Box’s CEO on Pivoting to the Enterprise Market

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2017

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, reflects on the cloud storage company’s entry into the enterprise market. He was skeptical about pivoting away from consumers, and it was challenging. But by staying disciplined with the product and deeply understanding market trends, they've made the strategic shift from B2C to B2B work.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you
0:20.2	listen. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green-ichael.
0:38.3	In the early 2000s, long before Aaron Levy became the CEO of Box. He was a teenager developing
0:45.8	internet products with his friends. We had this search engine in high school that was
0:50.0	vastly slower than Google so that didn't really go anywhere.
0:53.7	Later when he went to college he found himself carrying around USB drives and emailing
0:58.4	files to himself.
1:00.4	Moving data was necessary but also really annoying.
1:04.0	And right around then, there was this confluence of technology trends.
1:07.0	Web browser innovation was starting to spike again with Firefox just emerging.
1:11.0	You had the cost of storage was dropping pretty precipitously and you had
1:15.4	internet speed starting to finally get faster and faster.
1:18.8	Levy and his founding team saw the trends and built Box. One application that let consumers put all their
1:26.1	data in one place to access from anywhere. Those consumers started using the
1:30.9	application not just at home but at work in place of
1:34.7	traditional enterprise software and that's when Box pivoted from the consumer
1:39.2	market to the enterprise. Joining us now to talk about leading that kind of change is CEO Aaron Levy.
1:46.0	Aaron, thank you so much for talking with us today.
1:48.0	Sure, yeah, thank you so much.
	...

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