Box.net rolls out new features to its five million users

So who are you?

I'm Aaron Levy, the CEO and co founder of Box.net and this morning you're announcing, we are announcing an all new version of box.net and we're also announcing some things around openness and mobility that we think are going to be really, really critical to our strategy going forward in terms of introducing an all new kind of enterprise software experience for the world.

And who are you seeing right now?

This is Florian.

Yeah, so I'm the engineer working on the new version and notably some new cool features.

Very cool. I got a demo of that. That's why I turn on the camera.

Okay, very cool.

So tell me the first new feature that we're going to see. First new major change. You've had a billboard up on Highway 101 tout coming launch for a while. So show me some goods.

Yeah, we'll show you something super exciting. So we've had a billboard up for about 20 days now, really driving home that there's absolutely a major launch happening with Box on January 20th. We think that today enterprise software is too complex, too cumbersome, too slow, too unusable. And we're kind of doing our part to essentially make things simpler for the enterprise. And more specifically, we want people to be able to share and manage their business information as easily as possible. So if you think about what SharePoint does for businesses today, we want to do something like that, but much simpler, much more powerful, much more open, much more collaborative. And we want this to be something that any business can use. And so we're really excited about what we're going to be introducing and we think our 5 million users are going to be very excited about that.

Five million users.

Five million users, yeah. Crazy. So thank you. So we're really excited about the level of scale that this application has reached and we're excited that enterprises are going to start to have a completely new way that they can share information. Let's see it. Cool. So I'm just logged into. There you go. So I'm actually logged into a demo account right now and what we wanted to show you is essentially one of the new pieces of functionality in our new interface that we've been working extremely hard on for the past couple of months. And this new functionality allows Box to operate in more of a real time kind of format. And so the technology that you might be familiar with from FriendFeed or Facebook is being applied in the back end and we can talk a little bit.

It's the tornado open source technology that.

You guys are using. Yeah, exactly.

I know that well, because I was the number one FriendFeed user for a while and they open sourced the technology. So show it to me.

Cool. And we'd love to talk more about it on the tech side. So the idea is anything that's happening within your box that's going to be relevant to you as a collaborator, we want to be able to show you in real time. So I'm just in my box.net account. This is all the content that I have access to. Florian is on a different computer and he's going to be doing some actions as a collaborator that I'm working with. So he actually. Sorry, we just missed it. But he actually just added me to the marketing team folder. So I can actually click it and I'm going to be able to jump directly into the marketing team folder. So now I'm in the same space as Florian and he updated this in real time. And so Florian is actually Florian. Yep. Florian just activated a link for hiring. So that means that this is now a shared folder and I can mouse over it. It says Florian activated a link for hiring and Florian's going to do another change. So watch very closely. But Florian just actually changed the title of this file. So he renamed the press release from PR release to PR release 2011. So any kind of low level action that happens on the application, we want to be able to show you instantly. And this is going to be the really exciting one. So let's say I'm in the same folder as Florian and he is going to actually drag in a file from his box.net account and in just a second it lights up and it says, Florian jorda updated roadmap Q1. And so if I click and mouse over, it says Florian uploaded roadmap Q1. I can actually click into the hiring folder and I'm going to see the latest version of that file. I don't know if you want to upload a file directly into this folder while we're in it together.

Now, what is this like you do in a corporation? Why do we need this kind of real time speed? I worked at Microsoft, we would email things, wait a couple hours and send them back. Why do we need this kind of real timeness?

We think that the speed at which business is moving and the way in which we want to collaborate together, we need faster technology that keeps us up to date with our information much better than ever before. So the implications are that if multiple people are working together, some of the kinds of experiences that we initially saw with Wave but now applied into a much more business focused application, we think can move business forward way faster. We think can actually keep people up to date way more and way better than ever before. So you can be working on projects with people at the same time, logged in just to the web and have this complete online experience where you're able to collaborate with anyone. So you can have partners that are outside your organization that you're working with. You can have people inside your company that you're able to work with. We can share and collaborate on information in real time. And we think that's an incredibly powerful experience that we think is going to be pervasive across any enterprise software.

Are we going to get notification overload? I'm using Quora and Facebook and other things and I'm almost getting this overload of notifications of things that are going on in real time. If you watch my screens at home, you'll see Twitter just streaming down the screen 24 hours a day.

