Aaron Levie quotes
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“Execute like there's no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Nov 11, 2012
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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.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Interview with Michael Jarrett, www2.york.psu.edu. November 8, 1987.
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“Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from May 08, 2013
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“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 -
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“The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Apr 13, 2013
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“Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Feb 24, 2013
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Aug 18, 2012
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“Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.”
-- Aaron Levie -
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“When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work”
-- Aaron Levie -
“The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what's best for the customer, without ever having to ask.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“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?'”
-- Aaron Levie -
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“That's already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Apr 25, 2013
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“The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from May 10, 2013
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.”
-- Aaron Levie -
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“Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Oct 09, 2013
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“The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Sep 12, 2013
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.”
-- Aaron Levie -
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it's being done right now.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Apr 13, 2013
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“Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.”
-- Aaron Levie -
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it's not the healthiest way to live, but it's all I really have time for.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“There's a lot of pride that business owners have. It's actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.”
-- Aaron Levie -
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“What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : "Why Consumer Style Sells in the Corporate World: 10 Questions With Box Ceo Aaron Levie". Wired Interview, www.wired.com. August 20, 2012.
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
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“If people don't think the odds are against you, you're doing it wrong.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Twitter post from Feb 18, 2013
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“I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“I think I'm the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ - I'm pretty annoying, but driven.”
-- Aaron LevieSource : Mindy Kaling (2011). “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)”, p.70, Three Rivers Press
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“It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
“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.”
-- Aaron Levie -
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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.”
-- Aaron Levie
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