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
Keys
Exactly
Build
Listen
Software
Building
Distinction
Around
Enterprise
Really
Customers
Always
Telling

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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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A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can't separate those two things.
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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.
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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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We're going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.
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The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.
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Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds.
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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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Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don't need salespeople.
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In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.
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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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You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
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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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Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
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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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In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology... and you can build software then, around the user.
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The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.
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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.
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I don't use many apps. I use naps.
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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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