Aaron Levie started Box, an enterprise content management platform, in 2005. The company has since scaled the company from employing a few people to almost 2000 employees in addition to its now 41 million users and 85,000 businesses. He recently sat down with Jack at the Box headquarters in Redwood City, CA, to talk about Box's culture, how he built it through A/B testing, and the huge opportunity that he thinks big companies are missing out on.
Jack Altman: Alright. Well, welcome to another episode of Resources for Humans. I'm your host, Jack, the founder of Lattice. And today, I'm here with Aaron Levie, the CEO and founder of Box, at his office.
Aaron Levie: So thank you for thank you very much. Chair comfy enough for you? Jack Altman: Yeah. It's great.
Good.
So I don't know how ergonomic the whole thing is. Well, I don't know.
It's very mid century modern. Yep. So when you got started a long time ago. It's been it's been a while.
We've been in this, for a really long time.
Forty, fifty years.
Aaron Levie: Certainly in start up years. Yes.
Jack Altman: Yeah. It feels like it. Yeah. So when you got started, you were in college. Yeah. What what motivated you then to get started? What was driving you then?
Aaron Levie: Probably a mix of boredom and, inability to easily share files. So that was this combination of had free time and, found this really, at the time, annoying problem, but, but, we didn't realize how how sort of big it was. But this, I had an internship at the time working in a, corporate environment that had a lot of legacy IT solutions. And then in school, using a lot of, just really, really inefficient, processes and and technologies for for sharing data, USB thumb drives, FTP sites, emailing yourself files.
So ran into this problem of, like, why is it so hard to share data? Like, you just wanna be able to work from anywhere, pull, pull files up from any device you're working on, and it was way too hard. So, got this idea of of what if you could just make it really simple to be able to access, share, and work with your your data and files from anywhere. And it turned out that, nobody else was really working on this problem in two thousand four at the time when we when we came up with it.
Jack Altman: So okay. So at the at the beginning, you're motivated by the problem. Yeah. I just walked in here.There's there's two thousand people here. This is an establishment. Are you are you motivated by the the customer problem now? Is it the employees?
Like, how is it how are your motivations different today than when you started?
Aaron Levie: Well, actually, I think that, I personally have been in sort of this, sort of never ending search to, always get back to the the core, and to the the sort of smallest, possible unit of of what we do, which is make a customer insanely successful with our product, and help solve a really, really hard problem for them. And that was the that was what we did when we were, you know, four people living out of garage in in Berkeley when we dropped out of college. And we just twenty four hours a day, we were working with customers. We were innovating.
We were building new features. We were doing customer support. You're just sort of in that mode. And and and and sort of what what I think about now with two thousand people is how do you replicate that at scale?
And, it always comes down to building an incredible product that people love and building an organization that can deliver that incredible product and service, to your customers. So I spend most of my time trying to figure out what are the highest leverage ways that I can help influence our ability to do that now at at two thousand employees. But it's it's it's always about delivering amazing product, for for customers.
Jack Altman: So one of the areas that, you know, we work on at Lattice is is goal setting.
Aaron Levie: Yeah.
Jack Altman: And what you're talking about is this sort of aspirational customer centric ideal. Yeah. How do you balance that with the need for metrics and hitting numbers and having teams aligned?
Aaron Levie: Yeah. Like keeping the business, like, actually afloat. Yeah. Yeah. It would be fun if you didn't have to have metrics.
Yeah. And and you could just, like, continue to get funded forever. You know, I think, you what you do is you have to fuse those things together, so they become one and the same, and they're not sort of separate principles or or goals.
So we have a we have a core value which is blow our customers' minds. That's sort of the the first core value of our of our seven values as an organization.
And a very meaningful percentage of our corporate metrics ultimately, relate to are we actually delivering an incredible experience for our customers. Things like our net retention rate. So how, often are we keeping customers happy? Not not just that they'll they'll keep their account with us, but that they're growing their usage in what we're doing. How active, are our users? What is the the kind of, ways that we're delivering customer support? How do they value that?
So a lot of our metrics, as an organization relate to, are we delivering, on that true north ideal of of blowing our customers' minds?
