Box

“If you look at the new applications like Box, like Evernote, you know, a lot of these new applications are built for mobile. They're they'll, they're built for kind of a HTML user interface, and they're intuitive in the way that Tom was talking about, like Fac…”

“I think we think of, you know, the tech industry as being very mobile. Well, it turns out construction workers are actually far more mobile than those of us in the tech industry.”

“So as an example two to three years ago we were really going into the large end of the enterprise, and so the person that we selected to bring on the board was the previous CIO of General Electric.”

“We've never done a board search. What we've done is, is built advisors around the company, gotten close to lots of people I've personally engaged with, you know, 50 or so CEOs that have been through very similar problems over, over, you know, similar eras of t…”

“Including executives, ah, in, in obviously sessions at the board meeting, it's a great way to create accountability for other members of the team and it drives, ah, you know, that drives execution”

“You can actually find lots of ways to leverage communication you're already doing. So, like, we send a company all hands note monthly, and that is, sort of, lays out the strategy or whatever. Just literally forwarding that to the board of, FYI, here's the late…”

“Six months went by, and this debate raged within our engineering team, and even as we hired, you know, more senior people to come in, and the debate wouldn't go away. All it took was one formal conversation with, you know, some of the, as I created this archit…”

“So at Box, we had both, and they're very, very different. So the audience or the population of your customer advisory board are really what you would expect to sell to, right? So in, in Box's case, it would be the CIOs of big companies across different vertica…”

“I just gave a stock option package that was equivalent to a seasoned engineer. And, you know, I put my board together pretty early on in Box's life, so it was a, it ended up being a pretty reasonable package at the end of it all. But it was I think a three-yea…”

“While in my role as VP of engineering for Box trying to scale the company, I had a co-founding CTO that didn't want to manage anymore. That's basically how I got into Box at the very beginning.”

“And that, that's something where I do think We have to be prepared for this as many years. It's about the speed at which humans can change their workflows as opposed to how kind of quickly the technology can just, you know, sort of evolve in advance.”

“And we let's just say we very much took that to heart. And we basically like deployed every single lesson. Which was, like, the name of the game is you get big fast, you scale aggressively, and that was a very important kind of period in our company's journey.”

“Internally, we've actually explicitly taken the stance that we want to use AI to increase the capacity and capability of the company, so just do more.”

“About 30% of our code right now Is, is coming from AI.”

“Every agent really loves working with files, so there'll probably be more files in the future than there was going to be before, and so, you know, can we build a platform that, like, makes it really easy for agents to work with that data? You know, we, we're b…”

“We have an agent that, that we're working on where you, it just makes a determination whether it should use an existing skill, it should be using an existing tool from Box, or it should write code to solve that problem”

“We spend as much time now thinking about the agent interface to our tool as we do the human interface.”

“I do think that will be relatively disruptive You know, for some time until the bigger incumbents can kind of, you know, get out of the way on this. And that will at least create, you know, some precedent or case studies of what this new sort of corporation co…”

“AI built probably 80 to 90% of the feature. And the thing that slowed down the release of it was we have to do a full security review because we can't let there be any, you know, accidental code injection into the thing that we created.”

“I don't think that it's a five to 10 X gain. I do think it's a two to three X gain, maybe across the board. You are still rate limited by how quickly can you review this stuff and check on the work.”