Form S-1 (Letter from Aaron Levie, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO: Powering a New Way to Work)

Key ideas

In Box's S-1 founder letter, Levie describes starting from his own file-sharing frustration and building an enterprise company around end users, consumer-style product habits and speed.

1. 1

   Start from a problem you have

   Levie writes that as students he and Dylan patched together several poor tools for simple sharing and assumed something better had to exist. He calls the idea that came out of this simple and, looking back, obvious. He says they began with spare time and poker winnings.

2. 2

   Let individuals bring the product in

   Levie writes that Box was built around the end user, with free sign-up for people inside companies whenever existing systems got in their way. He says this produced growth inside businesses that the founders had not expected, and borrows Clayton Christensen's term to call Box a low-end disruptor of traditional content management software. He credits early users and IT administrators at large companies with shaping the product for enterprise needs.

3. 3

   Serve users and IT together

   Levie describes personal technology as often simple but outside IT's control, and corporate software as focused on security but often too complicated for most users. He says Box treats this as a balance between two constituencies, pairing security, logging and compliance work with simplicity for end users.

4. 4

   Borrow habits from other companies

   Levie admits that starting from a blank slate was partly inexperience, since neither founder came from a big enterprise vendor, and partly a deliberate choice to ignore convention. He names what Box set out to imitate: Apple's attention to design, Facebook's continuous releases, Zappos-style support and a salesforce.com-style developer ecosystem. He also describes the culture as thinking big, being a little irreverent and getting things done, and calls it a competitive advantage.

5. 5

   Treat response speed as the advantage

   Levie argues a technology lead can vanish as fast as it appeared, so Box organizes around improving and moving faster. He concedes the company will sometimes get things wrong and says it then fails fast. His example is shipping an enterprise content product for the iPad a few months after the device was announced, which he says can take other organizations years.

In Aaron’s words

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