Aaron Levie: Profile In Nerdage

Aaron Levie is CEO and, along with Dylan Smith, co-founder of Box.com, a leading platform for sharing information and collaborating, which the company describes as "cloud content management". Box.com or simply Box, which was originally named Box.net, provides an Internet based service that provides a central hub for storing documents, sharing them, and collaborating to get work done. Box has grown from an idea in 2004 to a service that has more than 6 million users.

Much of this growth is due to the fact that Box shifted focus from consumers to business users. In moving toward the business market, Box has delivered a synthesis of consumer and enterprise software. A significant chapter in Aaron's story concerns how and why this change of focus occurred.

We chose to invite Aaron to be the subject of a Profile in Nerdage for three reasons.
First, Box is pioneering a new synthesis of consumer and business software.
Second, the success of Box contains important lessons for how collaboration can be supported in the modern business world.
Third, Aaron has navigated the initial transition from a highly technical entrepreneur to the CEO of a large and rapidly growing organization. In order to make this transition he has had to overcome a variety of challenges related the Raw Technology Persona.

(Aaron is participating in the creation of this Profile In Nerdage. If you know Aaron, have worked at Box, and or have knowledge of the development of this industry, please contact us at ProfilesInNerdage@CITOResearch.com. Let us know what you know about box and this space and how you would like to contribute to this profile.)

Examining the reasons for the growth of Box helps us answer the following questions:

• What is the nature of collaboration in the modern business?
• What are the lessons enterprise software must learn from consumer software?
• What features must be added to consumer software to make it enterprise ready?
• How does the cloud architecture change product design?
• What are the challenges businesses face as they seek to incorporate services like Box into their computing landscape?
• How is Box integrated with other services such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps to better serve its customers?
• How as Box thrived in the face of competition from on-premise software vendors like Microsoft and EMC Documentum?
• How is Box differentiated from other related services such as Dropbox.com?

As a young CEO, Aaron and his team have had to learn to first build a product, then build an infrastructure to deliver the product at scale, and then build an organization to support growth. An analysis of his experience in navigating a transition from a start up to a company of 300 staff can help shed light on the following questions that are of interest to aspiring technology leaders:

• What are the dos and don'ts of the initial phase when an idea is shopped around?
• What is the best way to make use of angel investors?
• How should you balance the need for using capital to accelerate growth and protecting the value of the company for future rounds?
• How can you make best use of usage data to guide product development?
• What is the hardest part of creating scalable applications in the cloud?
• How can you tell when you need to hire management help?
• How do you acquire management skills along the way?
• How can you control the Raw Technology Persona?