The New Startup Playbook | Box CEO Aaron Levie

Startups can actually outrun these big companies in a way that was just never economically feasible before. You could actually go and compete in almost any category on the dimension of people are missing this whole thing. I really think that there will be hundreds of companies that are all 1,000,000,000 market cap, 5,000,000,000 market cap, 10,000,000,000 market cap, and beyond that basically are just... There's near infinite opportunity for new startups to emerge on the basis of AI is giving small startups something they've never had before, the ability to deploy resources at a scale that once belonged only to big companies. In this episode of Speedrun Office Hours, Fox CEO Aaron Levy explains why a three, five, or 10 person team can increasingly produce the output of a company many times its size. Aaron breaks down how founders are becoming managers of AI agents, why strategy and taste matter more as execution gets cheaper, and why he expects specialized agents to emerge across nearly every industry and job function. But one part of the startup playbook hasn't changed, distribution. As Aaron puts it, if you build it, they will not necessarily come. Aaron, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's kind of interesting that, you know, you're actually still a young guy, only a few years older than me and probably similar to Andrew, but you've been running Box since 2005, which is almost exactly half your life. If if you could compare the world of startups now to the world as it was back then Yeah. What do you what do you think about the startup experience has changed? My my biggest takeaway I feel really old, so I appreciate that you're using your age as the anchor for what young is, but I think unfortunately, I tend to feel very old now. I am so impressed and excited by so many of these young founders right now. What's interesting is that in 2005, so we dropped out of college middle of our junior year, and in 2005, it was fairly rare to drop out and kind of be 20 doing a startup. There were a few dozen of us in the Silicon Valley at that time. Think prompted probably mostly by like Facebook had made dropping out like a thing, but it was still a relatively rare event. And what is so fascinating now is the amount of now 20 year olds that are dropping out. It's like it is just like now a standard playbook for these kids. And so I think it's super exciting how just how many young people are getting started and jumping right into building startups. So I do tend to feel pretty old, but yeah, the playbook seems incredibly different. I mean, the way that startups are being run right now is the most different than any other period of technological change that I've ever seen. Where if you looked at how we ran Box in 2005 …