Aaron Levie

Aaron Levie is chief executive officer, co-founder, and chairman at Box, which he founded in 2005 with CFO Dylan Smith. He has served on the board of directors since April 2005. Aaron attended the University of Southern California from 2003 to 2005, before leaving to establish Box. In 2004, he served as an intern at Miramax and the next year he served as an intern at Paramount pictures. He established Box in the same year. From 2012 - 2013, he was a member of the advisory board at Crashlytics, a crash reporting solution for Android and iOS, which was acquired by Google.

The Big Interview: Box CEO Aaron Levie

Aaron Levie originally created Box as a college venture, with the objective of assisting people to access their information, regardless of location. The company was launched from his dorm room in 2005, with the help of the present CFO of the company, Dylan Smith. Aaron Levie is referred to as the visionary behind Box's product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating traditional content management with elements of social business software.

In a McKinsey & Company interview, Levie stated,

Initially, when we launched Box, we actually just funded the company from my cofounder's poker winnings, something like $12,000 or $13,000. And we ran the whole business off of his winnings. We went from 100 employees to 250 employees to 500 employees. Now we have a little over 1,000 employees. The focus became: How do we take this technology that we had built for individuals and small businesses and really begin to bring it into the enterprise? How could we make sure that we were building the de facto cloud platform for corporate information?

Dylan Smith and Aaron Levie

In 2019, Starboard invested in Box, then agitated for change in 2020, arguing that Box was underperforming in comparison to industry peers and not delivering on commitments. In 2020, Starboard placed two of its nominees on the board of directors of Box. Objecting to a $500 million investment from the private equity firm KRR & Co. Inc. in Box, in May 2020, Starboard nominated three candidates to replace Aaron Levie and the others on Box’s board. In September 2021, the three directors beat Starboard’s candidates in a shareholder vote that followed months of posturing by both sides. Shareholders chose to re-elect Levie, and directors Peter Leav and Dana Evan.