Quote

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.

Aaron Levie

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Aaron Levie
Age: 38
Born: 1985
Born: December 27
Entrepreneur
Seattle
Washington
Exactly
Build
Listen
Software
Building
Distinction
Around
Enterprise
Really
Customers
Always
Telling
Keys

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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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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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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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The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.
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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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In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.
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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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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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Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don't need salespeople.
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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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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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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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Read these 3 books - Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.
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Execute like there's no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.
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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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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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You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
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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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Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
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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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