Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Levie: Box stages COO hires across $500M, $1B, and $2B revenue milestones

Aaron Levie · What's New at Box with Aaron Levie, CEO and Co-Founder of Box and Jason Lemkin, Founder at SaaStr · Dec 6, 2023 · at 8:06

Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, explains executive hiring strategy and why Box recently brought on its third COO across 15 years.

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“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 our original COO that took us to five hundred million in revenue, did a fantastic job of that. Then we had a COO of Steph who took us from five hundred million to a billion. She's now retiring, and now we're lucky to have Olivia who has, you know, equally seen kind of multi-billion dollar Software scale, you know, is most specifically a Google cloud and now she is, you know, her, she's now chartered with the project of take us from one to two billion and beyond obviously.”

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