Aaron Levie on the Future of Box

[Music] we're here at Fox's fancy new headquarters in Redwood City joined by Aaron Levie who runs this place thanks for joining me you've come a long way since you first started this as a student at USC so how would things changed over there I want to clarify one point our modest new headquarters in in Redwood City but the original idea was we wanted to make it easy to just share and access information from anywhere and we have we've had a lot of fun in the process we now focus entirely on the enterprise market it has been pretty cool to start in our dorm room and and and scale up as far there's a lot of competition out there you compete with Dropbox Google Drive you partner with Microsoft how do you differentiate yourself from the others ultimately what we tend to replace is a lot of the core infrastructure that used to be inside of the data center of an enterprise so their storage infrastructure their document management software their security technology we move all of that we sort of compress all of those capabilities and deliver that via the cloud so that way that customers don't have to have that same infrastructure when they want to manage their data when they want to be able to share and collaborate from anywhere and you went public last year tech stocks haven't been doing so well lately you know box has been trading a little below its its IPO price what are investors getting about box actually I think that in general investors understand the story and kind of what we're up to you will always have different perspectives so some investors want us to spend less money and investment you know sort of lessen growth some investors want us to invest more in growth and just focus on the the top-line revenue and our job is to balance that mix of growth and profitability I think we found that balance but we obviously need to continue to make sure that investors understand you know our strategy and where we're going and there were actually zero tech IPOs in the first quarter this year which is pretty bad partly because it's been so taut for everyone that went public recently do you like being the CEO of a public company or do you kind of just wish that you could go back to the days of being private actually I've enjoyed it so far I think the you know it creates new challenges there are new rhythms in the business because you have obviously the quarterly early earnings process that's a little bit different than the how we were doing things privately and you certainly increase the number of investors that you have to be able to communicate with and make sure you know understanding your strategy but it's also come with a lot of benefits so the because of the nature of our business model and the fact that we sell to enterprises we are able to drive a lot more transparency you know in our business that that creates better recognition better understanding in the in the customer base lately you've been very vocal about Apple and Microsoft and some of their concerns about what they consider to be government overreach with with government data requests or what do you think the government should be doing differently yeah so this is this some this is something that's very close to home for us because when you sell a cloud technology to the enterprise ultimately you're selling trust you're selling the the trust in this service that that customer is going to be leveraging to help them secure their data and work with their information when the FBI first went after Apple that was a really kind of serious move in this industry because it was really the first moment where the government was requesting that a technology company actually break its own security that could have you know created a massive precedent for any technology company to again fundamentally have to weaken its technology and weaken its security so we were we were very much in favor of Apple and on the side of Apple we we signed a an amicus brief with Microsoft Google Facebook Amazon and others we are in a very different era in terms of how we're going to manage and store and collaborate and communicate in in the world and our laws and our policies and the approaches that governments are taking are not catching up with the new way that we're working and or the new ways that we're communicating or leveraging technology and so our approach is actually can we have a more modern landscape for for how the government is expecting to work with technology companies and to work in sort of the digital era has the government hurt your business at all is there perception overseas that that the US government would would invade the privacy of anyone using a US technology company yeah I mean I think I think there has been concern you know in general created more friction internationally it certainly doesn't accelerate you know business and and the ability to to to work globally we've we've built a lot of technology to try and combat or counteract that friction so too recent technology updates that we worked on the first was letting customers actually manage their own encryption keys this is a new technology called box key safe so that gives the control back to the customer so they can actually control the the data that they're using in the cloud and then a recent announcement that we just made this week in in London was Box zones so that lets customers actually keep their data stored in the region of their choice and we announced that in Germany Ireland Tokyo and Singapore so the US government can't access it if you're stored in in London correct so so that way you actually have that that data residency that different regulatory environments or different countries require internationally and so what's your vision for box five years from now where it where's box headed I think over the next couple of years it's it's still going to be about how do enterprises leverage the cloud to become more efficient to become more collaborative to become more productive our product is going to continue to focus on how do we take what is today a very very complex problem for businesses which is how do you access data from anywhere on any device anywhere on the world how do you share with anyone and how do you have your business go more digital in a world where you have massive security issues where there are massive regulatory challenges where there are massive privacy issues how do we actually simplify all of that complexity so our product in our platform is is really about how do we make sure that as the world gets more complex for customers that the way that they collaborate and share actually get simpler over time so over the next you know five years it's it's a continued focus and it continued march toward making sure that we can make it so enterprises have a completely seamless way that they can work in the cloud sounds like you have your work cut out for you yeah there's there's gonna be a lot more of this okay well thank you for inviting us to your headquarters now let's go play some ping pong okay [Music]

Channel: TechCrunch

Views: 18,178

Rating: 4.7560978 out of 5

Keywords: box, security, apple, cloud, storage, aaron levie, levie, interview, news

Id: wOba4mPlIVk

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2016