Maybe Aaron Levie’s story will inspire us in ENTR 101 to take the elevator pitch business ideas to the next level. During Aaron’s time at USC he was assigned a project to come up with a business idea. Taking this project he examined cloud storage options and after putting in the extra effort and contacting organizations on how they were storing their data and content, Levie came up with an idea.
He saw that the cloud storage market was fragmented. He saw an opportunity and built an online file storage business as a tool for businesses and individuals to access and store documents and files. After his fall semester junior year, Levie took a leave of absence to launch Box.
At Box’s beginning stage, it was a cloud that companies and individuals could pay to store their their files in the cloud. Being bold, Levie secured an angel investment from Mark Cuban himself after sending a cold e-mail to the billionaire. In 2007, Levie and high school friend and now CFO Dylan Smith, pivoted the business to focus on selling to businesses. By 2012 their cloud had spread to Europe, opening an office in London.
By 2014, this college business idea was being used by 40% of the Fortune 500 companies. Inspiration to the immense potential of a forced business idea project to a globally used and known company.
This is a really interesting story! I’m so shocked by the part about Aaron Levie securing an investment from Mark Cuban just by sending him an email. This definitely goes to show that being bold as an entrepreneur can produce major benefits. I also really appreciate that Levie was able to identify fragmentation in this industry and provide an innovative solution for it. I can’t wait to see where this company goes!