Guest: Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, and Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins
When he was a newly minted venture capitalist at USVP, Mamoon Hamid got a tip that he should meet a young entrepreneur named Aaron Levie, and fought for the right to invest in his cloud storage startup, Box. For years after that initial investment, the two men say, Box’s fate was precarious: “We could have died any day,” Mamoon says, and Aaron recalled several times he had to be talked “down from a ledge.” Today, they tell us how Box established itself as “open for business” — a concept Mamoon hounded Aaron with in the early years — and grew into success.
In this episode, Aaron, Mamoon, and Joubin discuss Box socks, authenticity at work, Josh Stein, living in the office, over-diligence, Google Platypus, the 2008 crash, nostalgia, everything is personal, the ten-person test, burnout, Dan Levin, ChatGPT, Parker Conrad, and Silicon Valley as “technology town.”
In this episode, we cover:
- “Make mom proud, unless she’s evil” (01:59)
- How Mamoon and Aaron met (04:38)
- Mamoon’s first investment in Box (11:15)
- Pausing the term sheet (16:08)
- “We could have died any day” (19:01)
- What is company-building? (23:23)
- Open For Business (25:27)
- Getting to cash flow positive (27:52)
- Slow growth with no burn vs. fast growth, high burn (31:15)
- Tough feedback (34:31)
- Overcoming challenges around the Box IPO (36:31)
- Growing as CEO (38:35)
- The Apple Vision Pro and AI (44:15)
- Investing in cutting-edge companies (49:15)
- Using AI to re-juice growth (51:48)
- How Aaron educates himself (54:22)
- Business as a sport (57:14)
- Who Box is hiring and what “grit” means to Aaron (01:00:44)
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