And then there's a bunch of of other financial operational metrics that just ensure that we're building a healthy company in the process. Are we cash flow positive? You know, how is the revenue growth rate? But, but you wanna make sure that the values of the organization and the North Star, you know, vision is very aligned to your even KPIs that you are gonna be thinking about on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis.
And we have to make sure those things ladder up together, and, and don't become inconsistent or incongruent in any way.
Jack Altman: So when you think about these goals, you know, there's a lot of different philosophies. The goal should always be a little bit too hard and you should miss them a little bit, or some people think that you want them actually to be a little bit under, so you have a culture of kind of winning.
Aaron Levie: Yeah.
Jack Altman: How do you think about that?
Aaron Levie: Oh, certainly, I don't think you should set fake goals just so you can have a culture of winning.
That that could certainly lead to disaster, but, you you know, it it all depends on the type of goal that we're talking about. There are some, sort of, you know, such foundational goals like cash flow and kind of core financial performance that you really wanna make sure, you you're hitting exactly the the number that you think you're gonna do. In that in that case, you probably want somewhere between, you know, a couple percent deviation on on what the goal is. So, you know, ninety eight percent to a hundred and two percent is is probably what you want in a core financial metric.
For things that are much more about the long term vision and execution of the company, sort of one, two, three years out, you know, bigger bets in the business. You, we at least, think that you should likely be, often missing those goals and targets, because, not always, because eventually, you wanna get the flywheel going where you're you're exceeding the targets. But often early on, you're gonna be missing those targets because you want the goals to be aspirational enough that really, causes you to think about the underlying, mechanisms of what you're delivering to see if you could achieve a much bigger outcome.
So when you think about the total number of sign ups in your product or how happy your user base is, you know, these are things where you wanna be setting pretty, significant aspirational long term targets, which means that that for the, early period of of building out that area, you're often gonna be, unfortunately, in in the red because you're you're still building the the the systems and the processes, the technology, the product, the service, to be able to actually go and hit those goals. So we we sort of afford for, you know, somewhere between at any given time, probably twenty, thirty, forty percent of our goals are gonna be yellow or red, which means that we're not delivering on the target that we wanted.
And, but what that causes us to do is is be able to very quickly postmortem and do kinda continuous improvement on what what could we be doing better about this area? What is the reason that we're red? Is it, you know, is it is it people? Is it team? Is it technology? How do we go and solve that problem? But but usually, you'll see our dashboards have that amount of of yellow or red on it, and we think that's very healthy.
Jack Altman: And how do you culturally maintain that health, you know, that health around a lot of red goals without people feeling attacked or like their goal was too hard or like they should be pointing fingers? How do you keep a healthy culture in the face of we're missing the targets that we set out?
Aaron Levie: Yeah. I think, you know, first of all, you need to have a healthy sense of vulnerability in the organization where people can feel comfortable saying, I didn't hit my target. Here's why. Here's what happened.
It's easier to be able to create that environment when you do have the facts and you can be as objective as possible. So, so you can say, we didn't hit this target because, we weren't able to launch this feature on this date, which meant that we were three weeks behind where we thought we'd be, which meant that we weren't able to ultimately build the, the kind of growth metrics that, that we expected. So, being able to build an environment where people feel safe, kind of talking about, either failures or areas where they didn't end up accomplishing their goal. Making it so, you, they're not, you know, punished in any way, where you you don't sort of take people off the project when, you know, they hit their first red or yellow or the first couple, because the moment that the organization thinks that, the moment that you miss one of your goals, you're not gonna be able to, you know, go on to the next initiative, is the moment no one's gonna take risks.
And then everyone's gonna be kinda quote unquote sandbagging on their goals and and actually only signing up for things that they know they can achieve. So you have to build an environment where, you know, risk taking is it's hard to, you know, do risk, you know, like failure is celebrated. That that is always a little bit, difficult because you wanna learn from failure. You wanna make it as transparent as possible.
I don't know how much you celebrate it. But what you can't do is sort of punish for it, unless, of course, it's something egregious or or, you know, violation of of, you know, the the organization's principles.
