Our ZURBevents explore the intersection of product design and business. →
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Back in 2005, when he was just 20 years old, Aaron Levie built a simple product in his dorm room to let people store files online. It was a college business project for a class. Aaron then cold-emailed Mark Cuban, the owner of Dallas Mavericks, entrepreneur and investor, about his idea to turn his project into a business. Excited about the idea Mark gave him $350,000 to turn his project into a business.
Fast forward seven years, Box now provides more than 100,000 companies (77% of which are Fortune 500) with secure cloud content management. The have recently landed an amazing $81M expansion round of venture capital funding from Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures as they have surpassed their 8M users mark.
Aaron Levie, the founder and CEO of Box, who has been named as "Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30" by Inc Magazine, will get on his soapbox on March 9th, 2012 to talk about the hurdles and challenges he faced along the way. Specifically — he’ll answer the following questions:
1. Tell us about those early days when you emailed Mark Cuban. What was the process of securing funding from him?
2. You came to a crossroads with Mark Cuban and actually bought him out — tell us more about that. What did you disagree about?
3. You were a huge proponent of a freemium business model 6 years ago, which must have seemed crazy to people. How did you decide to stick with that?
4. Six years ago — this was the time that Google announced their G-drive service. That must have kept you up in night?
5. How much of Dropbox and Sharepoint was inspired by Box? How much did they inspire you?
6. Talent — it has become ridiculously tough to find great talent. How do you source talent? What is your interview process like? Does Facebook/Google try to hire your developers?
7. Besides Steve Jobs who is your Michael Jordan of entrepreneurs? Who do you emulate? Larry Ellison? Tony Hsieh?
Format: Our talks usually last one hour. Food and refreshments are provided at each talk. If you have questions or comments, send an email to rsvp@zurb.com
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