You probably already know this, but you're an extreme user of Internet services that notify you. I don't know if anybody, if anybody told you that, but the amount of limits that you've broken on people's websites are probably indicative of that. So in our particular case, what we're notifying users about are things that are extremely relevant to them and their job function. So these aren't things that you might be interested in. These are actions and activity updates that are critical to what you're doing in a project or in your business. And so we think in our specific case, the notifications are really critical and relevant to what you're doing. That said, I think we are kind of living in a world with a lot of notifications and a lot of information. And I actually think, ironically, I think technology is a solution to that. As we have better filtering, as we have better relevancy, I think we'll start to see way more signal in the noise. And I think that's important. But I think we're fortunate that in our application people want to be shared with in real time because it's data that's critical to getting their job done.

I imagine that it helps solve another kind of noise, which is, let's say the three of us were on a Skype call. I can actually see that you opened up my PowerPoint slide and are accessing it. And if you're not, I can ask you why haven't you opened up that slide deck yet?

Totally. So what we're seeing, actually it's quite interesting what we're seeing in even just Silicon Valley is investment firms, venture capital firms will use box to centralize all of the kind of pitches and company and corporate material that is being shared with them in a private and secure way. And so what will happen is somebody will upload a presentation and another partner at that firm will say, oh, I know somebody at that company or oh, are you looking into that business? And instantly you're starting to see some serendipitous collaboration happen because these aren't the kinds of things that you would normally email out to your whole company about. And so we're starting to see that through better notification, through better visibility, through more consumer like approaches to information visibility and sharing. There's a lot of really kind of cool productivity gains that happen in the enterprise and in businesses.

Now if somebody uploads a new PowerPoint that's a derivative of existing one, does it notify everybody who was using that slide deck to say, oh, there's a new version of these slides of the quarter one sales?

Yep. So absolutely there's a new version. And we show you a little, I don't know how long it would take me to find an example file that has that, but it will actually tell you what version you're on. So as you're looking at the file, you'll be able to instantly go back to any version that previously existed and we show you that right away directly on top of the content. So it's really important to us and really important to our users that you always know what is relevant about what you're looking at. And that's actually one of the other features that we were showing you earlier in terms of being able to look at content and see all the other relevant content right next to it. That's a really kind of important direction for us.

Florian, you're one of the few companies that's used the Tornado open source library. How was that, what was that process like? Is it a good library that other companies should consider?

It was very, very smooth, very easy to start playing with. And for now we are very, very good with it. We are going to see how it works when we have millions of users using it or the scalability of it, but much bigger sites are using it. So we are very confident with this technology.

Very cool. So what else is in this new release? We covered the Real Time.

This called the Real Time. Another major kind of part of this release and again the kind of huge, the huge focus of this release is complete sort of redesign of the application to make it much easier to use box, much easier to share information, much more visibility around the content that you're sharing. So everything was kind of redesigned from the ground up to do that as well as the whole front end of the application was rebuilt and recoded from scratch to enable that. And so we've actually made it a much more efficient application and something that we can develop on much more easily going forward.

Now, before the camera turned on, you told me you're noticing a lot of iPads show up in enterprise. Is this all designed to work on the iPad?

So this will work on the iPad, obviously, in mobile experiences that have a larger form factor in that particular case. In terms of the growth that we've seen in mobile has been specifically around our iPad application. We have a leading kind of business app in the iPad Directory, and we're seeing a lot of businesses enable remote workforces, remote sales people, marketing teams, executive teams that need to be able to work from any mobile device at any time and be able to pull down their information very easily. The iPads and overall kind of tablet and smartphone experience is absolutely changing the enterprise today. And this is a very different landscape than the mobile space five years ago. And so there's a lot of enabling factors that go into cloud growth. Really amazing mobile applications that are being built for the enterprise, and we're really excited to be a part of that.

Back to the simplicity, can you give me one example of something that you guys changed that makes life dramatically better for customers?

Sure, sure. So we looked at kind of how people were using Box, and we really wanted to. We really wanted to update the overall experience to focus on the core elements of. Of Box that mattered to our users.

The content area is bigger.

Yeah. So in this particular case, we actually expanded the overall viewability of content on Box. We're giving you a lot more real estate to view your information. So if you're looking at a PowerPoint file, if you're looking at a Word document, a PDF, you want to consume that information, add comments on top of that data, or share it out to other people. We want to give you more space and more options to do that. Another really cool thing, and this is more of a roadmap that we're going to be pushing on throughout the year. But something we're launching with in the near term is showing you other relevant content to the information that you're looking at. And so as you're viewing documents in your box, we're going to show you other files that might be related to the file that you're looking at how.

Do you know that it's related? Because in enterprise there's not a lot of linking going on. That's a hard problem to solve.