But one of our principles is is take risk, fail fast, get you done. And as a part of that, we expect that there's gonna be failure. And if you're on a project that doesn't achieve its results, we're gonna diagnose it. Was it something that that, you know, we think it was just reasonable why it didn't achieve its goals?
Maybe the goals were too too high. Maybe something didn't ship in time. We're gonna learn from that. We're gonna, you know, try and improve.
And then but you're not gonna be, like, taking off the project or you won't be the manager of that that, you know, team anymore.
Jack Altman: Yeah. On the risk taking, I think, yeah.
Aaron Levie: That that a lot of organizations, you know, particularly if you look at sort of the, I don't know, new way of working versus maybe a more traditional way of operating and and scaling an organization. And a lot of other organizations, over time, if you think about the past, you know, twenty, thirty, fifty, hundred years of kind of the industrial sort of management science that scaled up, there was a lot of risk if you if you failed in your department or your organization, and you get fired, you'd have to, you know, take a a lower assignment.
And that would just cause you to ultimately have less ambitious goals. It would cause you to be less transparent and less, open about about, you know, issues you're running into. You'd obviously be be less vulnerable in that kind of environment, because your your job is to sort of hide any of the risks or any of the failure, and and not have other people know about it and not sign up for goals that could cause you to have that failure. So you have to build an environment where it's comfortable to talk about these things.
Every quarter, we do a, quarterly all hands where we go through all the red, green, and yellows in the business. And all the reds and yellows generally have lessons, that are associated with them. Why did we we miss in this area, and what are we gonna do to retool? And so, again, it's not like a celebration.
You don't have, like, balloons falling from the sky when we had red.
But, but you do sort of have open and honest conversations about what we're gonna tweak and how we're gonna change and how hopefully, how we can get it back on track.
Jack Altman: So early companies often are able to do these you know, they take these risks because they have nothing to lose, and the types of people they have are risk takers.
Aaron Levie: Yeah.
Jack Altman: You guys have grown from, you know, four of you, I guess, when it started to two thousand of you. And naturally, companies become sort of more risk averse. Yep. So how do you balance, like, from a hiring perspective, finding the types of people who are still going to be people you're betting on, not just people who are tried and true? Like, are you able to where do you make those trade offs?
Aaron Levie: It's tough. And and you do, despite, you know, sort of, me having been here when we were three or four people, and and then helping kind of, you know, see it scale up, and, like, my own sort of risk tolerance being quite high, you know, that's why we sort of started the company in the first place. You do sort of see over time that even even I have a low tolerance for risk in in certain key areas. I mean, there's obviously the there's the easy stuff to have no no risk tolerance around, like, financial, you know, accounting, security. Those areas are are are, you know, quite straightforward.
But even even in product areas where where, you know, I believe that we have very particular product experiences that that I don't, you know, think we wanna modify.
I have I bring a certain conservatism in the organization. And so you kind of wanna have people that can push back against that. You wanna be able to have really, really healthy debate on, you know, could we be, innovating more in this one particular area? Could we be taking risks in in this other area? I think things like, the power of a b testing, that that, you know, mostly was born out of out of modern software development practices of constant iteration on products. That can be brought to any part of an organization, so you can feel comfortable about saying, you know what? This is a risky area.
We wanna do it we wanna test it in an isolated way. So we're gonna have a a you know, we're gonna go test it with one particular audience. It doesn't have to be a product feature. It could be a new way of delivering customer service. It could be a new way of doing pricing and packaging. It could be a new way of doing HR.
And then we'll scale it out if it works. And so having that sort of test oriented, scientific method oriented way of of of testing out new ideas gives you the ability to actually have a higher tolerance for risk because you know that that you can try new things, and it's not going to necessarily scale to the rest of the organization or the rest of of what you're doing if it's if it's not successful. So taking that mindset. Now the next question is, how do you bring in people into the organization, that that continue to push move things, forward?
And can you bet on people, not just new ideas? And of course, that again is another area where you have to be very you have to use a high degree of judgment on the type of area. What is the risk of that of that part of the business sort of not succeeding, you know, or or or, you know, achieving its exact kind of precise goals. And so you have to make the the judgment call of of what kind of talent are you willing to bet on and and, you know, hopefully, set really, really high aspirational targets for it.
