$4B Box CEO Aaron Levie: The Next 3 Years Are the Best Time to Build — Here's How to Use This Window

24:55You know, the really interesting, important work is being done across the organization. so so that type of of work is more knowledge that like our head of brand design or our head of product design or our best brand design you know designer needs to know or our product managers in each of the individual domains um the stuff that that i do is is sort of look across those areas and try and add you know extra nudges in the right direction and kind of course correct and um and you know an agent could certainly help you know give me advice for how to do that but But I'm still at the point in my life where I'm like, I'm going to see if my brain can do it.

25:33It's also the founder energy, right? When you're talking to your team, you don't want your agent to be talking to your team. I think there'll be some spectacularly hilarious examples like that that probably over time sort of subside. We're already seeing them, like company data being deleted. Yeah, you're going to do that kind of stuff. And I like, you know, these agents are like, I could be proven wrong about this and maybe five years I'll be like, yeah, I was totally wrong. And this is where Jan LeCun, I think, would agree. And some other, you have a really interesting divide in the industry, which is are these like probabilistic pattern recognition machines or are they truly able to kind of go off on their own and think for themselves?

26:20and depending on kind of where you land on that continuum, then you have some big judgments that get made. So I kind of think about it as there's lots of business decisions I have to make or that lots of people have to make where just it's a brand new, net new event that happens. And I couldn't have documented what to do in that situation. And maybe I could have if I spent like a year writing down every single thing, but it's just a new thing that happened. And so if I try and imagine an agent running around, everybody's asking the agent questions, it's only going to be able to answer the thing that previously I have in my sort of repertoire of answers.

26:59Many of the things I'm working on are the brand new, net new things in the organization. So me being an agent across the company would kind of be useless because it would only have, you know, help with the things we already know. Yeah. Previous strategies. That makes sense. Now, just to share the opposite it for one second. There's a lot of stuff. I'd say 80 % of our corporate information is to be reused purposefully. Like you don't need people like making up a new answer to an HR policy. You don't need people making up a new answer to what is Box's security functionality and how should I position it to a customer.

27:32So in those cases, actually all of your enterprise information, which is what we do, you know, as a business is like that enterprise information becomes valuable for agents because they can look at the documentation. They can look at the sales pitch. They can look at the meeting that was recorded. That actually becomes very useful information for that kind of run rate 80 % of your company's work. Yeah, but it's for specific work, so like a founder strategy. Yeah. And you said some next great companies are going to be founded in the next three years. And you gave a very specific timeline. Why three years?

28:07Well, I mean, it could be three and a half years. Which is like not 10. It looks like we have a very limited gap in the market where you can build something great because then it's going to be another like boring 10 years. Basic theory is like, you know, these market windows happen every 10, 20, 30 years in technology. The mainframe, the personal computer, the internet, the cloud slash mobile. So there's already been kind of four of these eras. And if you look at the biggest companies, you know, in tech, they generally correspond with when these windows open. There's a couple of examples that don't.

28:44Facebook didn't correspond with any particular window. It was more of a social change that occurred as opposed to a technological change. But most other things, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, the real turbocharging of IBM in that era and Intel and so on, they correspond to a new technology at the foundation level emerges. and then you have this opening where a bunch of new companies kind of respond to that. In our era, it was Salesforce and Workday and sort of enterprise software companies like Box that sort of were able to capture that moment. And then in mobile, it was like Uber and DoorDash and another set of companies.

29:28So we're in a window right now that has all of the makings of that, which is AI is now emerging. Companies are going to want to apply this intelligence in various areas. And so there are going to be a lot of applied AI companies that bring that intelligence to businesses, to society, to consumers in these applied use cases. And the only reason it's not like 10 years is because there's a lot of network effects remotes that get built. So if you build one of these companies and you're capturing data from the customer and you're improving the feedback loop of the agent, that'll just make your technology better and better over time.

30:04whereby at least on paper that that product should become more uh sort of uh strengthened in its competitive advantage over time so that's why it's like yeah it's not like an infinitely long window yeah because you know it's very hard to disrupt walmart today because customers have been using it for decades yeah um and uh and so you kind of want to be in one of those spots as these markets are are emerging are you seeing any gaps in the market where a startup should be working on right now? Still, I mean, tons. But I think there's still like, I think, you know, everyone sort of knows the example of like Harvey right now for legal.

