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um no but i'm not trying to ruin your questions only
what one scenario we gave it like our earning script from from one quarter and we said um uh you know if you were warren buffett um how would you improve this earning script and um it's like a random use case like nobody in the entire world would ever have you know asked that question of an earning script but all of a sudden it starts to amp up the cash flow message and the share repurchase message and the capital allocation message and so now you know when you're preparing to go in front of a w
most of the the work that went into to box ai was you know these are like 1am sessions um you know with the the the team or cto on like okay can we how do we solve this and and how do we figure this thing out we hired a we hired an intern at at midnight on a saturday um and and just you know some some kid at stanford that was just like online and ready to rock right away
we had we've been doing seven or eight years of work in ai um and uh that the challenge was every single use case a customer had you know i i want to understand my contracts i want to understand my film scripts i want to understand my you know blueprint files every conversation we had was a different ai model that you had to narrowly you know kind of train and implement for that one use case and so it never really scaled because it would be like you know be like if we were building on the web an
The trend that you just described is actually probably a net tailwind for us. So the more places, the more places that data is going and people are generating content and you have all these different places to store things, actually, the greater the challenge it is for an enterprise. So if you, if you think about you're a bank and, and there's, you know, files going into
And then we, you know, really just acknowledge that for our play, we had to be an enterprise software platform, and build up this idea of having a cloud content management platform end to end for the full lifecycle of your business.
we basically did this like over a three month period pivoted the company and said, we're going to go out to the enterprise market. And that was that was sort of that kind of no hedging decision. And then we basically became an enterprise software company. So that was back in early part of 2007, late 2006, pivoted the company.
we compared that path, which was like, oh God, like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple. It's a race to the bottom... So we kind of saw that trend in 2006, 2007. We then looked at the enterprise market and we were like, oh my God, for some reason, we stumbled into this market that we never knew existed, which is enterprise spending millions of dollars just to manage their documents.
we were the first company of the new era, you know, sort of six years later, right around kind of the Facebook, YouTube sort of web 2.0 period. And we said, okay, let's let you store files in the cloud. And we're going to do a really big idea. We're actually going to give you a gigabyte of storage for free.
they're at least 100 times more dense than than the hard drives we bought when we started the company.
we've obviously been proven right on the cloud over peer to peer, specifically for our use case.
when we started box, we actually were also building a side product called Whirl, and Whirl was going to do peer to peer file sharing. So if you had a, if you had a corporate network, and everybody installed Whirl, you would basically be able to virtualize normally what would be in a server, because everybody would be just sharing files.
the third thing in particular in enterprise software, um, there's this one idiosyncrasy where your customers actually want to literally know like, how are your financials doing? Are you going to be able to manage my data for the long run? And so there's almost a kind of credibility brand transparency element to being public that ends up being uniquely helpful in enterprise software. That's not really the case in, in consumer like Airbnb or DoorDash doesn't really matter if these companies are pu
at a certain revenue scale, let's say a hundred million in recurring revenue, 200 million recurring revenue, you, you have enough predictability, uh, predictability in the business model where, um, you can, you know, operate at scale as a public company, I think with a high degree of forward looking, you know, kind of visibility and predictability and so that's good because that's sort of like job number one of going public is, is really make sure that you've got the business model locked in. Nu