Overnight Success: Box
Aaron Levie wanted to be a film director. Got rejected from film school. So the 20-year-old who'd built a search engine in high school that was "vastly slower than Google" dropped out of USC to work on a file-sharing startup from his co-founder's parents' attic on Mercer Island.
Cloud storage in 2005? Nobody cared. VCs looked at two 21-year-olds and assumed they'd take the money and go straight to Disneyland. Their lucky break came from a cold email to Mark Cuban, who wired $300,000 without ever meeting them. Good thing. If he'd seen how young Dylan looked, he might have hesitated too.
The original plan was consumer storage. The problem was Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo could all give away storage for free. In 2007, Levie wrote a Jerry Maguire-style memo laying out three paths. They pivoted to enterprise when they were 20 people. Then the 2008 recession hit right after their Series B. In 2011, Citrix offered $600 million. The founders rented a hotel in Half Moon Bay to figure out what you do in your mid-20s if you've sold a company. Levie spent months "freaked out and sleepless." They turned it down.
Now Box is worth $4.3 billion with $1.15 billion in revenue and 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers.
Aaron will talk about:
Why getting rejected from film school led to challenging Microsoft, Google, and Apple simultaneously
The "Jerry Maguire memo" that convinced 20 people to abandon consumers for the enterprise
Putting up a billboard directly across from Microsoft's campus that read "5,000 companies joined last month. Find out why."
Turning down $600 million in your mid-20s and spending months sleepless over it
Why "95% of the feedback from investors who turned us down was actually correct"
What it was really like for college dropouts to spend twenty years building a company that everyone said would be crushed before it started.
Limited to 30-50 founders. No slides. No script.
04:30 pm: Doors open
05:00 pm: Fireside chat starts
06:00 pm: Office tour + mingling
06:30 pm: Door shut
Part of the Overnight Success event series - see other events at overnightfpv.com