Q&A with Aaron Levie

> 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?

>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.

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

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.

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.

Fairly useless platitude-fest/groupthink. Kinda surprised.