They can kind of grow into that challenge, versus what areas, are you are you maybe not able to afford that kind of bet because of the time scale that you need to solve the problem, because of the risk, that that might be in that particular area. And and those are also so judgment oriented in in each, you know, particular area.
Jack Altman: So the concept of AB testing, like, your whole company is super interesting. Yeah. Has it been easier to do that, you know, when the company was fifty people versus five hundred, or is it does it go in waves? Or how does that manifest over, like, the last ten years?
Aaron Levie: I actually think it is easier to do that at scale now, because as you, you know, same principles apply on product. You can't really AB test something if you don't have a large a large enough user base where you can meaningfully test, you know, on on on some sample. And the same thing is true in our organization. So now at two thousand people, we can run kind of experiments, in a particular organization. We we, we've we've been, you know, running a a a performance management experiment in in one in one team to see, you know, does certain stratification of of performance levels, do better than a different way of stratifying performance, and, in terms of the the, quality of the feedback that you get, the quality of the, the, the compensation levels. And we would not have been able to do that at fifty or a hundred people because you would your your test would be ineffective on ten people.
And so I think as long as you can think about it methodically, like, you are actually running experiments, and you're gonna take the experiment that works the best and then scale it out, and treat it in in a a kind of a b testing, you know, kind of mindset. You actually can have a really, exciting way to continue to evolve your culture. And this is something that I, you know, unfortunately, don't see enough from larger organizations.
But I think, you know, we will see as we move more and do, this sort of new era of work, I think we will see more of this experiment experimentation happen.
Jack Altman: When you think about your culture, do you think about intentionally setting it the way that you want it to be? Or do you think of looking at what the sort of truth is and kind of trying to hone in and improve, like, what the best of what box is? And it Yeah. One of the examples that I think of is, like, your sort of burn the boats moment when you decided to go for the enterprise. This is a long time ago at this point.
Aaron Levie: But that was obviously that must It wasn't like, we didn't really have any boats. It was more like like we had some canoes and kayaks, and so like we like burned the kayaks.
Jack Altman: Easy to burn.
Aaron Levie: Very easy to burn. Not not a lot of like wood to worry about.
Jack Altman: But that must have come with some cultural change to go through stuff.
Aaron Levie: I mean, just that yeah. The twenty people in the in the organization, we had to get in a room and say, the kayaks are burning.
Jack Altman: So great. Yeah. Today, is it and to what degree is it, this is my vision for the culture, or to what degree is it, this is what we see and this is what we sort of lean into?
Aaron Levie: I think it's it's a little bit of both. We have we have sort of aspirational targets, based on, what we think, we could be doing better, especially if we learn something from from another organization. You know, maybe Amazon is is better at decentralized innovation than us. Maybe Netflix is better at an ownership culture than us.
Maybe, a different industry, an Apple, a Zappos is better at customer service in some area. How do we learn from those things, and how do we bring those into our culture? And so that might not be an existing best practice we've even been doing that we can kinda go out and scale. It might need to be taking something that that we think is is, even a much sort of much better utopian state for some particular part of of our culture that we want to aspire to become like.
And, and we wanna be able to kinda have a, a comparison of where we are today versus where we could be in the future with with this type of execution. And then in other areas, it will be learning from our organization, you know, doing a survey of the organization, seeing where the the hot spots are of of maybe really positive things that we wanna reinforce. So we learn a best practice around, internal communication, or we learn a best practice around, goal setting and execution, and then we wanna actually go and and have that best practice permeate the rest of the organization. We will do that in a in a relatively tops down kind of way.
Mhmm. We we established a, a group of all of our sort of of directors and above in the organization. It's about a hundred and fifty, two hundred people in the company that we get together monthly, to go and review how the business is doing and business performance. And in that process, we're we're effectively learning from each other on what different organizations and teams are doing that we think are are, you know, new methods of of doing something that we think are are gonna be useful to scale.
So you have to be able to to know where are those bright spots, and then how do you go and and have them permeate the rest of the organization.
