CEO: I rejected a $600 million acquisition offer, leaving me 'freaked out' and sleepless—now my company's worth $4.4 billion

CNBC

28-04-2025

Six years after Aaron Levie dropped out of college to start a business in his parents' attic with three friends, he faced a decision so nerve-wracking that he spent months "freaked out" and sleepless, he says.
The company was Box, a provider of cloud-based content management and file-sharing tools now based in Redwood City, California. And the decision revolved around a $600 million acquisition offer the four co-founders received from a business called Citrix, a larger rival at the time.
The question facing the co-founders was simple: Accept the offer or turn it down, betting that they could eventually build Box into something bigger than $600 million? Levie, now 40, vividly remembers the "volatile" few months he spent debating the pros and cons.
He'd left the University of Southern California to start Box, which the co-founders first ran from the attic in Mercer Island, Washington, and then from Levie's uncle's garage in Berkeley, California. When Citrix made its offer, the friends were all in their mid-20s, and the idea that their fledgling startup could sell for so much money — after years of cold-emailing investors and pitching Fortune 500 businesses on becoming clients — was extremely tempting, Levie says.If they'd gotten the offer a few years earlier, they "would have definitely sold" the business, says Levie. But by 2011, they had more experience and confidence running Box. They'd raised roughly $80 million in funding, and had approximately 7 million users, TechCrunch reported at the time.
The cloud-storage industry was growing, and if Box could potentially be worth more than $600 million one day, the co-founders figured that the only way to know for sure was to keep working toward that goal themselves, recalls Levie.
So, they rolled the dice and rejected the offer.
Today, Box has a market value of $4.42 billion — and 115,000 business clients globally, according to a company spokesperson — a decade after its initial public offering in 2015.
Here, Levie discusses the "volatile" months spent deliberating over Citrix's offer, the advice he received from other founders who'd sold their businesses and his relatively simple formula for success.
CNBC Make It: After six years of growing Box, you received your first serious acquisition offer. How did you approach the decision to accept or reject it?
Levie: This one was really tough for us. It was a couple of months, lots of conversations. The four of us actually went to a hotel one night in Half Moon Bay, [California,] and we basically treated this as an off-site [to discuss]: What do we want to do with our lives?
We were in our mid-20s. What do you do in your mid-20s if you've sold a company? We would probably go [start a company] again, and we'd eventually be back in this exact situation. We eventually concluded this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment to build something much, much bigger than what we had built. We had something that was working.
When there's an exit opportunity, your worst case is that you will literally make $0 in the alternative path. We still said that would be better than the potential of what [we'd be] giving up.
If we were wrong — if it didn't work out, and this was the best it was ever going to be — could we live with ourselves? We basically concluded: Yes. We'd have to go and do it again, but we could live with ourselves.
What about the other side of the argument? Besides the money, what were the reasons you might've wanted to sell?
Maybe you have less stress in your life? That would probably be a big one.
I called five or so CEO-founders during this process, and [their advice] was a little bit mixed. One or two said: "Hey, this is pretty life-changing. You really should consider it."
A couple others said, "You have a tiger by the tail. Don't let it go. Keep doubling down. As an entrepreneur, when you have a thing that's working, just keep riding it." That sat with me, because these were people that, 5 or 10 years prior, had sold their company. [And they're saying] "don't interrupt it."
There are some advantages to joining forces with a bigger company, for sure, but those are advantages you want to use when you don't see a path to victory on your own terms.
How confident were you with your decision? Did it still feel like a huge risk to give up the guaranteed exit money?
Oh, my God. Yes. We didn't get any sleep after making that decision. I was probably freaked out for weeks or months.
I happen to be a very nervous person to begin with, so it's not the kind of [situation] that I like to find myself in. You're just constantly [wondering]: Did we make the right call? What if this scenario happened? I probably should have been on drugs, and I wasn't, but I was totally spazzing out mentally.
We got lucky, because we eventually did another funding round at a higher valuation, and we kind of put it behind us. [Box raised an additional $81 million in October 2011 at a valuation of more than $600 million, according to TechCrunch.]
Once you turned down the offer, what were the biggest obstacles you faced in growing Box past that $600 million benchmark?
The biggest obstacles have largely just been execution. Can you build the right features fast enough? Can you sell to all of the customers fast enough? Most of any success or failure in software is purely down to execution.
There's a refrain: "Ideas don't matter, only execution does." I'm a massive believer in the truth of that.
Box is now valued at more than $4 billion. Has that changed how you think about success?
I like business because I like building things and creating things that solve problems. Success, to some degree, is just the ability to sustain that and keep growing it.
I have a family now — two kids, a wife. It's great to have a fantastic family, and it's great to be able to go solve really interesting problems. That's what I'm in it for.
I don't think there's a certain number of employees or a particular revenue threshold [I'm seeking]. That won't drive any difference in happiness.