Yeah. So for today we're relying on very kind of basic meta information. So today we're showing you files that are in the same folder as to what you're sharing. And so we think there's a lot of relevancy to navigate across files very quickly in the future, especially if you think about somebody doing a search on Box and then loading up a file, a piece of information, we can actually scan across your whole box account and show you other relevant data to what you're looking at today. And so that's sort of where we want to go directionally and where we think this type of technology allows us to do. And really what this redesign opens us up in terms of new opportunities for the application. So dramatic redesign of the website, making sure to overhaul the complete site to focus on simplicity and scalability of the service. Way more real estate for really kind of running your business and working with all of your content.

I notice the top bar is quite a bit different. It looks nicer and it's more open, like you said.

Yeah, it's a way more open experience. It's way more kind of focused on the core activities and parts of the application. We're actually going to be introducing a much more expanded applications tab, really kind of moving into an apps marketplace model. So that way when you store data once on Box, you can actually take it anywhere and people are. Customers are already doing that today. But we really want to enable completely new kinds of use cases. Use cases that work? Yes.

Sorry, are you testing this with customers and how are they reacting to the new changes that are coming?

Yeah, so it's extremely early. So actually on January 20th is going to be the first period that we're actually working with live customers on. We wanted to make this a really big announcement for even our kind of most excited customers. And so we're going to be rolling, rolling the application out to new users, very similar to how you've seen the new Facebook and new Twitter rollout. People will be able to choose to change over, but we're going to have a couple month process until you really kind of have to move over to the new version just so we can collect feedback, make sure the application is working the way we want it. And so this is a style much more consistent with consumer applications and enterprise software. And that's simply because we think that there's way better ways to deliver Enterprise software to our customers.

One of the things you mentioned, you're making this release more open. How are you making it more open?

It's by really focusing on our application, sort of marketplace and overall directory experience that will better Surface applications that you can use in conjunction with Box. So the only way we can succeed is if you can solve all of your problems around your business data. So once you store information on Box, we want to make it really, really easy for you to open up this content into other applications. So you might be a Salesforce or a NetSuite customer, you might be using NetSuite to manage your ERP, but you might be using Box to manage your marketing content and your contracts and your sales materials. And if you can link that information up from Box to your erp, you can create a much more consistent and seamless experience across your business applications. A similar example is if you're looking at Box. If you're on box.net, and you're working on a contract and you want to get it digitally signed by a partner, you might launch into something like EchoSign or DocuSign, where you can then get a digital signature directly from Box through a partner application. So in 2011, we're going to be really focused on enabling a whole ecosystem of developers of partners of channel and service providers that can build interesting value on top of Box.

So you guys are going to have external hack days then. So you encourage people to try out APIs and your SDKs and stuff like that.

Are you interested in participating?

I'm not a code.

Okay.

I have some friends.

Okay. Send them our way. We're really focused on opening this up to the broader ecosystem. So I expect we'll have some ways to encourage the developer ecosystem and even interesting ways we may be able to stimulate interesting development on the platform. So announcements to come on that front. But we're really excited with what could happen once more business applications are built on top of Box. And frankly, more open business applications that are built on top of a lot of these open platforms. Yeah.

Let's talk about business. I've been coming and visiting you for, I don't know, three or four years now. And every time I come back, it's like the size of your business has doubled. Has that continued?

Yeah. So actually we went from 65 employees at the beginning of last year to we ended the year with about 123 new employees. So pretty significant growth. I think that's really a testament to the market, the kind of macro factors of people want to work Way faster. They want to work with way more people. They want to be able to work in the cloud. They don't want to have as much legacy software and systems within their business. And we're just seeing a lot of the growth benefits from executing very well against those kind of market trends. So we've seen about 3.5x enterprise growth. That's exciting. We hit 5 million users. That's extremely exciting. We're starting to work with.

When you started this, did you have any clue you were going to get here?

I just needed beer money at the time, but maybe I might want to edit that one. No, I mean, when we started Box, it was very obvious that there are absolutely better ways that people could manage their information and share their content. What we didn't quite realize at the time was that every business in the world was having that same problem. And I think that the direction that we've gone in the past two to three years by really, really focusing, and that's really the time frame we've been talking regularly, really focusing on the enterprise experience has contributed and kind of really created that growth and that opportunity. Because most enterprise software companies have still taken a very traditional approach to solving business problems. You kind of deliver a piece of software, you put it on premise, you have a lot of infrastructure that you manage, and then you update that software two or three years later. Maybe you send some patches in the process in the meantime. And with Box, we operate very much like a consumer Internet company, but specifically focused on the enterprise. So we release the site every single week. That means every single week there are updates, improvements, usability enhancements, and often completely new functionality and features.