Jack Altman: Yeah. I think I heard once at Google that they, you know, with their top performers, they didn't try to do much with them. They just tried to observe them and replicate it. So it's almost like an organizational version of that.
Aaron Levie: You you I mean, within your, within your your company, there is one hundred percent unequivocally, all of the lessons you would likely need to be able to sort of scale the perfect organization. And your job is just to find out where those lessons are, and then figure out a way to actually do the change management to get those lessons to everybody else.
Jack Altman: Are there any particular companies or cultures that you look up to or try to, like, learn a lot about to to replicate?
Aaron Levie: Yeah. I think the, I think it's on a sort of per sort of category basis that we try and learn from cultures. I don't think there's a single company that we say, man, if we just could operate like this one company, we would be we would be so much better. We'd be performing so much better.
I think there are certain principles that that are, maybe even more enlightened versions of our own core values that that we think that we can learn from, we might be able to achieve, you know, that that value even even that much better. So, you know, again, we like I mentioned Netflix, but but so we have a a value of of being owner, and this idea of sort of extreme ownership, you know, take responsibility for the area that you're driving, hold yourself and your team accountable, make sure that you're you're learning the business and learning the lessons, enough within your team. So that way, you really truly can be a a sort of self, sufficient unit that can go out and execute, obviously, within the broader system.
While there are companies like Netflix and Amazon that do that incredibly well. And so we wanna sort of, you know, borrow and steal ideas of how do they actually create that that type of ownership. What is it about their people practices? What is about their goal setting?
What is about their, their, performance management structures that let them go in and create that that level of ownership. But there might be other things that we we might not pull from those organizations. So, like, from Amazon, we haven't, you know, taken the idea of writing the six page note before, a meeting. Just not not something that that that that's not a part not much of our, part of our culture.
So we'll kinda take specific ideas that we think relate to one of our values, where we think it's being done incredibly well, and then pull that into the organization.
Jack Altman: How do you learn about these other cultures? Do you read a lot? Do you just have all these CEOs over for dinner? Like, what what do you what do you do?
Aaron Levie: They, they they tend to not wanna come to my apartment. So they, less, less CEOs over for dinner Jack Altman: You don't cook for them.
Aaron Levie: Yeah. That would, more like heating up in the microwave.
Jack Altman: Yeah. That's nice.
Aaron Levie: Yeah.
But, we, I mean, the good news is there's books on almost every every company you could imagine. Now, not all of those books kinda give you all the secrets. But between books, between YouTube, between your video series, there's there's enough content out there where there's not a single company that if you wanted to learn from, you couldn't find the information out there on on how they've kinda tweak their process.
Patty McCord, former head of talent at at Netflix, wrote, the the the book powerful. She has a lot of lessons in there that that really are manifested within the Netflix culture. So you can kinda learn from that.
The, you know, there's plenty of of books and literature on how Amazon operates in in this area. I mean, the, delivering happiness at Zappos kinda teaches you a little bit very kinda customer service oriented culture. So I think there's a lot of content material out there if you, you know, put your mind to it.
Jack Altman: So you and your co-founders were relatively young. How did you manage to scale yourselves? Like, how did you learn to grow the bigger teams? Is it executive coaching? Is it learning from people under you? Like, is it mentors? Like, how do how does someone who is seeking to scale themselves accomplish that?
Aaron Levie: I think, so first of all, I mean, two thousand mistakes, help along the way. So just constantly learning from, okay, in that meeting, it would have been better if I didn't call out that one thing. And this, you know, session, I could have been calmer in in, you know, delivering this feedback. In setting that goal, we probably could have, you know, been more thoughtful about the implications of the downstream implications of that goal.
So, like, unfortunately, some of this just comes with lots and lots of failure, lots and lots of mistakes that that you that you overall, over time, learn from. A lot of it is learning from the the people that we've we've had on our teams that have, been in organizations that have ten, twenty, thirty years of experience in some cases, and studying what they do and and being able to kind of, you know, take a lot of lessons from from how they've operated. So our leadership team and the the leadership team from the leadership team, I've been able to learn from, a ton over the years.
