#150 CEO Box, Aaron Levie w/ Mamoon Hamid: Open For Business
Grit7 Aug 2023

#150 CEO Box, Aaron Levie w/ Mamoon Hamid: Open For Business

Guest: Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, and Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins

When he was a newly minted venture capitalist at USVP, Mamoon Hamid got a tip that he should meet a young entrepreneur named Aaron Levie, and fought for the right to invest in his cloud storage startup, Box. For years after that initial investment, the two men say, Box’s fate was precarious: “We could have died any day,” Mamoon says, and Aaron recalled several times he had to be talked “down from a ledge.” Today, they tell us how Box established itself as “open for business” — a concept Mamoon hounded Aaron with in the early years — and grew into success.

In this episode, Aaron, Mamoon, and Joubin discuss Box socks, authenticity at work, Josh Stein, living in the office, over-diligence, Google Platypus, the 2008 crash, nostalgia, everything is personal, the ten-person test, burnout, Dan Levin, ChatGPT, Parker Conrad, and Silicon Valley as “technology town.”

In this episode, we cover:

  • “Make mom proud, unless she’s evil” (01:59)
  • How Mamoon and Aaron met (04:38)
  • Mamoon’s first investment in Box (11:15)
  • Pausing the term sheet (16:08)
  • “We could have died any day” (19:01)
  • What is company-building? (23:23)
  • Open For Business (25:27)
  • Getting to cash flow positive (27:52)
  • Slow growth with no burn vs. fast growth, high burn (31:15)
  • Tough feedback (34:31)
  • Overcoming challenges around the Box IPO (36:31)
  • Growing as CEO (38:35)
  • The Apple Vision Pro and AI (44:15)
  • Investing in cutting-edge companies (49:15)
  • Using AI to re-juice growth (51:48)
  • How Aaron educates himself (54:22)
  • Business as a sport (57:14)
  • Who Box is hiring and what “grit” means to Aaron (01:00:44)

Links:

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Chief Sales and Success Officer at Slack, Bob Frati: Exploring Slack’s Key Growth Levers and Competition

Chief Sales and Success Officer at Slack, Bob Frati: Exploring Slack’s Key Growth Levers and Competition

In Episode #1 of Go to Market Grit, Slack’s SVP of Sales and Customer Success, Bob Frati, gives the inside scoop about the company’s sales and go-to-market strategy, and why they have been able to scale their go to market so quickly and effectively over the last few years. Bob and Joubin discuss two key topics in detail, outlining the next four years for Slack and key growth levers they can pull, along with growing competition in Slack’s market and what that means for their future. In this episode of Go to Market Grit, we cover: Key growth levers for Slack, and why the company is positioned for continued market dominance.Slack’s response to growing market competition, and why it’s ultimately better for the consumer and for the company.How Slack identified a business need and strong product market fit, and then worked to expand the solution to a broader audience. The importance of having a strong and developed customer-facing team to navigate complexities in large enterprises, and push business forward to completion.How Slack grew its sales team from 300 to 2,000 people — quickly, and effectively. Some of the factors that Slack looks for when hiring customer-facing sales staff, and why they value these characteristics.Why hiring should be a mutual fit for both the candidate and the employer.Identifying motivated individuals, and finding ways to tap into their motivation that will drive them to be successful. Bob’s career journey from sales rep to manager — including why and how he executed the leap. Why much of Slack’s success can be attributed to tight collaboration between its engineering, product, sales, and success teams. Slack’s ability to not only deploy a solution in an organization, but to help manage through the change and ensure success — and why this is a game-changer.Slack’s role in ushering a new way of working, and why it transcends the tired and overused digital transformation narrative in business.Links Host company: https://www.kleinerperkins.com/Loom: https://www.loom.com/ Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rfrati/Host Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoubinmirHost Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com

16 Juni 202050min

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About the Joubin MirzadeganJoubin has been with Kleiner Perkins since 2019 where he advises the KP portfolio companies on how to build and scale a robust go-to-market strategy. Additionally, he enables the firm’s portfolio through high impact relationships with F500 executives and key ecosystem partners. Joubin was previously at Palo Alto Networks as a global district sales manager for the Central US based in Chicago where he scaled the Central Cloud business from 1 enterprise rep and $2M ARR to 12 reps and $50M+ ARR in 4 quarters. He has also worked for Evident.io as an enterprise account executive and at Bracket Computing (acquired by VMWare) where he built the inside sales team from the ground up.

20 Apr 202045s

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