A short YouTube interview clip (featuring Aaron Levie) advising startup founders to align their products with major technology "tailwinds" so they can ride macro trends rather than fight them. Levie cites Box's benefit from megatrends (mobile, lower-cost computing, widespread Internet adoption), warns against creating headwinds, and gives PlanGrid (mobile/iPad/iPhone construction blueprint software) as a timing/example of leveraging device adoption.
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Another major factor, as you're starting your company, you really need to think hard about this one, which is make sure that you're benefiting from a major technology tailwind. There are so many companies that get started where there's no particular macro technology trend that they're riding on top of. And in some cases even worse, there could be technology trends that you're sort of resisting. You really have to think hard about what, what is going on in the technology landscape that I am going to be able to ride that wave with my innovation, where the growth of whatever that technology trend is is something that I can then grow alongside. In our case, we benefited from three or four megatrends. We benefited from the growth of mobile, we benefited from the lower cost of computing, we benefited from the fact that everybody was coming onto the Internet and all three of those trends were, were disruptive to our incumbents that were selling traditional enterprise software. And so we were able to take these megatrends that we had nothing to do with, take these megatrends, ride on top of them, and they were just an onslaught of basically disaster for the traditional competitors in the space. So try and find what are the technology trends that you think incumbents are not going to be able to respond well to because they're sort of economically, strategically, or from a talent standpoint, not able to leverage those technology trends in the same way that you can. PlanGrid is a pretty cool example of this. They basically do software for construction companies and for architecture firms and builders to be able to let you do blueprints and other kind of construction projects on the iPad and the iPhone. And it's a pretty dead simple idea. It's going after just the fact that there's billions of dollars spent every single year on either software and that is stuck on your computer or paper based processes. And so they nailed the timing perfectly of ok, it was a couple years after the iPad. Now's the time where these devices are going to start to show up in physical environments. What is the software that we need to do to be able to let construction teams and building companies be able to use that technology? So really make sure that you're going to benefit significantly from a major tailwind and don't create unnecessary headwinds for yourself.