30:44I think there's still lots of job functions, industries that will have their Harvey. Like, I don't think we've heard the end of the Harvey for X. I think there's going to be new infrastructure that gets built out because these agents are going to need new kinds of tools beneath them. There's all this new interesting stuff around when agents are doing work within software, they need more headless technology that they have access to. They might need payments. And so Stripe and this new company Tempo is providing payments for agents. Well, now if an agent can pay money, then you can start to think through like, well, what would the agent pay money for?

31:22And there might be new businesses that emerge that the agent is now going to transact with. They're going to need data, probably. They're going to need infrastructure. They're going to need to do tasks for you in the economy. There's lots of things that you can start to imagine that will become these new business models because of what happens with agents doing this work. With a whole new layer of active creatures in the market, which are agents. Yeah, 100%. If you were starting today, can you walk me through a plan? What would you do to find the right idea, to test it, and to make first money?

31:54My first thing would be some mix of like, you know, assume that we've got the most intelligent sort of system on the planet. So we have this incredible AI intelligence and just imagine that emerges. Then the question is where in the economy would that add the most amount of value? And then try and think through like, like are there spots where like an incumbent isn't effectively responding to that? So that'd be like one framework. Another framework would be like, where in the economy is it hard to deploy agents because there's a lot of other kind of systems that that those agents need access to and that's usually where like there's lots of work to be done to get the agent to work within the environment i'm pretty excited by a lot of these new kind of professional services it integration consulting firms that are emerging because when you go to the real world and you're like oh would you like to automate your work with you know co-work or or codex or any of these systems they're like yeah that'd be awesome And then they show you their environment.

32:50And it's like, ooh, it's going to be a lot harder than you think. What markets? Anything. Anything. Everybody. Healthcare, law, life sciences, bank, just every industry. Because if your company is more than five years old, pre-AI, your data is all over the place. You've got 30 different systems you're working with. Your workflows aren't documented to the prior point. So that's a lot of change management you need to go do to implement agents. So what does that spell? that spells opportunity for new services startups. That spells opportunity for the existing Accentures and Deloits of the world. It's kind of like a little bit of an up-for-grab market at the moment because of how much work there's going to be.

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34:28How do you decide between like building versus? Maybe the only thing is like Mark Cuban has had this riff and I fully agree with it. There's going to be like a lot of opportunity both for companies, but even just these will be roles that if you're like graduating right now, you might want to think about is like, who's the person that shows up at the 10-person consulting firm in Minneapolis, just to pick a non-value location? Who's the person that shows up that helps them take advantage of AI? Because they don't have a big IT department. They don't have a way to wire up their agentic workflows very easily.

35:02There's going to be tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars to get made between jobs and services firms in just that over the next decade. Also, as an entrepreneur, when I'm thinking about that, but what if Claude just makes the process really easy? I don't know. You just deploy an agent. They build a specific agent who goes into your email, whatever you have, your box, and creates the whole ecosystem for you. How do you think about that? Because these companies are getting more and more powerful, right? If I took your exact scenario and I'm like, okay, an agent's going to read through my entire email inbox in that, in that scenario.

35:36And then it's going to access Salesforce. And then it's going to have some kind of like workflow that participates in like even me as a, I've been building software for 25 years and I use every single tool that has ever been produced in AI. Obviously not literally, but, but like pretty much I don't feel comfortable implementing that workflow right now. So the idea that that 10 person company is going to go and set that up. And just because Claude became super powerful, I am skeptical that we ever get to that point. Because the reason why I'm not comfortable with that is like, I don't, I have to think through the guardrails of like, what happens if somebody emails me and then says, Hey, Aaron, I, you know, you, I need you to pull up this Salesforce record for me that you told me you would, you would look at and you can send me that information.

36:31Well, if my agent has access to my email in my Salesforce, then the agent should, by design, answer that email question and go pull in the Salesforce record and then send it out. That's like a non-starter. You can't just take any untrusted email coming in and then have the agent... And distribute information. And distribute information that your tool has access to. So even me trying to think through how to implement whatever your scenario was just now, I would have a hard time thinking through, how do I set the right guardrails? How do I have the right alert mechanisms to me? How do I have the right sort of human in the loop of like, should I review all of the emails before they go out and have an interface to do that?

