Aaron Winsor Levie (born December 27, 1984) (pronounced ) is an American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

. He is the co-founder and CEO of the enterprise

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

company

Box A box (plural: boxes) is a container with rigid sides used for the storage or transportation of its contents. Most boxes have flat, parallel, rectangular sides (typically rectangular prisms). Boxes can be very small (like a matchbox) or v ...

Early life and education

Aaron Levie was born on December 27, 1984, in

Boulder, Colorado Boulder is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Home rule municipality, home rule city in Boulder County, Colorado, United States, and its county seat. With a population of 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the most ...

, the youngest of three children. When he was ten, his family moved to

Mercer Island, Washington Mercer Island is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located on an island of the same name in the southern portion of Lake Washington. Mercer Island is in the Seattle metropolitan area, with Seattle to its west and Bellevue to ...

, a small suburb of

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

. His parents are Ben and Karyn Levie, who worked as a chemical engineer at a paper company and as a speech-language pathologist, respectively. Levie attended high school at the Mercer Island High School. He initially was interested in becoming a film director and applied to film school, but his application was rejected. He attended the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

studying with an undeclared major before dropping out during his junior year in 2005 to start cloud storage company

. During college, he interned at

Miramax Miramax, LLC, formerly known as Miramax Films, is an American independent film and television production and distribution company owned by beIN Media Group and Paramount Global. Based in Los Angeles, California, it was founded on December 19, ...

and

Paramount Pictures Paramount Pictures Corporation, commonly known as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount, is an American film production company, production and Distribution (marketing), distribution company and the flagship namesake subsidiary of Paramount ...

Career

The idea for Box originated as a college business project that Levie was working on in 2004. The project examined

cloud storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which data, said to be on "the cloud", is stored remotely in logical pools and is accessible to users over a network, typically the Internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers (so ...

options for businesses and after contacting several organizations to ask how they are storing their content and data, Levie came to the conclusion that the market was fragmented. Levie saw an opportunity to build an online file storage business as a way for individuals to access and store documents and files. In December 2005, during his junior year at USC, Levie took a leave of absence to launch Box (originally called box.net) with his friend and Box CFO, Dylan Smith who was attending

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

. At the time, Box was a storage service where users could pay to store their files in the

. Levie and Smith incorporated Box in April 2005 while operating the company out of Smith's parents' house on Mercer Island. Soon after, they moved the company to

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

. Levie and Smith first secured angel investment for Box from Texas billionaire

Mark Cuban Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American businessman and television personality. He is the former principal owner and current minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and co-owner of 2929 Entertain ...

after a cold e-mail. In 2007, as the consumer cloud storage marketplace was becoming increasingly crowded, Levie and Smith decided to shift Box from a consumer service to one focused on selling to businesses (

). Box expanded its operations into Europe in 2012, with the opening of its first office in London, England. As of 2014, Box reported that 40 percent of ''Fortune'' 500 companies are paying Box customers. The company is headquartered in

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in the Bay Area of Northern California, approximately south of San Francisco and northwest of San Jose. The city's population was 84,292 according to the 2020 census. The Port of Redwo ...

and was backed by several venture capital firms and investors such as

Andreessen Horowitz AH Capital Management, LLC (commonly known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z) is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of M ...

Bessemer Venture Partners Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is an American venture capital and private equity firm headquartered in San Francisco. Outside the United States, it has offices in India, Israel, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. In 2024, Venture Capital Journa ...

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth continues to be managed by co-founder John Fisher and co-founders Mark Ba ...

General Atlantic General Atlantic, legal main entity General Atlantic Service Company, L.P., (also known as "GA") is an American growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support for global growth companies, headquartered in New York, United States. T ...

, Meritech Capital Partners,

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

, U.S. Venture Partners, and Salesforce.com. The company filed for an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

(IPO) on the

New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...

in March 2014. Citing market fluctuations the company delayed its IPO until January 23, 2015.

Speaking and contributed writing

Levie has spoken at industry events such as Fortune Brainstorm Tech, Dreamforce, CxOTalk, LeWeb, RSA, MobileBeat, GigaOm Structure, TechCrunch Disrupt and DEMO. He has also written articles on innovation in the technology industry for publications such as The Washington Post, CNN.com, Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Forbes, ZDNet and Fast Company.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levie, Aaron 1984 births Living people American technology chief executives Businesspeople from King County, Washington People from Mercer Island, Washington Mercer Island High School alumni