Geek of the Week: Aaron Levie
For the past few months, CloudWedge has been running the “Geek of the Week” column, in which we choose on cloud leader that we feel has made an impact on the cloud market. There is no shortage of cloud news, and now with cloud news coming out in what seems to be every hour, it is more difficult than ever to choose a Geek of the Week.
Furthermore, with all of the competition this week from players like IBM, Fireeye, VMWare, Aquilent, Samsung and Oracle, this decision was not an easy one. Yet, there still needed to be a winner. That said, congratulations to Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box Inc.
For those who have not heard (okay, you obviously have heard), Box went public while raising $175 million. This is an incredible feat for a company that was (135.72%) net “profit” in FY 2014. That’s negative 135.72% for all of you stock market novices. And sure, while the stock is down after being up 66% at the close of day one, Box seems to have a bright future in store. Their platform is light years ahead of Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and even Google. How many people can say that they have a better platform than one of the most, if not the most, dominating company in the world (Google)? 40% of Fortune 500 companies are paying for Box instead of relying on the Freemium model. And, they are said to have over 30 million customers, with 275,000 business customers – 39,000 of which are paying corporate customers.
Aaron Levie graduated from Mercer Island High School and followed that by enrolling in University of Southern California (USC). However, he took a leave of absence from USC in 2005 to start Box, and was clearly instrumental in its success.
