Aaron Levie
39 statements across 8 episodes · 12 bullish · 11 bearish · 4 people on the record · first statement Feb 11, 2022 by Aaron Levie · said 139 times in 43 episodes since 2016 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Aaron Levie's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (52), Jason Lemkin (40), Ted Blosser (5), Rory O'Driscoll (4), Mamoon Hamid (4), Josh Stein (3), Jeff Lawson (3), Tyler Willis (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Coinbase Cuts AI Spend by 50% | Kalshi's $40B Valuation & Impending IPO | The Year for SaaS Roll-Ups · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic's Raise & What It Means for Potential IPO? Mag7: Google & Amazon Up, Meta & Microsoft Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Thrive Raises New $10B Fund | OpenAI Buys OpenClaw | Stripe at $140B: Is Adyen Wildly Undervalued? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 46 mentions in 12 episodes 4 per episode
- Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- What Does it Take to Be Good at Series A and B Today? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Thinking Machines Co-Founder Joins Meta for $3.5BN, Industry Venture's $665M Acquisition · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI’s $10BN Secondary Sale, Ramp Hits $1BN ARR & Brex Hits $700M · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Will Cursor Kill Figma? Lightspeed Raises $9B & OpenAI’s $1B from Disney & #1 App in App Store · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Eventbrite Sold for $500M, Databricks $5B Raise at $134B Valuation & Why SaaS is Like Japan · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sam Altman's Masterplan or a Gift to Anthropic? Palantir & Shopify Crush Earnings · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- a16z GP, Martin Casado: Anthropic vs OpenAI & Why Open Source is a National Security Risk with China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 36 mentions in 9 episodes 4 per episode
- Jason Lemkin: PluralSight S*** the Bed & The Next IPO Candidates | E1160 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mamoon Hamid: AI - Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws | E1217 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: Predictions for 2024 - What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups? | E1099 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Keith Rabois & Eric Glyman: The Tools, Tips, Secrets and Process That Drive Efficiency | E1148 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Eiso Kant, CTO @Poolside: Raising $600M To Compete in the Race for AGI | E1211 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Ara Mahdessian: ServiceTitan Would Not Be the Success if We Raised VC Earlier | E1175 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Andrew Bialecki: Is Klaviyo the Most Under-Priced Public Company? | E1170 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Michael Eisenberg: How China Could Overtake the US in the AI Race | E1167 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 2 mentions in 1 episode
2022 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: 23andMe's Anne Wojcicki on How To Approach Trust in Business and Personal Relationships, Leadership Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg and Reflections on How The Best Founders Manage Their Boards
- Miki Kuusi: How I Scaled Wolt to $8B; Why I Sold to DoorDash | 20VC #953 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Why the Traditional Seed Fund Model No Longer Works, Why Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed Bring Signaling Risk but also Less Pressure, The One Criteria All Potential Sales Hires Need to Have and The Clear Signs of 10x Sales Hires with Jason Lemki
- 20VC: Scaling to $122M ARR IPO with $6M in Net Burn, Olo. The Ultimate Journey of Capital Efficiency, What Worked, What Did Not Work and How Leaders Need To Reshape Thinking Around Resource and Attention Allocation
- 20VC: Sweetgreen Founder Jonathan Neman on Leadership Lessons from Managing Through COVID, The Importance of Failing Fast and Iterating & How the Best Leaders Bring Together Brand, Capital Allocation and Strategy
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Plaid's Zach Perret on Why You Have To Hire For Spikes and What That Really Means, Fintech Predictions From Incumbent Entrants To The Rise of Europe & The 2 Big Questions That CEOs Should Ask Themselves
- 20VC: So You Want To Be Acquired? Instacart VP of Corp Dev, Dave Sobota on His Biggest Lessons From 10 Years in Google's M&A Team Working on The Acquisitions of Motorola, Waze & Android
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook on The Commonalities of The Truly Great CEOs, How To Hire The Very Best Execs, Why Cash is A Defensible Moat Today & The Pros and Cons of M&A and IPOs
- 20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
- 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 27 mentions in 3 episodes 9 per episode
- 20VC: DFJ's Josh Stein on Why VCs Must Adapt To Their Founders, The Major Transition Points For Aaron Levie @ Box & Why SaaS Startups Are Growing At A Rate Never Seen Before
- 20VC: Why You Should Build Your Investor Team Like A Sports Team & How To Leverage The Abilities Of Your Investors Effectively with Ted Blosser, Founder & CEO @ WorkRamp
- 20VC: Why You Should Not Invest From Patterns, Why No Good Business Was Built As An Analogy Of Another & Why The Rise Of The 'Celebrity Investor' Is Concerning with Emily Melton, Partner @ DFJ
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: The Best Determinant Of Product Market Fit & Why Prior Experience Is Not Required For Founder Success with Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner @ Battery Ventures
- 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
Everything said about Aaron Levie, oldest first
Feb 11, 2022
Levie: Goal setting must be ambitious but decoupled from harsh accountability
“Whenever possible, have as ambitious of a goal as possible, and so goal setting should be sort of ambitious and idealistic in terms of what you're trying to achieve. That is, needs to be separate, though, from sort of like what maybe we would consider like har…”
Feb 11, 2022 positive
Levie: Box centralizes software design like Apple while keeping engineering autonomous
“So for design, as an example, we probably more have the Apple ethos. So our software design is extremely centralized and that ensures that everything we put out in the market, we believe is going to have the same look and feel the same great user experience. C…”
Feb 11, 2022 positive
Levie: Startups must prioritize product-led growth before adding enterprise sales
“Then I personally would sequence product-led growth and nail that because you will always be able to layer in a sales motion on top of a product-led growth engine because the DNA of product-led growth ends up being a lot harder to sort of rewire in later becau…”
Feb 11, 2022
Feb 11, 2022
Feb 11, 2022 bearish
Levie: Enterprise customers will not pay for petabytes of blockchain storage
“The idea of taking petabytes of files or information and sort of storing those 10 or a hundred or a thousand times is just actually going to be quite inflationary to the technology market, and I don't think customers will ultimately want to pay for that.”
Feb 11, 2022
Levie delegates everything outside product, strategy, culture, and customers
“And so I've designed my schedule, my time to be able to support, you know, spending time in those areas, which then by definition means you need to delegate all of the other important aspects of the business as much as humanly possible.”
Feb 11, 2022 neutral
Levie: Success depends on team, market, and timing over serial experience
“There's amazing entrepreneurs that have done it once. There's amazing entrepreneurs that have done it five times, and it all comes down to the idea, the team, and do you choose the right market at the right moment? Those tend to be the factors more than whethe…”
Feb 11, 2022
Levie: Product bets fail when teams prioritize technology over customer problems
“And when certain features or products don't work and often they frequently have a, an element of Us as sort of product managers and people within the company brainstorming about how amazing it would be if we could do X thing with Y technology, as opposed to th…”
Feb 11, 2022 bearish
Levie: Pushing Web3 decentralization for social data wastes founder effort
“The parts that I think have been maybe over-promised is this idea of decentralization of a lot of other information types, social data, My Airbnb, you know, host information. There's a lot of things that don't sort of need to be or should be decentralized, and…”
Jan 4, 2024 negative
May 22, 2024 negative
Levie: Bespoke value-based pricing is nearly impossible to scale in software
“That one's tough to scale because everything's bespoke. So let's kind of throw away the value, the kind of bespoke value oriented approach, because that does never, you can, you know, Except for maybe like a Palantir or something, it's very, very hard to kind …”
May 22, 2024
Levie: Tech platform shifts are sole window for new franchise companies
“Each one of these moments, there's an architecture shift that happens in tech that creates Really the only window of opportunity you have for new kind of platform scale, you know, large franchise kind of companies to emerge, because you need a change in the te…”
May 22, 2024 positive
Levie: Existing legal frameworks are largely sufficient for dangerous AI use cases
“I think there are real reasons we should, you know, sort of pay attention to some of the more you know dangerous use cases of AI. I just think we have in many cases sufficient Legal frameworks for addressing those things.”
May 22, 2024 positive
Levie: Most enterprises have both active AI experiments and production deployments
“The vast majority of companies have a meaningful number of AI experiments happening with lots of different, you know, kind of areas of their business, lots of different applications. But the vast majority also have, you know areas that are in production alread…”
May 22, 2024 bullish
Levie: AI poses no threat to Apple and reinforces platform dominance
“I don't think Apple is, is immediately threatened, threatened by AI. It literally, most of my AI usage is on an Apple product that I have often paid money to Apple to be able to use. So, so like, if I, so like, just like on the most immediate basis, all of my …”
May 22, 2024 neutral
Levie: Users Will Wire Into Specific AI Models Rather Than Abstracted Selection
“I don't think you're going to have complete commoditization of sort of the personality of the models for the sort of style and the response to the point where then, you know, if you're a user, you know, any given response could come from Gemini, Versus GPT-IV …”
May 22, 2024 neutral
Levie: AI startups will win where incumbents face Innovator's Dilemma business model traps
“Similarly in AI, I think there'll be some categories where incumbents have the natural advantage, but then there will be either blind spots that those incumbents don't kind of go after, or there will be things so different from their existing business model in…”
May 22, 2024 bullish
May 22, 2024 bullish
Levie: Dozens of category-winning AI labor startups will emerge within five years
“And this is a, this is again, one of these windows Where 10, 20, 30, 50 companies will get started that, that were like the window in two, in the mid 2000 where like all of today's SaaS companies basically emerged in like a five year period essentially. And we…”
May 22, 2024 bearish
Levie: Only 1 to 3 independent horizontal LLM startups will reach scale
“But I think for like the pure play horizontal LLMs we, I think those will largely be subsumed by the big players with maybe room for one, two, three independent companies at scale that are not in the hyperscalers, but there will not be room for 50 companies. T…”
May 22, 2024 bullish
May 22, 2024
Aaron Levie: Leaders should reserve micromanagement for core areas like AI
“I think that the real lesson is now is, is you choose the areas that you need to exert that level of involvement. So and in places like you know, let's say critical areas like AI or end user experience and some product, you know, strategy, you know, you, I sti…”
May 22, 2024 negative
May 22, 2024 negative
Levie: Self-replicating AI escaping data centers is an unlikely near-term threat
“What I'm less worried about at the moment is probably the more fringe extreme things of the AI sort of self-replicates. It sort of, you know, jumps over outside the data center to another data center and then self-propagates. And I'm less nervous that that is,…”
Jun 3, 2024 negative
Lemkin: Box and Dropbox Were Very Late to Go Multi-Product
“When we look at the boxes and the drop boxes, and I think both Aaron and Drew are honest here. They were very late to go multi-product and arguably drop boxes and multi-product at all. Arguably it's one product boxes kind of getting there, but I would say it's…”
Jun 3, 2024 neutral
Oct 21, 2024
Hamid: Aaron Levie's Box IPO dilution led VCs to re-up founder equity
“Aaron has done a great PSA for founders with his equity stake at the IPO, where I think we as investors, board members have done a way better job making sure that our founders get re-upped when, especially when they dip below a certain threshold.”
Jul 28, 2025
Apr 16, 2026 bearish
Apr 20, 2026
Apr 20, 2026 negative
Levie: Traditional tech media offers zero AI alpha compared to frontline engineers
“The information sources aren't the classic ones. It's not the roll up review two weeks later from your traditional news publication that is going to give you any kind of alpha. It's the practitioner who's the, you know, literally the engineer at the, you know,…”
Apr 20, 2026 neutral
Levie: Enterprises cannot shift AI liability to providers like Anthropic
“I promise you, you're not going to be able to blame Anthropic when something goes wrong. And so if you can't blame Anthropic when something goes wrong, then at some point it doesn't really work to tell the company, like to tell your customer, well, That, that …”
Apr 20, 2026 bullish
Levie: AI agents will trigger an explosion of unstructured data
“Agents are going to be this incredible consumer and creator of your unstructured data. They're gonna Read through every one of your contracts and generate all of your contracts. They're going to generate marketing assets. They're going to write reports for you…”
Apr 20, 2026 neutral
Levie: Enterprise AI token budgets will shift from IT to departmental OpEx
“The budget of tokens will have to move out of IT spend and into regular kind of OPEC spend. This can't be treated like a, oh, you know, I'm going to trade off between Salesforce licenses or compute tokens. Like it's going to more be, I'm going to trade off You…”
Apr 20, 2026 positive
Apr 20, 2026 bullish
Apr 20, 2026 bullish
Apr 20, 2026 negative
Levie: US-China AI race is commercial, not existential
“You know, the idea that we're in some kind of, you know, kind of race, existential race where a month or two of advantage is gonna, you know, change the total outcome of AI progress and what everybody does between us and China. I just don't agree with, I think…”