Now, I worked at Microsoft. The teams up there are used to shipping every two years, every 18 months, something like that. Are you sensing that they're feeling threatened yet by you? Because your numbers now are getting to the point where the box is 5 million users.

Wow. We try to make it very clear.

To them they can ignore you when it's 5 million. They got to start paying attention.

We have some fun email exchanges with various folks here and there, but overall, I think they're a little bit insulated in Redmond. They're kind of. They have their sort of. And they're trying to figure out the mobile strategy and all these kind of things. So we actually like that they're pretty distracted as an organization right now. We're going to stay super focused on this one kind of singular enterprise value proposition. And I think it's working out pretty well for us. But we ultimately, I Think ultimately we're just trying to build the best possible experience for businesses. Right. And create the best way that they can manage their information.

Tell me how you get the innovations into your product, because that's an interesting example where bigger companies just still aren't thinking along these lines.

Well, one fun example actually, on the SharePoint side. So right now there's the latest version of SharePoint is SharePoint 2010. Right. So you're already. Now your technology is already a year old, right. If you're on SharePoint. And the next version is going to be SharePoint 2013 or 2015 or some distant kind of future type of thing. So our ability to move and adapt in real time is a major competitive advantage and something that's very different in the enterprise space. One thing that we do to kind of force as a forcing function to make sure we're always constantly waking up to the newest ideas that we can find in our organization. We have hackathons every three to five months or so. And it's really an opportunity. It's something modeled off of some leading consumer Internet companies. It's an opportunity to. For essentially nearly 16 hours of development, every engineer in Box gets to choose any feature, any new function that they want to be able to build. And it doesn't have to do anything with our strategy. It doesn't have to do anything with where we're trying to go. And that's really when you can start to see some completely new types of innovations happen on Box and Florian, you.

Built this on one of those hack days, right?

Yeah, exactly.

On the hackathon we had in December.

So you built this all overnight, drinking pizza and drinking Diet Coke and pizza.

And using as many hex as possible.

That's one of the requirements. And then what you do is you spend three months productionizing what you buy.

Cleaning up all the mistakes, because you did get your sleep. Are you guys working like on an Eric Reiss kind of model, the lean startup kind of thing? Tell me some of your philosophies of running teams here.

We're very lean on a team basis. The person who has led up the whole sort of V5 creation, Kimber, is an engineering manager at Box. She actually was the CEO of the company that produced this content previewing technology that we acquired about a year and a half ago. And she pulled together a team of four or five folks and really just from scratch, dramatically redesigned the whole application. And so we do operate on that model. Small teams getting big things done. And it's really cool because we have Teams of two or three engineers building functionality that tens of thousands of businesses are going to use a week later. And it's really exciting. And the kind of reward and gratification you get for doing that is just way different than traditional enterprise software, where we hear stories of people from Oracle or Microsoft, where you're building something in an RD lab that you're basically going to wait five years until the public sees this, because it has to go through marketing, has to go through productionalization, it has to go through shipping, distribution channels, it has to go through all the vendors before it actually gets used by end users. And then imagine after that whole process, then you get a feedback loop from users. And in our environment, we're getting feedback loops from users within a couple minutes when the site gets the latest version of code. And so I think these are philosophies that are not unique to Box, but they're unique in the enterprise space. And I think we're going to start to see them more and more throughout the whole kind of enterprise landscape.

Very cool. Where do we learn more about the new release?

Yeah, so just visit our homepage after, after one o' clock on January 20th and www.box.net we'll have some information about the new launch. Box.net simple. We'll have some more information about our development philosophies and what we're up to. But really, really excited. Again, this is going to start out as beta, opening it up for current users that want to switch their account over, collect a lot of feedback, kind of roll it out. But I think most importantly, the three key things for this year are really building a much simpler product for every kind of customer. Openness and letting you get to your data from anywhere. And then finally mobility, being able to work from anywhere. And so this new version of Box is going to really kind of dramatically simplify, I think, the whole experience of enterprise software.

Are you guys hiring?

We are, we are. So we cannot.

So you can double again this year?

It might not be a year, but maybe it will be a year plus a couple months. But we are super focused on hiring the absolute best engineers, people in sales, in marketing. And so we have a lot of great openreqs go to box.net careers or jobs. One of those URLs will send you to the right place. That's a little hiring test, if you can make it to the page. But we're absolutely growing and we're super excited to bring people that are passionate about innovating in the enterprise. Very cool.

Thanks for showing us, man.

Thanks, Robert.

Congrats for the success.

Thank you so much.

It's really great to see a company just grow up like this.

It's. It's quite fun. So. Yep. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Cool.