Latest news with #Levie
CNBC
19-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
At 20, he cold-emailed Mark Cuban and landed a $350,000 investment—now the company is worth $4.6 billion
Cloud storage and file-sharing business Box is worth $4.6 billion. It might never have gotten off the ground 20 years ago if Mark Cuban hadn't been closely monitoring his email. In 2005, Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie was still a student at the University of Southern California, where he was developing a cloud-based data storage startup from his dorm room. Since the company needed funding to get started, co-founder Dylan Smith contributed roughly $20,000 he earned playing online poker. Then, the summer before their junior year of college, Levie and his three co-founders — Smith, Sam Ghods, and Jeff Queisser — received an $80,000 seed round from angel investors to help them get Box incorporated as an official business and launch their initial product, Levie says. Still, the founders knew they would need a lot more to build out the platform and attract enough customers to turn it into a viable business. So Levie started sending cold emails to every potential investor he could think of, including Cuban, he says. "If you were [even] remotely an investor in 2005, you got an email from me," Levie says. He estimates that he reached out to dozens of investors from "anywhere in the world," starting in his hometown of Seattle, then expanding out to Silicon Valley and even Cuban in Texas. "If there was any theoretical chance that you could invest in the company, I was probably emailing you." Cuban responded just a few hours after the students reached out. The billionaire entrepreneur and then-owner of the Dallas Mavericks initially proposed working together on a data-hosting project for one of his businesses, Levie says. "But then it basically expanded from there." Cuban agreed to invest $350,000 before he'd even met Levie and his Box co-founders in person. "That was wild, because it happened so fast," says Levie. Cuban's funding represented Box's "breakthrough investment," he adds, which gave him the confidence to drop out of college and focus on building the company. Cuban maintains a public email address and checks it regularly. As of 2020, he received up to 1,000 email pitches per day, he told CNBC Make It ibn November 2020. However, the billionaire is a tough sell: Cuban estimates he deletes roughly 90% of those messages and it only takes him a couple of seconds to decide if he's interested, he said. Levie insists Cuban received "the same pitch as everyone else," consisting of Levie's observation that online data storage was getting cheaper, the internet was getting faster, and with more people using a variety of devices for work and personal use, there was an opportunity for a company to make it easier to securely store data online and allow people to "work from anywhere," he says. So why did that resonate with Cuban, specifically? Cuban did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It's request for comment. Levie believes the tech billionaire "was just very primed for that pitch," particularly because Cuban's time developing the streaming media market in the 1990s likely meant he was familiar with the need for more online data storage options, the Box CEO says. "I think our pitch just landed at the right time with him," Levie says. Still, the Box co-founders weren't sure Cuban would respond so quickly, or at all. In fact, Levie admits that basically all of his cold email pitches "were shots in the dark." But that was the idea, he says: "I don't know what part of my brain didn't develop properly, but I don't see it as any risk of pinging people and pitching people [out of the blue]. You just have to have as many at-bats as possible." Levie offers similar advice to young entrepreneurs today. "Email everybody," he says, reasoning that you have little to lose by doing so. "Most of the time they're not gonna respond. But the good news about math is you'll catch the one that does, whether it's an investor or a prospect or somebody you want to hire. So to this day, I love emailing people [I want to work with]." Working out of Smith's parents' attic in Mercer Island, Washington, and then from Levie's uncle's garage in Berkeley, California, the co-founders put Cuban's investment to use. They hired contract engineers who helped develop their product and put money toward server costs, online marketing and a 1-800 phone number for customer service, Levie says. "We didn't pay ourselves anything. This was just purely, like, 'Let's grow the business as much as possible,'" he says. Just a year after Cuban made his investment, however, the billionaire had a change of heart. He and the Box co-founders disagreed on the decision to pivot to a "freemium" business model where Box gave away a free gigabyte of online storage to attract more customers. Cuban didn't like that idea, or the fact that Box would have to take on additional venture funding to subsidize the cost of customer acquisition, Levie said in a 2012 interview with design company Zurb. Box raised more money in 2006 — a $1.5 million funding round led by VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to TechCrunch — and Levie used part of that capital to buy out Cuban's stake. In 2014, when Box went public in an IPO that valued the company around $1.7 billion, Cuban reflected on his decision to walk away. Cuban wrote on Twitter that he "would combust" if he was responsible for a business with losses that outweighed revenue, like Box's did at that point. At the time of the IPO, Box had still not yet turned a profit. Box has posted an annual profit each year since 2023, though, with the company reporting net income of $129 million in 2024. While their partnership was short-lived, Cuban's investment helped kickstart Box's initial growth — and, 20 years later, Levie vividly remembers the excitement he and his co-founders felt when he received Cuban's email. "It's very surreal when you see the name of somebody that you hold in high esteem in your inbox," Levie says. "That's a very good feeling. It may have been the first time ever that I felt that rush of like: 'Wait, I'm sorry. Mark Cuban literally responded? His name is literally in the sender line?' We were just super pumped that it actually happened."