37:07Should I have some escalation mechanism that like pings me on my cell if like I need to look at something? How does the person on the other end of that email inbox, not how do they, how do they get to me as the real person and like get, you know, how do they escape the agentic loop that they're in? There's like 30 questions that I even have thinking through whatever that workflow is. So it's not a matter of Claude is so powerful. It's a matter of like how the systems talk to each other, the safety mechanisms of those systems. How do you define the, how do you define the actual workflow? So it gets done in a kind of safe and reliable way, that's the work that a technical person generally needs to go do.

37:46Okay. So, but that's like a big shift from, you know, being manual to getting automated as a company. What about niches where like we see Figma stock go down when Claude releases the design feature, right? And if somebody is working on that type of feature and they're afraid, you know, with the next Claude upgrade, it's going to be gone. Well, that's a different issue. So, so, So that's a different category altogether, which is, you know, how much will Claude or these AI models eat into the business models of different industries or different providers? I think that's more of something where you just have to be very thoughtful right now to not just build anything.

38:23You have to build things that like, what are you building where even as AI agent progress continues, no matter what, no matter how much it continues, it could be infinitely powerful. There's still some other thing that that agent is going to need to do. It's going to need to put its data somewhere. It's going to need to incorporate into a workflow. It's going to need a human to take the information and put it into the real world. Over time, more and more value will start to look like things where, again, like it's a well-governed process that has lots of security or compliance needs. You have to trust the underlying system.

38:58You know, probably just like quick personal productivity tools maybe will be less relevant. At the same time, like in the Figma example, I think Claude design is actually very, very cool, very powerful. I play with it a bunch and it like, you know, generates, you know, amazing designs. But at the same time, I still want our design team kind of going and doing the last mile of work. And right now they're doing that last mile still in Figma. Even these things are not as binary as I think maybe the Wall Street, for instance, would suggest. So that's why it's still kind of a, you know, we're in a pretty dynamic period right now.

39:32Yeah, and it's also because I feel like the stock reflects what we're thinking about the next two years. And because this is evolving so, so fast, sometimes as an entrepreneur, I'm like asking myself, okay, I'm building these apps. Why don't a language learner just go into ChatGPT and like build the Apple Vibe code and that for themselves? I mean, I think it's a question that every entrepreneur should have a very big whiteboard that like thinks through various game theory events that could happen. and where will your value get compressed and where will it not? And it's hard to, you know, in any kind of generic way, have a perfect answer because it is a very busy, complicated time.

40:11But again, kind of ironically, in like the more macro sense, I think the more that AI is sort of doing in these kind of automated things, you're just going to see new constraints begin to emerge. Like, you know, a lot of people like healthcare classically as this example. And I think Jeff Hinton, you know, had, I don't have the perfect quote, but I think, you know, he felt like radiology would reduce as an example because, you know, AI will get really good at looking through radiology images and self-driving cars. And now we still have radiologists driving to work every day. Oh, sure. Yeah. I think it was that.

40:45Oh, yeah. So what also happens is these other things that occur, right? So like, we might have like AI that gets the radiologist 90 % of the way there to like look at the right thing or get some suggestions, at the exact same time, what that's meaning is we're doing vastly more imaging. We're doing vastly more scanning. Way more people now can go do it. More accessible. It's more accessible. And so actually now the demands on that role end up increasing as a result of that. So there's a lot of parts of the market where actually AI facilitates lowering the barrier to doing that work. And by lowering the barrier to doing that work, more people participate in it.

41:21And as more people participate in it, a new constraint gets kind of backed up that now real people need to go and kind of, you know, get involved in or go and work on. Yeah. I feel like the more I play with AI agents, I do realize that I need a person at the beginning of the process and the end of the process. So I still end up having more people. Yeah. And again, it's just like a question of like, how many roles do you want to play within your company or your team? Like, do you want to play designer, developer, marketer, strategist, sales rep? No, you're just like, ah, at some point. So yeah, the solo entrepreneur is already used to that because it was, you know, we or they have been doing that forever.

42:01Like when I did, uh, startups before box and I was a solo founder, like, man, I, you had to do 10 things and you're like, you're so tired. And if I could have ever hired somebody to go do half of those things, I would have. So could AI allow us to get these companies to a little bit more scale to the point where then you can hire that next person? That's more of where I think this would go. And do you think it's the best time to start a company now? I'm kind of a stickler for this one key point, which is it's only the best time to start a company if you've got a great idea. I think that great ideas can exist in any kind of period of time, but I'm not in the camp of just like everybody should start companies because it's I mean, you know, it's like really hard work.

