
Q&A with Aaron Levie - dwaxe
http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/07/aaron-levie/
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doctorpangloss
> startups with zero baggage

Well, a megalomaniacal founder who wants to hire 10,000 people and run a huge
company has the exact same baggage as his large competitors. The baggage is
just cultural, rather than business baggage or technical baggage. I think
investors like Aaron Levie, who's all around a brilliant and highly
accommodating guy, don't recognize that cultural baggage exists at day 0.

> Don’t hedge your bets.

That makes sense from the point of view of an investment portfolio manager,
where you would want all of your companies to do the thing you actually
invested in them to do in order to achieve diversity. But from a business
point of view, bifurcating strategy could make a ton of sense.

Maybe we're talking about different companies. I really admire places like
Valve, which definitely regard culture as their main source of enterprise
value (rather than some notion of legacy-free competitiveness) and bifurcation
(game development and store management) as successful. You could find lots of
people who wouldn't care to found a Box.net. But who wouldn't want to found
Valve?

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manigandham
> You could find lots of people who wouldn't care to found a Box.net. But who
> wouldn't want to found Valve?

How'd you come up with this? I'd much rather build Box than Valve. What's so
special about Valve other than making some games? Business != culture.

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sockgrant
Whaaaat? Maybe you're not that into video games. Valve helped define a
generation of gaming. You can't tell the history of video games without
devoting some time to them.

Box is a great company but I don't think it's as impactful.

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nl
There are a lot of people who view games as pretty much the same as Hollywood:
no doubt it has a lot of impact, but ultimately it is "just" entertainment.

Personally I'm just not very interested in gaming.

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tacon
>Ten years from now, how have you improved yourself? > >The list is pretty
much endless. To name a few: I wish I were better at chess, I wish I could
juggle five balls instead of barely four, I wish I were better at piano, I
wish I were a speed reader, and I wish I could sleep fewer hours.

This is a very disappointing list. He is the CEO of a major corporation, but
everything he wants to improve has nothing to do with how he interacts with
other human beings, be they family, employees, customers, or anyone else.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
I would have been disappointed if he said something out of your playbook.
Those are very cliche feel-good PR comments that anyone can say. It's almost
like those people at conferences asking questions they're not even curious
about (but for the sake of getting attention).

He's just another normal human being and is being genuine about it.

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misiti3780
Am I the only one here who has never heard of the book Blue Ocean Strategy ?

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cocktailpeanuts
Maybe not the only one but I don't think it's something to be proud of. It's a
great book and I'm sure a lot of people are aware of the concept even though
they haven't actually read the book.

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misiti3780
im not proud of it - i love reading im surprised i have never heard of it - as
i have read everything else on his list

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cocktailpeanuts
Lame answer to "What do you believe that few people agree with you on?". I
don't think "few" people think that think AI will create more jobs than
destroy. This type of controversy has existed every time there was any type of
technological innovation throughout the history.

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Aelinsaar
I generally agree with UntilHellbanned, but I think the closing point about
spending time with, and getting to know your customers makes it all worth it.
Too many people lose sight of that, or worse, develop adversarial
relationships with their customers.

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untilHellbanned
Fairly useless platitude-fest/groupthink. Kinda surprised.

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exolymph
I had the opposite reaction — I found previous entries in this series pretty
lackluster, but enjoyed this one. Maybe that's because I was previously biased
to like Levie due to his entertaining Twitter presence...