And, and I think that the, you know, we've we've each, we we've each sort of, like, you know, honed our own respective roles in the type of management style that we have, between the the the three of us that that are are in the company now. And everybody has to sort of find their own path of what kind of manager or leader, they wanna be in. I don't think there is, like, one perfect fit for for all, types of leaders. And you have to kinda know what what are your sort of what are your superpowers going to be that that you think are gonna be, you know, something that you're gonna bring to the table in a big way? And then how do you make sure that you're building a a great team, within your team, that can help you, augment the areas that you're not gonna be good at? Yeah. And make sure that you're you're creating that kind of, really balanced dynamic of of portfolio of skills that come together, in a very powerful way.
Jack Altman: And I guess, sort of analogously, how much do the early employees who are still around matter to sort of institutional knowledge or values? Like, do you still keep in touch with all those employees? Like, how does that work as you grow?
Aaron Levie: Yeah. I think the, it is incredibly important. At the same time, if that is your only way of of maintaining and scaling your culture, then then you're doomed to fail. So it's, I I see it as both symbolic and also just, like, sometimes they're the the deepest livers of our culture.
And so so it's great on those two dimensions. But at the same time, you can't you sort of rely on tribal knowledge of your culture to to really have it scale out. You have to have living, breathing examples of every new cohort of of people that come in that that, of people that come in that that that, that are gonna be able to to live, and operate in the way that that you expect the rest of your organization to operate.
So we do new hire orientation every two weeks, and I give a presentation every every new hire orientation on our values, how we live by them, how we expect everyone else to live by them. And we need to make sure that that, our culture and our values are propagating to every new group of people and hopefully evolving and and improving in every new hiring class. Because we've learned from the last nineteen hundred and, you know, sixty people what we could do better in the next forty that are coming on board. So, so I think we always wanna be evolving the culture, but but you certainly wanna be, you know, getting as much of that energy, as much of that new new institutional knowledge from your new, employees as as the ones that have been around for a long time.
Jack Altman: Yeah. We talk about culture add rather than culture fit Yep. And sort of evolving with it. Okay. A few years ago, you IPO'd. So what has changed, and what has stayed the same? How do you feel different in your role now?
Aaron Levie: Yeah. I think a lot of, a lot of organizations and and CEOs sort of lament the quarterly, you know, shot clock that you have with, with with, with earnings and Wall Street. And there's a hundred percent truth in you know, Wall Street is very, very near term focused. There's there's no question that they really only care about your last quarter's performance and what are you gonna what are you gonna be doing in the future. And so it's very, very near term oriented.
Jack Altman: Do those calls make you nervous?
Aaron Levie: Well, they they're recorded. So, so it's it's not as nerve wracking. But, the the q and a session afterwards is obviously live.
But, you know, I I think we've done something like, twelve or fourteen now. So it's You're okay. Yeah. You do it. Got it. But, but in general, the the the sort of that that quarterly cadence, tends to actually align pretty closely to my own impatience, of of how I like to kinda see progress in the business.
So, I think I'm uniquely suited for for that kind of operating rhythm. But what it does is it forces your organization to have to be, you know, really, thinking about what are we gonna execute? What progress are we gonna execute on in the near term? So over the next three months. But how do you do that without, and and without, compromising or in a way that's not detrimental at all to the long term goals of business? And the moment that you sort of veer so much into the quarterly performance, you will absolutely make sure that in one or two years from now, you don't have the product strategy. You don't have the growth rate that you wanna have.
Conversely, if you only focus on the long term, you won't actually achieve your quarterly performance. So I think it's actually a really good rhythm to be in as a company, which is to be able to balance that near and long term focus as a as an organization. So that's the first thing. Second thing is is the scrutiny, the intense focus on your your business performance, your numbers, how the company is is, is executing is a really good thing because it causes you to have to make the changes in the business in those areas where you can be like, I could get to that next month.
Normally, there's that burning fire over there, where you you don't you can't afford to to actually not deal with that burning fire because it the market will see it, and it'll be way more painful once it's fully sort of manifested in the in the core of the business. So it caused you to have to move more quickly on key issues. It caused you to have to think about the the sort of scrutiny, and the transparency in a very different way. So how do you make sure you're you're operating with a level of of openness and transparency in the organization?