Geek Wire
15-05-2025
- Business
- Geek Wire
Box tightens Microsoft ties with new Copilot integration, builds out its own suite of AI agents
Box CEO Aaron Levie grew up in the Seattle region, and co-founded Box in 2005. (Box Photo) Box is deepening its connection to Microsoft's productivity platform through a new AI agent that works with Microsoft 365 Copilot, while introducing new AI agents of its own to analyze documents, automate tasks, and dig up insights from enterprise data. The new technologies, announced Thursday morning, build on the Redwood City, Calif., company's longtime role as a hub for secure file storage and collaboration, while continuing its push into what Box describes as intelligent content management. Microsoft 365 Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant for business, integrated with its widely used productivity apps. The new Box AI agent will let users search, summarize, and act on content stored in Box from inside Microsoft tools such as Teams, Word, and PowerPoint. Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie, who grew up near Microsoft in Mercer Island, Wash., said in an interview that the Copilot integration is part of an effort to make data and content in Box available to AI applications in other environments, in addition to its own platform. 'We want to be the best place for bringing AI to content, but we know there's lots of other things you're going to do with AI,' Levie said. For example, he said, a user might ask Microsoft Copilot a question that pulls information from tools like Outlook or Dynamics. Box wants to ensure content stored on its platform can be part of that answer, alongside other enterprise data. Box AI integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot, letting users retrieve and summarize contract data stored in Box directly from within Microsoft tools like Teams and Word. (Click for larger image.) In addition to the Microsoft 365 Copilot integration, Box is introducing three new AI agents on its platform, expanding on its existing AI capabilities. The agents focus on intelligent search, deep research across large sets of documents, and structured data extraction from unstructured sources like PDFs and scanned images. Levie has emerged as an outspoken advocate for using AI tools in daily work, writing in a recent LinkedIn post that he now turns to AI for everything from drafting product ideas and customer surveys to researching market trends and analyzing investor materials. The industry's move into AI agents aims to take things a step further. The idea is to not only generate content or summarize information, but complete tasks across different systems, like pulling data, connecting tools, and doing other types of work automatically. COMING THIS WEEKEND Box CEO Aaron Levie talks AI, agents, and the future of work on the GeekWire Podcast Speaking with GeekWire this week, Levie said AI agents have a lot of promise for automating knowledge work, but acknowledged that the technology is still early, and easy to overhype. He described 2025 as largely a year of pilot projects and smaller-scale testing, and said many ideas for agents are not realistic yet in practice. 'If you ask 10 people to describe AI agents,' he said, 'you'd probably get 20x the number of use cases than are probably possible today.' At the same time, he said, some use cases for Box's new AI agents are already proving valuable, citing two examples. Deploying a data extraction agent to dig through contracts and pull out key fields into a structured database. Using a deep research agent to analyze large volumes of internal data and generate product recommendations or due diligence reports. In both cases, Levie said, the agents are enabling initiatives that previously would have been too costly or time-consuming to justify. While Box and Microsoft compete in some areas, such as cloud storage and collaboration, Levie said they continue to partner across a range of enterprise tools and applications. That pattern plays out across Box's business and the industry. Box also competes with companies including Google (Drive), OpenText (Documentum), and Dropbox. It also partners and integrates with Google, Salesforce, Zoom, Adobe, and ServiceNow. Box, founded in 2005, went public in 2015 and has about 2,800 employees. The company reported $1.09 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ended in January, up 5% from the year before. Profits for the year were $244.6 million, up from $129 million the year before. The company said its new AI agents will be available in the coming months, with pricing to be announced closer to launch.
CNBC
28-04-2025
- Business
- CNBC
CEO: I rejected a $600 million acquisition offer, leaving me 'freaked out' and sleepless—now my company's worth $4.4 billion
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 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.
