school, loyal, stick-with-it type of person. today's young people are a little bit more entitlement-oriented. when we were growing up, we never thought about it that way. we thought that you have to create opportunity yourself. i tried to go and learn different areas. my first job is in fixing manufacturing hardware. then i went into writing software. helping run factories. i have done a lot of different things throughout my career. emily: you took sybase from a $362 million company, on the verge of failure, to $5.8

billion. how did you do it? john: first of all, you have to have a very good team of people. i spent a lot of time recruiting them and building a culture. you focus on things you do well. you focus on value you could add to the market. you stick with those for the long haul. you build it a step at a time. and at sybase, we were literally at the verge. but we came back. emily: you bet on mobile before mobile was big. john: i bet on mobile in the year 2000. it was funny, i got people calling me, investors calling me, and telling me that the money that you have, company money, belongs to them. it didn't belong to me. and then for me to invest, and waste it in areas like mobile, i may as well dividend it back to them. but thank god we did it. at that time, we were stuck at a value of $2 billion. mobile took us to almost $6 billion. emily: what was the hardest thing you had to do at sybase? john: the initial rounds of letting people go, refocusing the company, and being able to convince the remaining employees and of the people that you try to recruit that there is a future.

emily: and you eventually sold to s.a.p. john: eventually. long time. what, 13 years later? emily: people are telling you that blackberry is already dead. john: yes. emily: why did you take this job? john: i think i flunked retirement. ♪ ♪ emily: you came out of sybase looking like a hero.

emily: you came out of sybase looking like a hero. and great ceo's and executives there is often a myth about them that is sort of boiled down to legend. what is the myth of john chen? and what is the reality? john: i actually think i'm a pretty simple, straightforward kind of guy. i like working with people. i like focusing on objectives and results. most people ask me, why are you doing this? the company is already dead. to me, it is just, i am just going to take one step at a time and do better every day. eventually, we will break through. i am actually a lot more relaxed than most people think. emily: people are telling you that blackberry is already dead. john: yes.

emily: why did you take this job? john: that is a great question. i think i flunked retirement. [laughter] john: that is probably the real -- there is a bunch of reasons. i could give you this reason about it being iconic in the industry, and it's a great company that has a lot of technology, therefore i think there is a lot of potential. all of that is true. but that does not automatically answer the question about why i am doing it. i started as being the chairman of the company. i was going to find the management team and formulate a strategy. i thought i was a little too old to run around the world and play cowboys. but, you know, once i got into it, i find that it is hard to just guide without doing. and we really do not have a lot of time to just find a team, and

then a person, and think about the strategy. and all that. we just kind of have to get it done. right, wrong, indifferent, i decided to become the ceo. emily: so you are not crazy? john: i am not crazy. i think there is a lot of good potential here. it is not a done deal. but i think we have made a lot of progress in the last six months. emily: is this part of your personality? you like to feel needed, to fix things? john: yeah. [laughter] john: it is probably the negative part of my personality. i am a little paranoid about not being needed and wanted. i guess, i think it is important to -- what i do every day, i know that it means something to people. emily: history has been cruel to phone makers. nokia, motorola, palm. what makes you think you can change history? john: well, by not following the same play. we try to broaden ourselves way beyond just the device, just a phone. i don't sit there and think, i could make another really great phone and somehow everything will be well. emily: but you did vow to keep making phones. john: yes, of course.

this is part our strategy, end-to-end mobile computing for the enterprise. i mean, you can say, i am so committed that even if i lost my shirt, i will do this. it does not make sense. but i think i could make money on the phone. i hope that, by now, the industry realizes what i'm talking about. we have some great phones coming out, very cool. but it is kind of our first point of entry, or one point of our big strategy of everything secure. that is our big strategy. and so the phone is part of it. i mean, our phone is the most secure phone, because of the way we make it, and the software we have. both hardware and software. and so i would like to continue

to do that, but if i can be successful in it, i'm ok to work with somebody else to do it. emily: blackberry's global smartphone market share peaked in 2009 at 21%. it is less than 1% now. idc predicts blackberry market share is going to fall another 50% this year, down to 0.3% by 2018. are you going to change the direction of that? john: i hope so. could i change it immediately? no. in many, many markets around the world, blackberry's are still the preferred phones. i will admit that, in north america, with the banks, some of the hospitals, and the governments, outside of that, we don't do well. i do see people in the professional world still using our devices. it is my job to recapture that interest and that loyalty. i think we have a shot at it. emily: in a future where chips are embedded everywhere, in our clothes, in the walls, do smartphones matter? do these numbers matter? john: smartphones will not matter in the long term. i think smartphones will -- i think devices will matter, how things talk to each other. the whole internet of things is really real. it will be real. the question is how and who will make money out of it. it is not clear whether it is the traditional handset people.

