Box

We'll talk about the implications with Janice Henderson's Richard Clode.

Plus, speaking of chips, Box announcing a new partnership with NVIDIA.

The CEO, Aaron Levie, will join us first on CNBC to discuss.

And we'll get a read on the state of the consumer and inflation with the CEO of Tapestry, one of the few names today that is actually up better than 6%.

All right, Eric Johnson, thank you for phoning in with your reaction to what's happening in the market today.

We appreciate it.

Take a look at shares of Box.

Box is bucking today's broad sell-off.

I run a Nextcloud server for file sharing because customers have locked down their network so tightly, you cannot share, you can't email a file in, you know, many extensions are blocked.

So then you try to do a file share, let's say OneDrive, blocked, Box, blocked, whatever the other file sharing services are.

So they're all blocked, commercial ones.

So I run a Nextcloud server, which allows me to host files, have public links to them.

Now we have the cloud, right? We have data living in 365.

We have data living in Google Drive, Box.com, Dropbox, Salesforce.

Take your pick.

Dynamics.

AI is giving small startups something they've never had before, the ability to deploy resources at a scale that once belonged only to big companies.

In this episode of Speedrun Office Hours, Box CEO Aaron Levie explains why a three-, five-, or ten-person team can increasingly produce the output of a company many times its size.

Aaron breaks down how founders are becoming managers of AI agents, why strategy and taste matter more as execution gets cheaper, and why he expects specialized agents to emerge across nearly every industry and job function.

But one part of the startup playbook hasn't changed.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

It's kind of interesting that, you know, you're actually still a young guy, only a few years older than me and probably similar to Andrew, but you've been running Box since 2005, which is almost exactly half your life.

If you could compare the world of startups now to the world as it was back then, what do you think about the startup experience has changed? My biggest takeaway actually is I feel

everybody really pumped up to talk about enterprise software? Good, that's what you want to do today.

So I'm Aaron Levie, CEO, co-founder of Box.

And what I wanted

to

do was share a little bit about our story at Box and how we started building our company.

We actually didn't start as an enterprise software company.

We eventually changed our business model and our path.

I love it when the least interactive part is when I call out that we need to be interactive.

So there are companies out there called custom development shops, system integrators, dev shops, consultants if you want it, technical consultants, and all they do is write code to solve business problems for existing companies, okay? So all these companies have logistic issues, reporting needs, whatever it is, and they hire development companies, and at the enterprise level you got like IBM Global Services, Tata Consulting, Infosys, you have all these, I mean these are billion dollar companies, And all they do is, for the most part, not all they do, but they provide development resources for companies to build custom solutions.

So if you can talk to somebody in the IT department of a bigger company and ask them the question, hey, have you guys ever hired a contractor or a development firm, et cetera, to build you a custom solution? And they say yes, say, hey, I'm just curious, what problem did it solve for you? Here's what you're looking for, because I'm going to tell you, all of these, you know, development shops would love to build a SaaS product to become the next Salesforce or Box.net or Slack, but it's literally two different business models.

It's really tough to have one foot in custom development and another foot in pure software, okay? But where the opportunity is for you is to find another company that's already building the code base, they have the code base, they have maybe five or six reference customers, because they've been reusing the code base, and you can extract it from that company and actually bring it to market.

So all of a sudden now you're partnered with them to bring it to market.

I think those...

Oh, and Box.com as well.

So for document storage and things like that.

So we use a combination of those tools to kind of just help us to just stay organized.

I think they really embraced the challenger mindset, which is, "I'm gonna go after this industry and disrupt it." I think that's really, it rallies people a lot.

I mean, you know, there, there's a company called Box.net or Box.com.

They really, like, challenged, uh, Microsoft and they said, you know, "Whatever you built, we're gonna make ours so much better." And they challenged Microsoft directly, and it created a really good, like, alignment internally in the company to push them forward.

And then you see it time and time and again where a company will have an enemy as a small company, like a formidable enemy, and they'll challenge them and, like, go full force.