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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.

Aaron Levie

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Aaron Levie
Age: 38
Born: 1985
Born: December 27
Entrepreneur
Seattle
Washington
Going
Compete
Always
Solution
Solutions
Building
Full
Small
Incumbent
Start
Incumbents
Able
Intentionally

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You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.
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Startups often win because it's easier to see what comes next when you don't have to worry about maintaining what came last.
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Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.
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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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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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Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.
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The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead.
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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
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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.
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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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We're going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.
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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?'
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Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.
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Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something.
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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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