Because your employees will see what's going on because the market's gonna see it. So it's it caused you to create a much more open and transparent environment internally, I think, you know, quite coincidentally.
Jack Altman: So what internally, what's the culture on the day after the quarter? Are you celebrating last quarter? Are you talking about next quarter? Like, what's the vibe?
Aaron Levie: Yeah. So unfortunately, we can't, give out all of the numbers, at just at the at the day end because a lot of that is material nonpublic information, but we kinda can signal toward how we're doing. And then in general, in our all hands, which is which tends to be seven to ten days after the quarter end, we're probably spending thirty percent on the past quarter's performance.
So what we did well, what we didn't do well, what we can learn from, what we need to continue to improve on, and then about seventy percent of the time on the forward looking, goals that we have. And that tends to be the balance that we we have for most things in the business is let's review what we what we did, in a in a backward looking way, but let's put a lot of our emphasis on on the the future and what we can do better as opposed to kind of belaboring, you know, what we did in the in the past too much.
Jack Altman: Yeah. So early on for any startup, like, where, you know, any any founder, all they're thinking about is how do I keep the company alive? How do I just, you know, sort of get through Yeah. Whatever I'm trying to get through? At this point, Box is established. It's going to endure.
Aaron Levie: Not gonna lie a lot. But it's you know that's, like, the worst luck thing to probably say.
Jack Altman: It's good. It's all going it's all going down. Okay. Thank you. Do you do you feel a responsibility, like, to sort of, like, the broader community or to tech or to the country? Like, are there any things as a public CEO that you now have a desire or sense of responsibility to sort of speaking towards?
Aaron Levie: I think, you know, I think certainly as we've grown as an organization, we've realized that we do have a greater responsibility, at minimum locally in our local community, and issues that are local to technology in Silicon Valley. So whether it's, you know, helping improve the kind of, quote, unquote, pipeline problem and and how do we get more people into tech and actually taking more responsibility for that as opposed to sort of, you know, continuing and persisting the issue as somebody else's problem, or it's just local geographic, issues, and and making sure we're supporting the nonprofits that that surround our company and and have, you know, made sure that we have a a community that that have has been great to be able to flourish in, to then more of the national issues that we face.
So, whether it's, you know, challenges with immigration reform, whether it's social issues, at the national level that, that we care a lot about because either it affects our employee base or our customer base or just, you know, our our, like, fundamental principles of of us as a as a, you know, kind of, you know, set of people inside of an organization.
So we do we do get more a little bit more actively involved, and it and by the year, it get we get more active in this area. We launched a nonprofit arm, of the business about four years ago called box dot org. That's where we both give do charitable giving as well as give away our technology and make sure that boxers, our our employees, are are actually going out and volunteering on these issues, whether it's disaster relief or homelessness. So we do wanna make sure that we're as involved in the community locally and nationally, as possible.
Jack Altman: And then I guess my last question is, what is something about Box that you hope is definitely the same in five or ten years, and what's something that you hope is definitely different in five or ten years?
Aaron Levie: I hope that our core values, that we kind of established as we started scaling eight or ten years ago, are gonna be the same at the core and continue to manifest in even more impactful ways. And this is just around how we execute, how we collaborate, how we build a culture of of inclusion and and, people being able to be themselves, and a culture of ownership. So so I hope that those remain the same. I hope that our focus on customers, I know for a fact, that will be the same.
That that's very core to who we are as a company. And then the the ways that we wanna evolve, I think we, you know, we we are very motivated, especially with with a lot of the the the the, the challenges we've seen on the, bring more communities into engineering and and all the the STEM education side of things. I I'd like our organization to get vastly more diverse over time. So that that is something that I would hope would be would look different in five or ten years from now, and, and and continue to, you know, again, try and drive an organization where people can be themselves.
They can achieve, you know, kind of their best work in our environment no matter who they are and where they come from.
And, and that's something that that, you know, we're proud to do today, but we'd like to do even more of going forward.
Jack Altman: That sounds awesome. Aaron, thank you so much.
Aaron Levie: You're welcome. This was great.
Jack Altman: Good to see you. Bye.
