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

Aaron Levie

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Aaron Levie
Age: 38
Born: 1985
Born: December 27
Entrepreneur
Seattle
Washington
World
Billion
Lesson
Billions
Lessons
Instead
Building
Doe
Optimizing
Work
Uber

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When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.
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Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.
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Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it's being done right now.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.
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The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.
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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.
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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.
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The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
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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.
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Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.
Aaron Levie
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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.
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Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.
Aaron Levie
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You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
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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.
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Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed - just in the last 5 years.
Aaron Levie