Aaron Levie quotes:

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.

My acronym is WWSJD: What Would Steve Jobs Do?

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.

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.

I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it's important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It's best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.

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.

I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.

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.

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.

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.

Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work

You'll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don't need salespeople.

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.

I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee.

If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.

We didn't really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.

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.

The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.

It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

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.

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.

The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.

Execute like there's no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.

Startups often win because it's easier to see what comes next when you don't have to worry about maintaining what came last.

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.

If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'What's the party going on right now that I should be going to?'

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.

The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.

Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.

Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something.

Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.

In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology... and you can build software then, around the user.

They can bring the technology in, then you can sell to the enterprise when they want to have better control, better security... you still have the same biz model as a traditional enterprise sw company, but the way to get into the company is through the end user.

In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.

Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead.

We're going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.

I don't use many apps. I use naps.

The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what's best for the customer, without ever having to ask.

Always look for these changing technology factors- any market that has a significant change in the underlying raw materials ...or enabling factors, is an environment that is about to change in a very significant way.

The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.

Too little process and you can't get good work done. Too much process and you can't get any work done. Most companies never find the middle.

All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.

Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.

If you're waiting for encouragement from others, you're doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it's probably too late.

If you don't go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.

You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.

Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.

Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds.

You can look at the cost structure of an incumbent company and discover: where are they not going to be able to drop their prices... because that business model is fundamental to the existence of the company.

Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.

If every customer is using your product "correctly", you'll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.

You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent... because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.

In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.

A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can't separate those two things.

When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.

Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.

That's already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.

Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it's being done right now.

Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.

The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.

Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.

The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.

We're enamored with the concept that there's always a price. But sometimes, your goal is to build a great company, not sell it.

The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.

Sometimes things are the way they are and can't be changed, other times it's because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.

Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.

Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.

I'm obsessed with speed. I'm always asking myself, 'Why can't we do things faster? Why can't it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?'

If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'What's the party going on right now that I should be going to?

I think I'm the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ - I'm pretty annoying, but driven.

I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.

If people don't think the odds are against you, you're doing it wrong.

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.