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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
Start
Incumbents
Able
Intentionally
Going
Compete
Always
Solution
Solutions
Building
Full
Small
Incumbent

More quotes by 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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Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
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I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it's important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It's best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.
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When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.
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You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
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Too little process and you can't get good work done. Too much process and you can't get any work done. Most companies never find the middle.
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If every customer is using your product correctly, you'll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.
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Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.
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I'm certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.
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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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We're enamored with the concept that there's always a price. But sometimes, your goal is to build a great company, not sell it.
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Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.
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Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
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If you're waiting for encouragement from others, you're doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it's probably too late.
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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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Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.
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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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If you don't go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.
Aaron Levie
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They can bring the technology in, then you can sell to the enterprise when they want to have better control, better security... you still have the same biz model as a traditional enterprise sw company, but the way to get into the company is through the end user.
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Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds.
Aaron Levie