Box founder Aaron Levie explains the importance of saying “no” to certain customers

There's going to be hundreds of times where you're at this moment where the customer is asking for something that is antithetical or going to go against the simplicity of that user experience. Maybe it's a security feature, maybe it's a compliance feature. At every single one of those decision points, we have made sure that we always favor the end user over the enterprise. In some cases, that means that we will lose deals, so we'll have to say no to a customer because by building that feature, we, we don't think we're going to be able to deliver the delight and the user experience that we're looking for over time. That gets really, really painful. If I look back over the past 10 years, we've lost tens of millions of dollars of business because we said no to certain customers. What we benefited from, though, was a product that many, many years later could serve a much wider population of customers that ended up making our existing customers much more successful with our product. And funny enough, the companies that once didn't say yes to us and took their business somewhere else ended up being unsuccessful with those products and had to eventually come back to us. And so if you're right, and the key point here is you have to be right, if you're right and that user trade off truly was going to be disastrous for that user experience and you remain true to that North Star of always focusing on the user, eventually over the long run, you will end up winning in that market, but you're going to lose deals along the way and that's going to be really stressful for you, for your team, for investors. But it's really important that you're crystal clear on the principles of how you're building your product and what you're going to say no to. Finally.