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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Aaron Levie

Image
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.
Aaron Levie
Image
Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.
Aaron Levie
Image
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
Image
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.
Aaron Levie
Image
If you don't go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.
Aaron Levie
Image
We're going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.
Aaron Levie
Image
The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.
Aaron Levie
Image
If people don't think the odds are against you, you're doing it wrong.
Aaron Levie
Image
Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.
Aaron Levie
Image
Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.
Aaron Levie
Image
My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.
Aaron Levie
Image
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.
Aaron Levie
Image
You'll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.
Aaron Levie
Image
The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.
Aaron Levie
Image
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.
Aaron Levie
Image
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?
Aaron Levie
Image
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.
Aaron Levie
Image
The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
Aaron Levie
Image
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.
Aaron Levie
Image
Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.
Aaron Levie