42:46It's extremely stressful. You're working like mad. I don't think that people should feel pressured into starting something because it's one of these windows. When I say it's one of these windows, it's just to reinforce the point that like this is the moment where the best ideas probably will get built. That doesn't mean that you should start one. It doesn't mean you have to rush yourself to starting that. Yeah, because if you rush yourself to starting a bad idea with one of these moments, you're no better off. So I would say it's a good moment. You have an incredible amount of leverage. That also comes with more competition because basically by lowering the barrier of getting ideas out in the market, what do you get?

43:25You get more competing ideas. If you get more competing ideas, that's more noise that customers have to deal with. So interestingly, and back to the job thing again, interestingly, it's not so much like now the idea, getting the idea out there that's going to matter it's going to be like man do you have like do you have somebody talking to customers do you have are you doing sales are you doing marketing and so there's a new constraint which is like the constraint isn't code generation the code this constraint is is are you in front of customers enough and and are you marketing marketing which is a new set of dollars yeah uh if you could become 19 again today and start over would you exchange that uh to what you've currently built like to start over again would you do that am i starting in 2026 or back in 2005 No, 2026 is a 19-year-old.

44:09Would you do that or would you just stay put with what you've done? Oh, I see. I see. Well, I'm the most excited we've ever been on what we're doing now. So I would certainly pursue what we're currently doing because part of it is historical, which is, you know, we've earned the trust of 120 ,000 customers, which is a good launch pad for the next set of things we want to go do. um so and then i i just love the the kind of things that we get to do with customers we get to work with every industry and every size company and we get to help uh you know space launches and medical discoveries and blockbuster films get produced so like i'm very excited by what what our platform does with agents um at the same time i have lots of friends that are doing you know companies and i'm like oh that's a really cool idea right now and it looks very exciting and And and and so I'm just in a period of like I'm impressed and excited by lots of stuff while also being, again, incredibly stressed constantly.

45:07Any jobs that are going to disappear in the next five years? I think there's going to be work that gets compressed. And and then and I think you're going to take those people and often repurpose for for, again, more of the agent manager escalation path or proactive versions of that work. A very kind of clearly obvious one is, and this is something that companies always, you know, tried to sort of automate to some degree. Like if you're emailing a company and you're saying, like, I need you to reset my password, that is probably not going to be a person. Like customer support, right? But even that, customer support is this funny one, which is like, we think about it as a monolithic thing because we call it customer support.

45:49There's tiers of customer support. there's like the first line of customer support that we will most certainly automate which is change password change password and i don't mean to like you know over minimize that thing but like there's a lot of tasks like that which is like i need to download this thing i can't log in i have this issue whatever that we're going to fully automate but there's a lot of customer support which is like i need you to get on this call with me and look at my my specific problem in my computer and why this thing isn't working and we just have no way to automate that yeah like maybe will automate like the next line of the of the set of questions but you can't you can't get to the the final thing i had i had a friend have a problem with box two weeks ago he just sent me some screenshots and there's a 0.0 chance that he would be able to have asked the question with an agent so it had to be you well in this case it actually it had to be a senior product manager i had to get the senior product manager to the person but he couldn't have talked to a chat bot and answered the question.

46:50But what about like bookkeepers? I had an issue with my Mac last week. I spent 10, 20, 30 minutes on AI trying to diagnose it. Never worked. Had to call IT. They had to come and diagnose it. Couldn't replace that. Oh, okay. What about jobs like bookkeepers or? You know, some of these jobs, like again, they've been on the path already to how do you already automate as much of that away as possible. And so agents kind of are just another sort of layer in that. But again, you know, sort of the same answer. There's still always an escalation path because there's always the exception. There's always the weird anomaly that occurred.

47:30And you can't have, like the thing that you can't do is I can't moonlight as a bookkeeper. I can't moonlight as a lawyer. So at some point there still is this final path in the escalation, which is I may have been able to automate 90%, but you still have that one part. I had this legal question two months ago, and I asked every AI agent the same legal question. And every single one basically gave me the same answer. And then I called a lawyer, and they basically gave me a much more kind of contextualized answer because they could decide how much risk I wanted to take on or not take on. Knowing your personal situation, right?

