Notes from a call with Box CEO Aaron Levie 3/17/2017

Notes from a call with Box CEO Aaron Levie 3/17/2017

within file data "there's a lot of really rich information" "you can really only go off the name of the file" currently, wants to process the information *within* the files "Imagine having a Google Photos kind of search for your enterprise data" "That's all driven by machine learning and the deep learning capabilities that now are availability from companies like Google and others"

predictive insights "based on your pattern and behavior of work" plus your coworkers, pointing you to the right information or project to focus on. "anything we give our customers, by default, has to adhere to the highest level of compliance" because they serve finance and healthcare. high levels of access will be opt-in. "we live and die by the trust that we have with customers"

re: watson and einstein "most of them do represent partnership opportunities" "ai and machine learning is going to be kind of a hybrid solution" both inhouse and domain-specific partnerships "we're really gonna mix and match technology" use some of their own, also leverage partnership's specific expertise. uses example of Google object-recognition. says "we have one of the largest repositories of corporate documents that exist"

tech IPOs. "the lesson that we learned, and that we're always learning, is that two things matter the most" in being public. predictability "wall street loves nothing more" than consistency results that exceed expectations. "overcommunicate." there's so much information out there. "we spend a lot of time just making sure that our strategy is incredibly clear." "internally, from a company standpoint, you have to balance the challenge and the complexity" "on the one hand, wall street demands predictability, but our companies are not always predictable" because innovation. balance predictable results with long-term innovation investment.

"the companies that end up veering off-course are the ones that don't realize that wall street needs that prectictability, or the ones that become overly predictable"

"this is really why being incredibly clear on your north star and your long-term vision is important" "we've experienced incredible volatility at times" up and down 10%. "the only way to get through that is by being very very clear about what we're doing in the long run" and that's years not just one year.

"if you're hyper-focused on just the near term [...] that's the kind of stress that would cause you to execute worse over time." "there's always going to be near-term volatility, the question is whether you're executing for the long term." "you still need near-term data points to make sure that you're executing well for the long term."

at time of IPO "we were competing with EMC, we were competing with Microsoft, we were competing with Google" and "there were five or ten very very effective competitors in the market" "either most of them have become partners" microsoft, IBM, google (e.g. hangouts chat) "or we've actually seen some of the legacy players get out of the market altogether" or have to be acquired, sell their tech, etc.

"in the places where IBM plays very well, they still have a strong hold" consulting arm, hold on finance and healthcare.

"we know that we have to make decisions quickly given how competitive our landscape is" collaboration, share information quickly and broadly. "you have to have a very flat hierarchy, to ensure that people are exchanging information up and down the hierarchy as well as laterally, to their peers" "we have to make sure that we don't have processes that get in people's way"

consumerization of IT "I miss the days when people were talking about that because of us" in their startup days in '08 and '09. "we deeply believe that the future of enterprise technology [...] is about apps that are incredibly engaging" "if you don't fundamentally change the way that you work, both culturally and through technology, you won't be competitive" in the coming years. incumbent businesses can learn from Slack, Box, Airbnb etc. emphasis on flatter org and fast-moving information. "it's going to change the culture of work, it's going to change how businesses run" staying on-prem and legacy is going to be uncompetitive. "IT dark ages" = on-prem