Best 79 quotes of Aaron Levie on MyQuotes

All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.

All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.

A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can't separate those two things.

Always look for these changing technology factors- any market that has a significant change in the underlying raw materials ...or enabling factors, is an environment that is about to change in a very significant way.

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.

Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.

Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.

Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.

Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.

Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.

Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed - just in the last 5 years.

Execute like there's no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.

Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.

Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds.

I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.

I don't use many apps. I use naps.

If every customer is using your product "correctly", you'll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.

If people don't think the odds are against you, you're doing it wrong.

If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.

If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to?

If you're waiting for encouragement from others, you're doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it's probably too late.

I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.

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'm obsessed with speed. I'm always asking myself, 'Why can't we do things faster? Why can't it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?'

In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.

In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology... and you can build software then, around the user.

Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.

Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.

In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.

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.

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 think because of the iPhone and the fact that we now have a ubiquitous internet, our creativity in the startup space is 10 times different. Every single industry, every single market, is going to be technology-driven in some way. There's an infinite opportunity for startups because now you can go and solve problems that previously looked like they had nothing to do with technology.

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

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.

It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.

Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.

Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.

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.

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.

My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.

My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it's not the healthiest way to live, but it's all I really have time for.

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.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

Read these 3 books - Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.

Sometimes things are the way they are and can't be changed, other times it's because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

Startups often win because it's easier to see what comes next when you don't have to worry about maintaining what came last.