Aaron Levie Quotes

"My acronym is WWSJD: What Would Steve Jobs Do?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast."

"If you think about the market that we're in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that's happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

"The dynamic with social is you tend not to have products with 30% market share. It's all or nothing. Email works because we have open standards that let you communicate across any email client."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I think I'm the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ - I'm pretty annoying, but driven."

"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."

"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."

"It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep."