Box

“If we had started in January and had a full six months to sort of side by side pursue funding and partnerships or acquisition, I think we would have been in a much stronger position.”

“Before Crashlytics, Jeff was the founder of InCrayo, which was Box's first ever acquisition in 2009.”

“At the same point, Aaron Levy didn't know anything about the enterprise before he started box. And that worked out brilliantly well.”

“Was the fact that they had over a 130% net upsells, meaning if you stopped closing any new business and essentially fired your sales and marketing team, the business would still grow 30%.”

“They went rough revenue ramp was five, 10, 25, 55, one, 25, and so just, you know, exploding out of the gate on the heels of that.”

“In fact, the last two IPOs that we've seen at DFJ over the last couple years, Box and Twilio, were both companies that were on nearly two hundred million dollar annual revenue run rates before they got public.”

“I remember making a bad decision not to advise or invest in box or join box because I just thought that the business was so young and so early, and it was basically when it was just three people. And I also made a mistake on Waze, too. And, you know, I met the…”

“The obvious example, Harry, is Uber, where having lived in London and seen the taxi lobby and how strong the taxi lobby was in London, that clouded my vision for what was possible. Having lived in Los Angeles and seeing how few people ever use taxis, that clou…”

“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…”

“And we actually developed another product that we don't talk about publicly, which was going to be a peer to peer file sharing technology that we were going to introduce in the market.”

“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…”

“And it never felt like an epiphany because the moment I started pitching people on the idea, they thought it was stupid.”

“As you're scaling, you have to attempt to not solve, hopefully, as many problems as possible in the business directly, and that's your only way of scaling”

“So if we had chosen the peer to peer path as an example, that would not have worked just based on the architecture of the web went.”

“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.”

“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…”

“It always takes much longer for the sort of payoff of that investment to really start to materially lift and impact the business.”

“Box IPO did eight hundred million. HubSpot IPO did eight hundred million valuation. Shopify IPO did a seven hundred and fifty million dollar valuation.”

“Now, now Forex is clearly way, way too undervalued. It, you should be in the kind of, you know, six or eight X range.”

“At least so far empirically, every time that we've done that, we will actually reinvest in that area of the business.”

“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 …”

“So far the evidence is no. So far it says the incumbents are gonna, they're gonna do great things with AI, great, great things. The product's gonna be much better, but it's not clear they're gonna get any revenue boost from it. No one's saying that none of the…”

“I think we are seeing some great companies like Dropbox and box settle into that and just feel that they without, unless they have a huge market cap and then go buy something that it is the world, right?”

“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…”

“Box is doing a billion-ish a year, a little bit more, right? So, twenty million goes to, two hundred million goes to COGS, to servers and support, and he's got eight hundred million to play with each year.”

“Like, I don't think the margins that Box and Dropbox is generating, if they could have generated, if they would just stay private. Because the growth was slowing, they were forced to look at the business and run the business better.”

“We got to invest more dollars in the box at a twenty-five million dollar valuation. More, like, every incremental dollar or, you know, two, three million dollars in bridge that was being done was done at that valuation.”

“I've had companies that are one week away from cash out become public companies.”

“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.”

“The reason the stock price is always hard is we're competing against Microsoft and Google who give it away for free.”

“Yes, I remember that was in O-Nine. We did HubSpot, Box, DocuSign, and I think RingCentral.”

“I'm glad to see that just literally this week, we were seeing Mongo even Okta, which had been struggling, Box last, the other day, Zoom, which is, you know, which is not exactly a rocket ship anywhere, but seeing growth re-accelerate because of AI, it's like, …”

“Same thing on Box. I passed at the start of 2010. The round didn't even get done, and nine months later, I literally woke up and said, what's the dumbest thing I did all year? I didn't do that deal, and I went down and did it.”

“These companies, they're in a much more bounded world now. They might grow 15%. They might grow five percent. They might trade at six times revenues. They might trade at four times revenues. You know, if you look at the stock chart, the area of magic is gone, …”

“In COVID in 2020, we formed a group of SaaS CEOs. I think there were 16 of us that got together, we'd meet on Zoom every single week, right? At one stage, 10, 11 of us were public, maybe more, we all had earnings calls, and you know, it was a really good thera…”

“If he can't get Box to 20 to 30% growth I'm giving up on, on the rest of the world.”

“The volume of API usage on our system is already enormous and already, you know, is outsized relative to any of the end user interactions in the system.”

“We will.”

“It has led to a boost at Box. It hasn't turned Box into a hundred percent grower. It's gotten it back to double digit growths.”