Words matter. These are the best Aaron Levie Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It’s unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
The dynamic with social is you tend not to have products with 30% market share. It’s all or nothing. Email works because we have open standards that let you communicate across any email client.
My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.
My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends’ parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.
I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.
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. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.
I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.
I’m certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.
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.
There’s a lot of pride that business owners have. It’s actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.
It’s not accidental that products get worse over time; it’s because companies stop paying attention to them. They stop caring as much about maintaining the same quality they did when they were just trying to fight for survival and no one would pay attention unless they had the best technology.
What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don’t think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.
My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don’t have time for nonwork stuff.
Steve Jobs is the most epic entrepreneur of all time. He served as a guiding light for any emerging businessperson who wanted to learn how things should get done. He’ll be looked at as one of the best business leaders of all time, and certainly one of the best tech entrepreneurs.
My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it’s not the healthiest way to live, but it’s all I really have time for.
My acronym is WWSJD: What Would Steve Jobs Do?
I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.
