Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion

Aaron Levie (0:00)

I want to send an emergency alert to like, everybody who's like a sophomore or junior in college, and just be like, follow these 20 accounts on Twitter, and also join Twitter, because like this will just help your career. You're either like a year ahead or a year behind, simply based on your feed. And my feed is like so, so wired in. I'll still talk to 20 year olds that are like, yeah, like, you know, I see some articles, and I'm like, what do you mean? How do you see articles? Like, I don't even know what that means. Like, do you just like get lucky that somebody emailed you an article? You just have to be wired in. I enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. I play with everything.

Sonya Huang (0:50)

Today, I'm excited to welcome Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box. Box is building a collaboration platform and content management platform for Box Enterprise that has now taken on a really new life with AI.

And I'm excited to chat with you today about Box and AI, about your general thoughts on AI because you are such a thought leader, and about how founders can reinvent themselves for this AI wave. So thanks for joining us.

Aaron Levie (1:11)

Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. I religiously watch every episode, and it's a great work. I am wondering, though, I know this is a different podcast, but when do you talk about root canals in this?

Sonya Huang (1:22)

Oh my gosh. We're gonna call in Doug Leone.

Aaron Levie (1:26)

Have we figured out how to weave that in yet or not? I mean, I'm happy to talk about different kind of pain and suffering that I've been through.

Sonya Huang (1:32)

We should just do this podcast with a live root canal. Let's do it.

Aaron Levie (1:35)

See how it goes. Actually, it would be like hot ones, but you get a root canal, and you have to talk about your strategy while you're in a dentist chair. And Doug is just on the other end of it.

Sonya Huang (1:45)

Amazing, amazing. Doug is so pleased with himself, by the way, right now. Okay.

Aaron Levie (1:49)

Has he seen every tweet?

Oh, yeah. He's very pleased with himself.

Sonya Huang (1:55)

Okay. Let's start with, I'm curious to take on this, application companies are the hottest Neo labs. Agree or disagree?

Aaron Levie (2:03)

Two years ago, I think it would have not made that much sense as like, what does that mean?

But very clearly, I think this is what's playing out in the market. And it's all working out mostly because of open source. But what's pretty amazing is right now, you know, the whole concept of being a sort of LLM rapper, model rapper is actually working out. Because what I think people underappreciated was that in the real world, in the enterprise, what you need is some bridge from the model's capability to the actual workflow that the enterprise has. And that bridge, you basically like probably a trillion dollars has been bet on basically one of two outcomes. Either that bridge is very kind of limited, or that bridge is actually very vast, and needs to be able to take on a lot of depth within organizations. And that bet basically looks like, are you only long, you know, kind of the model itself and super intelligence, or are you long the sort of application tier, or you know, maybe previously would have been just pure Neolab.

But I think it's very clearly playing out that actually there's a lot of gap between the model and the workflow. And as you bridge that gap, over time, you get to a point where you realize, oh, I should also do the model. And then you have enough data, you have enough sort of domain expertise, where that becomes its own sort of flywheel. So I'm very bullish on this idea. And what's cool is it's opening up like multiple layers of sort of opportunity for startups, you could either be the actual applied company itself, i.e. the NeoLab, or you could be the infrastructure provider to the NeoLab, and you have like multiple layers of going and attacking that space. But I think a huge update for the market and everybody's kind of use of it.

Sonya Huang (3:47)

Box Labs, let's go.

Aaron Levie (3:49)

We already have it, it's a little bit secret, but we pay very close attention. Right now, the main focus is, let's make the agent really, really good on any model. But over time, obviously, you would peel off certain use cases, either on a per-customer basis or kind of across the whole data set.