Box founder Aaron Levie’s 5 lessons for startup founders

Lesson one, do something that wasn't possible three years ago. Pretty much if you're looking at a business opportunity that you could have done five or 10 years ago, it might be too late or it might not be different enough to make a lot of people care. And that's ultimately what it takes to scale look for new technologies that are enabling. Your solution box wasn't possible in 2000. The enabling technology was cheaper storage, better browsers, more connected devices, faster Internet. Do something that you're extremely passionate about. This is another lesson that I've learned over the first three things that I had started in college. Startups are very hard. There's a lot of bad news that happens every single day. Bad things in competitive space, bad things with hiring, and you have to be able to push on through. And so you have to do something that's actually really, really exciting, that you're going to be inspired about and that you're going to really create inspiration for other people. Don't compromise. As I was mentioning earlier, one of the coolest things about starting your own company is you get to make a lot of decisions. You don't actually have to compromise or sacrifice on a lot of things. You don't have to sacrifice on who you work with. You don't have to compromise on how you're going to do your marketing or how you're going to build your technology. So we think about things in terms of best what's the best team that we can build to solve this problem? What's the best technology we can produce to solve this problem? What's the best way we can talk about this and communicate it with our public relations? How can we do the best marketing? So ultimately, this is all in your control. You get to make these decisions and it's a really exciting opportunity when you do. Lesson four is if you feel comfortable, you're probably not doing it right. I mean, there's a lot of hard decisions that go into business. Who you're going to work with, how you're going to compete, what's the strategy? Are you going to raise money? Are you going to leave school? You're going to have to go well beyond your comfort zone. There's a lot of decisions that aren't going to be very easy to make. That's actually a good sign. So it's actually a good thing when you don't really know what the answer is or you don't know if you should do it this way and you make that leap. And that's pretty important. Also, finally, don't write your obituary too early. This is a mistake that we've made a handful of times. We have been extremely competitive with Google and Microsoft and EMC and these other larger companies who normally we shouldn't be afraid of. And the venture capitalists are often afraid of these guys. Don't write yourself off. Make sure that you kind of keep on pushing. Make sure that you're optimizing on the right dimensions and areas that you can beat other people in. And so that's really important and why we still have the company today.