Lecture 12 - Building for the Enterprise (Aaron Levie)
Aaron Levie describes why Box moved toward enterprise customers and how cheaper computing, cloud delivery and user-led adoption changed the opportunity for new software companies. The historical Stanford lecture also covers starting with a narrow problem, finding advantages incumbents cannot easily copy and learning from customers at the edge of an industry. Notes cover selected passages from the public auto-captions for the 46-minute lecture, with speaker identity checked against the official Stanford CS183B archive. The date is the October 30, 2014 video upload. Company figures, market sizes and predictions reflect 2014. The available captions reach the closing remarks; examples and business opinions are not current product or market guidance.
Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Aaron Levie describes why Box moved toward enterprise customers and how cheaper computing, cloud delivery and user-led adoption changed the opportunity for new software companies. The historical Stanford lecture also covers starting with a narrow problem, finding advantages incumbents cannot easily copy and learning from customers at the edge of an industry. Notes cover selected passages from the public auto-captions for the 46-minute lecture, with speaker identity checked against the official Stanford CS183B archive. The date is the October 30, 2014 video upload. Company figures, market sizes and predictions reflect 2014. The available captions reach the closing remarks; examples and business opinions are not current product or market guidance.
Key Takeaways
Choose a customer and its value equation
Levie argues that enterprise buyers judge software by business value and productivity. Box had too many features for many consumers but too little security and control for enterprises, so the team had to choose which audience to serve.