User:CrystalBlue2012/sandbox

Aaron Levie (b. 1984) is an American entrepreneur and recognized as a pioneer in the cloud computing industry. He is the co-founder and CEO of the enterprise cloud company Box, which is one of the fastest growing companies in enterprise software and is used by more than 11 million individuals and 120,000 businesses worldwide. He is an advocate of innovation and disruption in the technology industry and frequently appears in TV interviews, IT conferences and business events.

Early life and education
Levie was born in 1985 in Seattle, Washington to Ben and Karyn Levie. He grew up in Seattle and attended Mercer Island High School, part of the Mercer Island School District in Washington. As a child, Levie was said to spend most of his time in front of computers. After graduating from Mercer Island, he went on to attend the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. As part of a college project in marketing, he was assigned to choose a market and conduct a SWOT analysis for its Strengths, Weaknesses/Limitations, Opportunities, and Threats. He chose to do the project on digital storage which he later stated had very few companies offering meaningful services on the market. It was at that time that Levie stated he decided to leave school and build a company that provides such services. Levie started the company with his life long friend and co-founder Dylan Smith.

Professional career
Levie co-founded Box in 2005 while still attending the University of Southern California. He incorporated the company in April 2005 in Mercer Island, Washington and the following summer he moved the company to Palo Alto, California. He initially offered a freemium model for the company with a 1 Gigabyte of space for new users. Levie secured Angel Investment for Box from Texas billionaire Mark Cuban after a cold e-mail. He was also able to secure investments from some of the top investment companies such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, the majority shareholder of Facebook. He also secured investments from Salesforce and SAP reaching $162 Million of funding since the launch of the company in 2005.

Box (formerly Box.net) is an online file sharing and Cloud  content management service for enterprise companies. The company has adopted a freemium business model, and provides 5GB of free storage for personal accounts. A mobile version of the service is available for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, WebOS, and Windows Phone devices.

Box received a number of funding rounds and is valued at approximately $1Billion (USD) as of July 2012. The company has more than 500 employees.

Box is one of the leading corporations in the Cloud space and has expanded into the Enterprise market with 92% of the Fortune 500 companies as clients, more than 120,000 business clients and approximately 11 millions users. The Huffington Post called Box "one of the fastest growing enterprise applications" ever.

Lectures and media appearances
Levi has been profiled by Fast Company magazine, and The Wall Street Journal's Digits Show He has spoken about content and collaboration tools at events such as DEMO conference, CloudBeat conference, Accenture Global Summit, South by Southwest and Svase. He has also presented on tech at some of the top tech conferences such as Fortune Brainstorm Tech, Web 2.0, and Dreamforce. He is frequently invited to speak at industry events about Cloud computing and Enterprise IT solutions including at the  DocuSign 2010 ESIGN Summit where he was a featured presenter along with former  President Bill Clinton. Leive was a speaker at the 2012 Twilio Annual Conference (TwilioCon),, The 2012 Uplinq Mobile Developers Conference (where he was the keynote speaker), and the  CTIA-Enterprise and Applications at the San Diego Convention Center in 2011. He has also written numerous articles for publications such as The Washington Post and Fastcompany.com.

Awards and recognition
In 2008, Inc. Magazine's named Levie as one of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30. He was also named one of the 30 Most Influential CEOs Under 30 in 2010, a list that included names such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg and Living Social founders Tim O’Shaughnessy and Eddie Frederick.