Aaron Levie
25 statements across 6 episodes · 10 bullish · 4 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Feb 26, 2015 by Aaron Levie · said 85 times in 25 episodes since 2017 · 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 Jason Lemkin (72), Jeff Lawson (6), Mark Wayland (2), Josh Stein (2), Brian Halligan (2), Nick Mehta (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 14 mentions in 3 episodes 5 per episode
2024 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- How to Think About Product-Led Growth, Bootstrapping vs VC, and Early Exits with Jason Lemkin
- Fundraising from VCs and Hiring VPs in 2025: AMA with Jason Lemkin SaaStr CEO
- From Outbound to Channel Partnerships: Your Burning Sales Questions Answered by Jason Lemkin
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 6 mentions in 6 episodes 1 per episode
- Why the Future of Customer Success, Sales & Marketing Has Changed with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin
- Nick Mehta, CEO Gainsight: My Top 10 Failures as a SaaS CEO & What I've Learned
- How to Navigate Strategic Change for Growth with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
- Secrets to Scaling and Growth in an Unpredictable Market with monday.com's Co-founder and Co-CEO
- The Most Important SaaS Metrics with Monday.com Co-Founders and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin
- Why You're Unfundable Today: The Cold, Hard Truths About SaaS Part 2 with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Reaccelerating Growth at Scale with Box's CRO Mark Wayland and SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
- The Secrets to Scaling with HubSpot's Founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan and SaaStr's CEO
- Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: AMA with SaaStr's CEO
- VC State of the Market with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder & MP Aileen Lee
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Ask Me Anything About Customer Success with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and ChurnZero CEO You Mon Tsang
- Nick Mehta CEO Gainsight + Jason Lemkin CEO SaaStr on "The Latest in Leveling Up Customer Success"
- Scaling a Successful SaaS Sales Team w/ 20VC Founder Harry Stebbings and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 33 mentions in 2 episodes 17 per episode
Everything said about Aaron Levie, oldest first
Feb 26, 2015
Feb 26, 2015 negative
Levie: Building everything enterprise customers request leads to failure
“A lot of companies confuse getting to know your customer and that customer intimacy with building whatever they ask for. And that's obviously the road to, you know essentially all of the broken enterprise dreams that we've always had”
Feb 26, 2015
Feb 26, 2015
Levie: Box prioritized unlocking higher customer tiers over lower-tier refinements
“We've met at many moments built something that was necessary for one tier of customer that didn't break our product for anybody, but maybe we had to prioritize getting to that next tier versus maybe the 95th percentile thing that we wanted to do on, on the tie…”
Feb 26, 2015
Levie: Refusing philosophical misaligned features is why Box loses most deals
“Actually this is one of our bigger, one of our biggest categories of why we lose deals is because there's some weird feature that we are philosophically opposed to. Because we think it's going to hinder what the user is trying to accomplish or what the busines…”
Jul 7, 2017 positive
Jul 7, 2017 positive
Nov 12, 2021 bearish
Amazon and Azure's on-premise cloud offerings remain relatively subscale
“Every time that Amazon or Azure or others have launched these sort of on-prem versions of their clouds, these are all relatively subscale versus just the pure public cloud infrastructure benefits that, that, that customers are getting.”
Nov 12, 2021 neutral
Levie: Box closed 74 deals over $100k last quarter primarily via expansion
“Last quarter we did, I don't know, 74 deals over a 100,000 dollars, so it's, that's a fraction of those deals. And you still have so many more that are just, they've adopted more of the product, and we have an incredible, you know, account executive that goes …”
Nov 12, 2021
Levie: Architecture matters more than almost anything in building a platform
“Is architecture matters more than almost anything else you can imagine in that journey. Because if your feature is then completely disconnected to the next feature, and then thus the next feature, then you really aren't on your way to building a platform.”
Nov 12, 2021
Box forfeited an estimated $100M in revenue refusing on-premise deployments
“We were multi-tenant from day one, and we made no exceptions to that. So when customers said, hey, can I go run this inside my data center? We said, no, you can't. And we lost, I could probably add up maybe a hundred million in revenue.”
Nov 12, 2021
Levie: Enterprise CEOs should prioritize customer expansion as much as net-new logos
“You align your time with where the, ultimately the dollars are gonna come from, and so, in the base, we often will have lots of customers that have significant expansion opportunity, and that can look as important or be as important as a net new, you know, log…”
Nov 12, 2021 neutral
Dec 6, 2023 positive
Levie: A 6x to 8x revenue multiple is healthy for profitable SaaS
“You do want it to be kind of just healthy to be at a six or eight X revenue multiple, and I make, I'm making up those numbers, but like, but that, you know, that tends to be a safe range if you assume the company's going to get 20, 30, 40% operating margin, gr…”
Dec 6, 2023 neutral
Dec 6, 2023 negative
Levie: Consumer software is ten times more stressful than enterprise SaaS
“The consumer is just like 10 times more stressful because you don't have recurring revenue at any moment, like one single platform change. You know, can alter the entire dynamics of your business model. You're dealing with the whims and the mercy of the consum…”
Dec 6, 2023 positive
Dec 6, 2023 neutral
Levie: Enterprise AI budgets only account for 1-10% of IT spend
“There's no AI budget per se. When I, and when I referenced that, it's sort of like, there's every, everybody has like just some discretionary dollars for, you know, some R and D or innovation thing. And so that's probably right now the totality of the kind of …”
Dec 6, 2023 negative
Levie: Embedding uncapped AI risks exploding costs due to power law usage
“The alternative model is you just say, hey, we're just going to embed AI into everything. And then you're like, well, shoot, now my costs just explode. And also equally, you have this, like, you know, disadvantage, which is the power user is being subsidized b…”
Dec 6, 2023 positive
Levie: Box stages COO hires across $500M, $1B, and $2B revenue milestones
“The pattern is Is sort of somebody that can help take box to the next stage of growth at each, you know, kind of commensurate point where, where that, that person's experience is very relevant in, in driving the next stage of growth. And so, you know, we had o…”
Dec 6, 2023 positive
Levie: Box bundles AI natively instead of charging for an add-on
“So actually this is sort of part of our, this is part of our theory on our pricing model is, is let's, let's create an instant win for the customer by just saying box has AI in it. Like, you know, if we were to start box over from scratch in 20, 23, AI would n…”
Jul 2, 2025 positive
Levie: Model Context Protocol integrations enhance rather than erode enterprise software moats
“I would actually argue that MCP is a thing that only enhances the underlying moat. Because data wants to be free. That doesn't mean that there's no moat around managing the data and making it useful. It wants to be incorporated in some other workflow. So for u…”
Jul 2, 2025 bullish
Levie: Upgrading to reasoning models instantly replaces a year of custom scaffolding
“The amount of work you would have to do to pack into, let's say, a non-reasoning model for giving it exactly the right sort of context, instructions, kind of hacking and tool use, versus today, just having O-Tree go do that, or having the new Lama IV go and do…”
Jul 2, 2025 positive
Levie: AI's network effect is user interaction feeding agent capability flywheels
“What is the new network effect in a world of AI? And it's some degree of that user working with an agent to create something by creating something that data feeds back into the agent's futures capabilities. And you get this sort of flywheel that, that ends up …”
Jun 16, 2026 bullish
Lemkin: Tech Industry Needs 100x More Forward Deployed Engineers
“We're going to need, I think Aaron Levy said on a tweet today or the other day, we're going to need a hundred times more FDs than we thought, because there's going to be a hundred times more workflows out there and they all need humans to deploy them. They don…”