emily: you sold sybase to s.a.p. are you going to sell blackberry, too? john: there is a standard answer for public company officers. emily: give me the nonstandard answer. john: the nonstandard? i would prefer to build a lot of value before i contemplate that. emily: but as the ceo, you owe it to shareholders to consider offers. john: absolutely. it is only fair. it's not only the shareholders, it's also the employees. one thing i am proud of about sybase, is that the people who slaved away with me for so long, although selling to s.a.p. was not my desired outcome, i was hoping to build a big company. but it was the right thing. they gave us an offer that was very hard to refuse. emily: if you got a good enough offer? you would sell? john: if i got a good enough

offer, i would. emily: what kind of offers have come across your desk? john: no, i don't have any offers. emily: no? john: people like to talk. talk is not an offer. emily: would you sell to a chinese company? john: the answer is i would probably be unable to do that. one of our biggest install bases is the government. in countries where government shares intelligence. i think there will be a lot of regulatory issues and concerns. and i appreciate that. emily: what do you think of the current state of u.s.-china relations, given the new regime in china? john: i try to become a very constructive bridge between the two, if i can. i think the current status -- like every -- u.s.-china relations are always full of challenges and opportunities. emily: when it comes to security and cyber security and the privacy of american citizens who is more of a threat, china or the united states? to our own security. john: i think everybody is spying on everybody. i would think it is equally a big threat inside our country as outside our country. emily: what the nsa has been doing, as far as we know, their

recent revelations, fair or unfair? john: if the intentions are truly for national security, i think it is fair. because we don't want another setback. now, this is only a personal view. this is not a blackberry view. emily: if the nsa wanted a backdoor to blackberry, would you open it? john: we don't have backdoors and we would not do that. from time to time, the government wanted information from us, ok? first of all, we don't keep it around. that is number one. you need to know that. if we do it, it has to be under a court order. emily: have you ever had a moment where you thought, what did i get myself into? john: twice. not just one time. yes, i have. ♪

♪ emily: since you are the tech industry's turnaround guy, i would like to ask you about how you think some other turnarounds are going. yahoo!?

john: from what i can read, they seem to be doing reasonably well. yahoo!, they would look at it from the growth, revenue, and all that. if a company guided that way that is one thing. but the question really needs to focus on, if the company's fundamentals become stronger in the long term. i think i would focus on that. from that perspective, it feels like they are doing the right thing. emily: so you think marissa mayer is doing a good job? john: i think it is a reasonable job. i don't know her very well. met a couple of times. yes. emily: you are also a father. you have four kids. what kind of a parent are you? john: i am very close to my children. i always enjoy time with them. i do not spend a lot of time with them, unfortunately because of the nature of the job, running around the world. thankfully, they all grew up pretty good. i feel good about it. emily: how do they feel about you living half here, half in canada? john: i think my wife loves it. we have been married 34 years. you know, i think she is, the time she does not want to see me every day. it is good. if i go home early, she always

says, what's wrong? you are not feeling well? i say, no, i just want to come home early. i am serious. i am not making any of this up. anyway, they support me. if i'm happy, they're just fine. emily: what's an app you can't live without? john: e-mail. emily: facebook or twitter? john: neither. emily: why not? john: i tried it. i got so hooked on it. i'm spending an entire living moment of my life on it. i can't do it. i need to stop. [laughter] emily: smart watch or no? john: no. i'm a traditionalist. emily: but you want your chips and everything. john: yeah, i am still a traditionalist. by the way, i want a chip in everything. i did not say i want to be tracked like that. i did not say that. i think there is a certain amount -- there is a certain place for that, and then i want

to have my own private moment in my own private life. emily: if you were not doing what you do now, what would you do? what would you want to do? john: it would never happen again, because i am too old for it. i would love to go to law school. actually, i wanted to be a lawyer at a certain point in time, but my father thought it was not a good profession. emily: when is the last time you were nervous? john: i am very fortunate. i think if anything would happen to my family, i would be nervous. outside of that, there is nothing to be nervous about. emily: what is your guilty pleasure? john: cigars. everybody -- everybody -- i love having a cigar. one time, i played golf with my doctor. i finish a round and pull out a cigar. he looks at me and says, being your physician, i must advise you against it. i say, but i only smoke after i play golf, or getting a drink with some friends. he says, does it help your golf

game? i say, not really, no. he said, ok, fine. emily: now that you have been doing this blackberry thing for almost a year, what would you give your own chances for success? john: if you are talking about being able to create value, i think i can do that. emily: 100%? john: i would say better than 80/20. how is that? i am comfortable where the company is today with how we manage our technology, business, the margin, the distribution channel, all the new products coming out. the strategy that gets into communicating a secure manner of all stuff. i think there is enough runway here for us. and we scale our expenses to a level that allows us to stay back, invest, and make money. i am comfortable with generating more value. whether it will be good enough to be iconic again, that is something i need to chew on.

i don't know the answer to that question. emily: being completely honest have you ever had a moment, a single moment, where you thought, what did i get myself into? john: twice. [laughter] john: more than one time. yes, i had. after the first 30 days, i said to myself, this is -- i am running against time on so many things. but then i did not dwell on it for too long. i started putting a plan together and recruited a team and said, just do one thing at a time. do not try to fix everything at the same time. that was once. and i could feel when i am kind of, my mind starts, not very focused. i could feel it. right now, i am quite at ease with the plans we are working on. emily: how do you want to be remembered? john: somebody who could generate results.

i would like to be remembered in the future that i did something that made a difference. a lot of people benefited from my effort. if i can feel that, i'm good. i'm good. i don't need to be called anything. emily: john chen, thank you for so much joining us today on "studio 1.0." john: thank you. emily: great to have you. ♪