48:11No, they know my personal situation. they also know the fact pattern of like, like, how does the industry tend to think about this one thing? And all the AI agents were giving the sort of mean answer of that particular topic, which is in this case, it's like, it's the more conservative answer. It's the thing that it should be trained against because it can't give you the, it's not going to give you the more liberal, risky answer. But when you talk to a lawyer, they're like, well, actually, yeah, this situation won't actually occur because of X, Y, Z fact patterns. And so those are the kind of things where like you then are like, I want somebody that has seen 20 years of this stuff.

48:46I don't want a model that was just like looking at Reddit and deciding, you know, how to use that information. Okay, my two last questions. You have a six-year-old, right? Almost seven, but yes. Okay. And four and seven and a half months. Oh, congratulations. Okay, are they going to go to college? Shoot, maybe I shouldn't have leaned in so much to the question. um uh i okay i am here's the one problem with me um as a b2b enterprise software person i am like boringly pragmatic and so i just think change happens more slowly and and it's funny because i have this like weird duality which is like i adopt every tool like i was i was wearing google glass like like in week two i buy every vr headset like i i lean into every one of these tools because I'm just like, I'm excited as a personal user.

49:40I love technology breakthroughs. It's amazing. And then I'm like, and then I go in the real world and I'm just like, man, that whole system over 300, 500 years that we've built up is like, is that really going to change because of this one variable? So on the college thing, I struggle because I'm like, on one hand, from first principles, it doesn't have to exist. My seven-year-old, almost seven-year-old is already way smarter than I was because he can, every question that comes to his mind, we're like looking up the answer right away. Whereas like, I don't have like a perfect memory of being seven, but like, like I didn't have like an instant resource for like every question, but like he wants to know like how fast a paragon Falcon can fly.

50:25We get the answer. He wants to know like how big the, the Atlantic ocean is. We get the answer. Like, like, and so he's just like a sponge for like unlimited information. On one hand, you're like, wow, that could probably replace like a lot of the traditional sort of, you know, ways that we think about these institutions. But then you're on their hand, you're like, well, you know, what is college other than another four years of high school, but with a little bit more vocational kind of orientation, a network of people that you want to be with and learn with and make connections with, a kind of transition period into the real world because, you know, you're still kind of young at 18.

51:03so like so that then i'm like a pragmatist i'm like does that really change in in this like super intelligence world or is the curriculum just changing and the format maybe changes um but like does everybody want to just be at home with their parents talking to an ai bot um like no so so it's like i have these other like you know kind of sort of counter pressures now things that should and must change like at a at a socio like societal level is like man can we have college cost a fifth of what it does because it's insane. Like, like, should you really go into debt for 20 years because you went to medical school or you went to, you know, get X degree?

51:39Like that's, that's incredibly insane. So like, should we use abundance to, to bring the cost down and try and do that as much as possible? Absolutely. So there's some things that need to change about college, but does the very concept change? I, I, I always, I always struggle with that one. Yeah. Same, same here. I feel like as a society, we're really slow to just change dramatically when it comes to foundations when college is one of them. Okay. Last question. Advice for entrepreneurs who are starting today. I would say just like back to the earlier point, lean into the tools, like learn the technology, see what's, what's, what's possible with it.

52:12Um, make sure you're riding the tailwind of, of what's happening in technology. Uh, you don't want to be, you know, kind of hitting a headwind, uh, where you're kind of going against the grain of the AI. You want to be like riding the AI wave out, um, which can mean a number of things. It might mean do things that actually in a world of AI become more important because people don't want AI to do that thing. So it's like, it's like this counterintuitive, like riding the AI wave might mean do a live events business. Like that's what other people are doing. Yeah. Like, like, like, do something where we will appreciate this other thing in the economy because AI is sort of so abundant or, or, um, uh, AI makes getting healthcare questions answered so quickly.

52:53So you should probably be doing hospitals because now more people are going to be actually needing real - Wellness clinics. Wellness clinics. So sometimes it's a technology thing that you do. Sometimes it's a thing that the technology is related to an underlying broader societal trend that will become more important as well. Build one of these consulting businesses that helps deploy the AI. I just think there's going to be like build a child care service because we're all sort of our brains are exploding and we need help with kids. There's all this kind of stuff that is going to need to exist.

53:29Thank you so much. I like your positivity, especially after talking to some scientists. Thank you. Thanks a lot.