Lecture 12 - Building for the Enterprise (Aaron Levie)

Can we keep playing? Wait, okay, good. Can we turn it up a little bit, so it's more pumped up?

That's loud.

Okay, here we go. Okay.

Okay, so we gotta find the beat and then we gotta clap to the beat.

Okay. All right. Okay, that's pretty good, guys. All right, we're good. We're good. Thank you. Okay, please stop. Okay, stop the music. Thank you.

Okay, cool. Can you put on the presentation? Thank you.

That'll be the most pumped up thing that ever happens in enterprise software, so the rest is sort of downhill from here.

So, thank you for that intro, that well-rehearsed intro. Thank you.

Confirming the facts as you're saying them, very good. So I'm Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box. Welcome to this edition of how to build an enterprise software company. That's my understanding. This is the course that you're taking, right? Is that correct?

No, okay, so.

Here's my job today. My job is to try and convince you that everybody else who speaks throughout this whole class is wrong and that you actually wanna build an enterprise software company. And so hopefully we'll be able to kinda work through this, and you'll have a good sense of why it's super cool to be in the enterprise. And why a lot of the perceptions of going into the whole consumer space, where it's, you know, so much fun and everything. Why that's wrong and why you wanna do enterprise software.

Who wants to build an enterprise software company? Good, all right. Thank you very much. Hopefully we'll do a vote at the end and hopefully that will not have shrunk. So that's really actually the only goal I have at this point.

So, we're gonna talk about three things today. The first is the quick background and history of Box. Cuz when we started the company, we didn't know that we wanted to do enterprise software. And so I wanna kind of get through a little bit about why we decided to go after the enterprise and what we do today.

And then I'm gonna talk a little bit about what are the major kind of factors that have changed in enterprise software that make it possible to do a startup today in this category. And then finally, we'll talk a little about some patterns that you can kind of exploit and some ways to recognize and ways to actually go build an enterprise software company yourself. And hopefully that'll be some practical, useful advice.

Just as a forewarning, my voice, as I've been speaking a lot the past couple of days. So hopefully, I'll be able to get to that third part of the advice and actually be able to talk, so we'll see how we make it. But I'm gonna be downing a lot of water, so I apologize for that.

So building for the enterprise. This is what we're gonna talk about. So just quick kinda high level stats about Box. We've about 240,000 businesses that use the product. There are over 27 million users that have brought Box into their organization and used it as individuals, and we're in about 99% of the Fortune 500. Unfortunately, that last 1% is really just Microsoft. And they don't seem to wanna buy from us. So.

We have to work on that a little bit. But certainly, a decent amount of scale, a lot of users that have brought Box into enterprise environments. These are some of the large organizations that are using the product. So, a very wide range of industries. Everything from manufacturing and consumer products to companies like General Electric.

Stanford Healthcare actually uses the product for collaboration within the hospital environments and the research. But between healthcare, media, manufacturing, these are the sort of the range of industries that we serve.

So, the question's how did we get here? Cuz we didn't really start the company to try and go build an enterprise software company, even though that is how things ended up happening.

So when we started the product, we launched the company in 2005. We got the idea actually in college back in 2004. And so, was anybody using the internet back in 2004? Okay, great.

So basically, I don't know if millennials use the internet back then.

Sorry. Okay, no more age jokes. All right, here'...