LOS ALTOS, Calif. ? It?s about 20 minutes into my lunch interview with Aaron Levie, co-founder of Box, at the headquarters of the online data storage company, and he still doesn?t have any food.
?Are you eating?? I ask, awkwardly swirling Thai noodles onto my fork.
Like someone swerving out of the way of oncoming traffic, he abruptly shifts from a lengthy ramble on the short history of cloud computing and responds: ?For your own sake, I?m not going to eat. I speak too quickly, and my food would be splattered all over the table.?
Mr. Levie, 27, the chief executive of Box, always operates on fast forward. He talks quickly. Walks quickly. Thinks quickly.
Even his clothing displays a need for speed. Mr. Levie doesn?t own a single pair of dress shoes. Instead, he opts for Asics or Puma sneakers with bright orange or pink laces, which he wears daily with a dark suit. ?Sneakers help me walk faster,? he says. ?Plus, it reminds me that we?re fighting for the end user ? the consumer ? because they wear sneakers, too!?
His career and his start-up have also grown at warp speed.
Just seven years ago, while attending the University of Southern California?s Marshall School of Business, Mr. Levie founded Box from his dorm room with Dylan Smith. Mr. Levie programmed the site, and Mr. Smith, who is now the company?s chief financial officer, played online poker to finance the business. (Until recently, the company was known as Box.net.)
The founders learned to identify the 3 percent of people who were ?terrible poker players? and beat them, Mr. Levie said. ?If you played against eight screens at a time, it basically just becomes statistical.?
After a brief stint in Seattle, Box moved to Oakland and operated out of a garage belonging to Mr. Levie?s uncle. For seven months, a small group of programmers lived and worked there among pizza crusts and Coca-Cola cans.
Now, Box is one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley. It has more than 500 employees and supplies cloud storage services to more than 11 million people and 125,000 businesses. It has raised $200 million from notable investors, including the Texas billionaire Mark Cuban, SAP Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And revenue has more than doubled every year since Box was founded in 2005, although the company does not disclose the amount.
Sean Andersen, director of interactive services at Six Flags Entertainment, said he chose Box because of its ability to adapt for businesses. ?I first met Aaron at a trade show, and at the time, he was literally having two conversations at once,? Mr. Andersen said. ?They have this iteration cycle where they are changing and improving their product at a much faster scale than others.?
Mr. Levie talks about his business the way an ardent ?Star Trek? fan explains his favorite episode. As he sees it, enterprise computing, or software for companies, is at a pivotal moment as businesses move from clunky, in-house systems to Web-based ones operating in the cloud.
?If you think about the market that we?re in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that?s happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,? he says. ?This is probably going to happen at a larger scale than any other technology transition we?ve seen in the enterprise. Larger than client servers. Larger than mainframes.?
The business potential, he adds, seems limitless: ?We think we are just 1 percent into that transition.?
To Mr. Levie, mobile is the biggest driver of change. Before, legacy systems used to be connected to Windows computers, and people printed out most of their documents. Now, printers are giving way to iPhones and iPads, all of which are connected to the cloud.
?All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers,? he says. ?They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices. Mobile is the catalyst that can actually re-evaluate and re-engineer your entire I.T. strategy.?
This is where he expects most of his company?s growth to come. As chief information officers of Fortune 500 companies continue to switch from mainframes and allow employees to work remotely from mobile devices, including tablets and laptops, the cloud and services like Box will become all the more important.
While Mr. Levie runs a multimillion-dollar business and oversees hundreds of employees, he is still a 20-something tech geek. In Silicon Valley, where he is often described as ?the son of the mad professor from ?Back to the Future,??? he arrives at the office around noon and works until 3 a.m. After work, he goes home and plays video games to ?wind down.?
The company?s headquarters are infused with his youthful energy. A bright yellow slide spirals from the second floor to the lobby. Swings hang from the ceiling of meeting areas. Hundreds of stuffed unicorns litter the office, sitting on chairs, above computer monitors and abandoned in the hallway.
All of this, Mr. Levie says, helps employees remember that they are fighting for the consumer. He believes this philosophy separates Box from its competitors.
?This is the thing that we think will always keep us competitive with enterprise incumbents,? he says, noting that traditional enterprise software is often clunky and confusing. He says Box tries to ?fight the man? by making software from a consumer standpoint so it can easily be downloaded to any device and remain secure.
I reminded him that technically, he is ?the man.? As if momentarily placing a finger on a spinning record, he pauses for a millisecond, looks up and says, ?Oh, yeah,? before turning down a new street in his mind to explain the importance of security in cloud software.
But ?the man? is different in this case. Even with the colorful sneakers and boyish looks, the young chief executive stands out for his philosophy, which he demonstrates on his personal Twitter account with jokes about cloud computing and other technologies.
In a recent post on Twitter, he wrote: ?Blogs made it hard for me to read full articles. Now tweets make blogs hard to read. Soon, I?ll only be able to consume shapes.?
Or, taking a jab at smart guys like him: ?Start-ups are for people that wanted to run marathons, cage fight and hunt alligators, but were born with asthma.?
E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com
Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/disruptions-at-box-net-a-fast-moving-chief-immersed-in-the-cloud/
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