Axios
03-03-2025
- Business
- Axios
OpenAI's GPT-4.5 could be the last of its kind
GPT-4.5, OpenAI's big new model, represents a significant step forward for AI's industry leader. It could also be the end of an era. The big picture: 4.5 is "a giant, expensive model," as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it. The company has also described it as "our last non-chain-of-thought model," meaning — unlike the newer "reasoning" models — it doesn't take its time to respond or share its "thinking" process. Why it matters: The pure bigger-is-better approach to model pre-training now faces enormous costs, dwindling availability of good data and diminishing returns — which is why the industry has begun exploring different roads to continuing to improve each new AI generation. Between the lines: Building and powering the massive data centers required to build and run the latest models has become an enormous burden, while assembling ever-bigger datasets has become challenging, since today's models already use nearly all the data available on the public internet. Yes, but: Although pre-training may have hit a wall, most of the industry remains bullish on new gains to be made with reasoning. Catch up quick: OpenAI Thursday released an early version of GPT-4.5, a major update to the large language model underlying ChatGPT that OpenAI says will be better at recognizing patterns and drawing connections. This is OpenAI's largest model yet — though the company declined to offer details about its size or the computing resources it took to train it. While OpenAI isn't sharing details, the cost is clearly substantial, as evidenced by the fact that developers are being charged 30 times as much for their use of GPT-4.5 compared with the current cost of GPT-4o. OpenAI says GPT-4.5 should hallucinate less, follow instructions better and deliver interactions that feel more natural. OpenAI turned on the new model Thursday, but only for subscribers of the $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro and developers who use OpenAI's API. Next week it will be available for some other paid subscribers, including the $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus service, with paid enterprise and educational customers getting access the following week. What they're saying: Altman wrote in a post on X, "Good news: it is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me. ... It's a different kind of intelligence and there's a magic to it I haven't felt before." One skill the new model seems to have mastered is "reading the room," for instance when a user might prefer a conversation rather than be handed a pile of facts. Zoom in: Box CEO Aaron Levie, whose company has been testing GPT-4.5, says that it shines in certain areas, such as accurately extracting the proper information from very large datasets. In such tasks, Levie told Axios, GPT-4.5 is about 20% better. "We're very much in the camp of not diminishing returns yet," Levie said in an interview, adding that updates like GPT-4.5 are "continuing to drive new step function improvements on reasoning capabilities, logic, math, a bunch of things that really matter to our world in the enterprise." Levie said it makes sense to use models like GPT-4o for some tasks, such as summarizing documents, especially given how much the cost of that model has come down. "But if you go to a bank or a large law firm and they need to run mission critical operations on their data, then they would absolutely pay the five or 10 times increase on these more powerful models — because it's still far cheaper than their alternative of just throwing humans at the problem." Yes, but: Levie said the next era of gains will likely come from improving the reasoning that sits on top of large language models. "If the foundation model is extremely powerful and then you're doing chain-of-thought thinking on top of that model, then you get very, very high-impact results," he said. Altman has already said that the next big release, GPT-5, will integrate reasoning capabilities from its inception. Between the lines: Former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew says the question isn't either/or, but comes down to where AI companies commit their resources. "That o1 is better than GPT-4.5 on most problems tells us that pre-training isn't the optimal place to spend compute in 2025," McGrew said in a thread on X. "There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in reasoning still. But pre-training isn't dead, it's just waiting for reasoning to catch up to log-linear returns."
CBC
30-01-2025
- General
- CBC
New smoke alarms available for deaf and hard of hearing Calgarians
A new program launched by the Calgary Fire Department is aiming to help hundreds of deaf and hard of hearing Calgarians. The program will provide specialized smoke and carbon monoxide alarms to be installed for free for eligible Calgarians. The $100,000 program cost is coming from the City of Calgary's fund for equity in service delivery. The new alarms will provide bed or pillow shakers that vibrate to wake people during emergencies. The alarms also flash strobe lights and loud, low-pitched audio signals, intended to help individuals recognize emergencies no matter the time of day. "Every Calgarian deserves to feel safe at home regardless of their circumstances, and this initiative removes financial barriers to achieve that goal," said Chief Steve Dongworth of the Calgary Fire Department at a news conference. To qualify for the program, Calgarians must self-identify as deaf or hard of hearing, live within city limits and participate in support programs. Eileen Levie was the first Calgarian to receive the new device in December. Levie, who lives alone, said through sign language interpreters that the device was "life-changing." She said she used to rely on neighbours for help in case of emergency. She also had a flashing strobe doorbell to alert her. "I would just be guessing most of the time. I didn't know what was happening. I certainly didn't know what kind of emergency it was," Levie said. Dongworth said the fire department has had many instances where rooms were not evacuated due to residents not being able to hear alarms, which puts people at increased risk during a blaze. Door hangers and stickers will be provided to residents who are a part of the new program. It will help first responders make sure everyone is evacuated safely under the designed protocol. Alex Kwan, community safety officer with the department, said staff will visit residents to sync the specialized equipment, adding it is treated like any regular alarm. Officers will also check in to make sure all equipment is working properly. Kwan said that better patient outcome is key when dealing with emergencies, adding it can be quite the scare when a first responder is standing over you trying to wake you up. The first of 12 units have been installed in the city, Kwan said, leaving remaining units available for anybody who qualifies. Registration can be done through the fire department's community safety email or by calling 311.
