Aaron Levie honored at Silicon Beach conference


On Wednesday night, the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Marshall School of Business honored Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year Aaron Levie.

Outside the Box · Lloyd Greif, right, namesake of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, interviews Aaron Levie, left. - Mariya Dondonyan | Daily Trojan

Outside the Box · Lloyd Greif, right, namesake of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, interviews Aaron Levie, left. – Mariya Dondonyan | Daily Trojan

The ceremony, which was part of the larger conference Silicon Beach @USC, was held from at the Trojan Grand Ballroom in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center. Silicon Beach refers to the area of West Los Angeles known for a high concentration of technology companies.

“We always like to bring in highly successful entrepreneurs to Marshall to supplement our courses, and each year we honor an alumni entrepreneur,” said Dave Belasco, co-director of the Lloyd Greif Center. “The founders of companies like Kinkos, MySpace and Tinder have come out of USC. This year we are thrilled to welcome back and celebrate Aaron Levie.”

Now in its third year, the Silicon Beach @USC conference is a program jointly organized by the Marshall School of Business and the School of Cinematic Arts to promote leaders in the fields of film, technology startups and academia.

“The conference is great because it allows students to participate in business competitions with real prize money at stake and also see founders of startups like Siri, Square, Stubhub and Kiva,” Belasco said.

The event was free for all USC students, alumni and registered attendees of the conference and included a forum and student question-and-answer session with Levie.

“We are here to teach students the skillsets and mindset to launch businesses and change the world, and Levie is one of many sources of inspiration,” Belasco said.

Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box, a Los Altos-based online storage company that connects people and information across all types of devices.

“We build a platform that makes it really easy to work with and collaborate around data,” Levie said. “A company’s data, in addition to its employees, is the most crucial part of its success because it is the heart of its ideas and intellectual property.”

According to an article this past March in The New York Times, Box’s value is estimated at $2 billion, and 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies are paying customers.

Levie attended USC until taking a leave of absence as a junior in December 2005 to pursue his work full-time with high school friend and then-Duke University student Dylan Smith.

“I took a broad set of classes at USC and took advantage of different domains because they were made easily available, which is such a great aspect of this university,” Levie said. “But by the time [Box] launched in September 2005, I was spending about 50 percent of my time on school and 50 percent on the company, and I reached a point that I wanted to focus entirely on our project.”

Levie believes Box’s innovative approach allowed it to rise above the competition of traditional online storage vendors when it was first launched.

“The bet early on was that heads of companies would value the user experience of the technology they were enabling their employees to have,” Levie said. “Box offers usability and sustainability to manage corporate information that others just didn’t have.”

Over the past nine years, Box has expanded to 27 million individual users and has 1,100 employees. Levie is optimistic that it will continue to grow because it has stayed true to its startup values that cater to users.

“My job is not that different now from when it was at the beginning with just four employees,” Levie said. “We are always thinking like a startup. We are always learning about how technology is changing. The only way to have that flexibility to maintain that startup structure is to have an infrastructure and a set of employees so I don’t have to spend too much time away from customers.”

USC alumnus Lloyd Greif, investment banker and namesake of Marshall’s entrepreneurial center, presented the award to Levie at the conclusion of the event.

“I think Aaron [Levie] had the perfect combination of humor and wisdom in his words tonight,” Greif said. “One pearl that particularly stood out was when he said we should be in constant, relentless execution mode. If we take away anything from tonight, it would be those four words.”