You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane

Box’s engineers, ordering them to develop an app for the device by the time it debuted in stores—and they did.
    Around that same time Procter & Gamble started sniffing around. Executives at the consumer products giant were starting to use iPads and wanted access to their files. And while it took eighteen months of courting and customizing to close the deal, having a product that worked smoothly for 18,000 of its employees opened doors for Box at other giant companies.
    Levie spent 2011 continuing his self-education. He e-mailed his favorite pioneers in his industry with a simple, if ballsy, request: “Spend one hour with me.” Tom Siebel, who founded Siebel Systems (acquired by Oracle for $5.85 billion in 2005), told Levie he once traveled to four states in a single day to meet with customers. Craig Conway, who ran PeopleSoft when it sold to Oracle for $10.3 billion, glanced at Levie’s calendar, saw roughly one customer meeting and echoed that advice. Levie, focused on what was going on inside Box, had lost the perspective, gleaned from IT support calls, that had saved the company. He began meeting eight customers a week, peppering each with questions about what was working and what wasn’t.
    This listening-tour process did more than hone Box’s strategy. It honed Levie. The guy who turned off dozens of VCs is now considered a model entrepreneur. “We saw everything exactly the same way,” said Gary Reiner, a partner at venture firm General Atlantic who spent months doing due diligence before putting $100 million into Box in 2012. “It’s like he’s been doing this for twenty years. I can’t throw him a question he hasn’t already thought of.”
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    BOX’S LOS ALTOS HEADQUARTERS feel more like Facebook’s fun zone than Oracle’s stiff towers. There’s a bright yellow slide, a room with ping-pong tables, unicorn figurines, and lots of scooters. “I’m not a scooter person, but this stuff matters for our culture,” he said. Box’s staff is approaching 1,000, with key hires from Oracle, Google, and Salesforce.
    But for all the giddiness, danger lurks. Not a month goes by without some mortal threat against Box. Virtualization giant VMWare announced plans to offer file-synchronizing in 2012. Salesforce, an investor in Box, announced a rival storage feature called Chatterbox around the same time, though by 2013, it was already rebooting its effort. Dropbox, meanwhile, has started Dropbox for Business, in a play for those lucrative business accounts.
    Then there’s Microsoft, which has Box firmly in its sights. Levie got lucky by originally competing with the Redmond giant’s SharePoint software. While Microsoft bundles it with other offerings and has sometimes threatened price hikes on existing products if customers signal they want to switch, SharePoint is notoriously expensive. For every $1 customers spend on the software itself, they’re spending on average $8.70 for outside firms (developers and IT consultants) to get it to run. While it does considerably more than Box, such as linking into inventory systems, traditionally it’s been hard to use and until recently didn’t work on mobile devices running Google’s Android system or Apple’s iOS. The 900-pound gorilla, however, has woken up. “Box, along with other smaller companies, got there before Microsoft,” said Jared Spataro, SharePoint’s senior marketing director. “But we always see customers wanting fewer vendors, not more.”
    Levie’s defenses, built in collaboration with his latest consigliere, Ben Horowitz, founding partner of the Valley’s hottest VC shop, Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Box’s $48 million round in 2011, look like this: Build a sales team that can look and act like Oracle’s while preserving Box’s innovative, fast-moving culture, and make Box a viable