Aaron Levie of Box Always on Fast-Forward - Disruptions

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, August 27, 2012

Aaron Levie of Box Always on Fast-Forward - Disruptions

By NICK BILTON 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.

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