Founder Calls

In this week's episode of Founder Calls, Levie calls up Yahoo! Co-Founder and consumer internet expert (see: Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web) Jerry Yang to discuss how one of the Valley's greatest heroes has now become one of the most prolific enterprise investors in the world. In a generation of enterprise software that values engagement and ease-of-use, Jerry's expertise has made him invaluable to companies. At his firm AME Cloud Ventures, almost all of Jerry's 50+ portfolio companies are focused on selling into the enterprise. Aside from discussing Box's first competitor, Yahoo! Briefcase, Levie and Jerry also talk about what skills enterprise software founders need to hone in a world of consumerization; what might happen to enterprise spending in a bust-cycle; and the biggest opportunities around mobile security, big data, and enterprise hardware. Stick around for the end of the call to hear Jerry, whose bet on Alibaba was one of the world's most lucrative investments, also share his thoughts around why enterprise software is still missing from China and what he believes to be two of the biggest myths around China at the moment.

In a landscape where international hacks, cybercrime, and bad actors infiltrate company data — security has never been more important to enterprises. As a result, we are excited to have Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of CloudFlare, joining us on Founder Calls to discuss how enterprise startups should think about building security in their applications. Prior to CloudFlare, Michelle worked at Google and Toshiba, launched two successful startups, and got her MBA from Harvard Business School. She went on to co-found CloudFlare with classmates and turn it into one of the leading companies in enterprise security. CloudFlare helps websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and attacks by blocking threats and limiting abusive bots that waste bandwidth and server resources. In this episode of Founder Calls, Michelle and Box CEO and co-founder, Aaron Levie, discuss the how CloudFlare was first started, why startups need to be thinking about building security into their applications from Day 1, and what might happen if security threats lead to the balkanization of the Internet. Questions answered in this episode: If you are selling to the GE’s of the world, how should you think about building security into your application? Does every software company have to become a security company? How should Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) think about the effect of distributed software on security? How should CISOs be measured in a a world where hacks and data loss are inevitable? What should the US government be doing with industry around security? How should startups balance speed and innovation against a need for secure systems? Tune in to hear what Michelle has to share!

Our longest episode of Founder Calls yet, you'll want to dig in and listen to Stewart discuss why he decided to build an enterprise software company (after a brief detour in multiplayer gaming), how a product built for internal use spurred a massive pivot, and how the underlying technology that a company uses dramatically affects its ability to innovative and, ultimately, survive, as the major Darwinian forces of building a business take effect. Stewart also shares some of his thoughts on Slack's latest funding, why he doesn't have any plans to spend the money right away, and why he thinks Slack can justify a 2.8 billion dollar valuation (a 5.5% compounded weekly growth rate might have something to do with it!).

In the latest episode of Founder Calls, Aaron Levie, Box CEO and co-founder, calls up Mikkel Svane, CEO and co-founder of Zendesk, the company that has changed the face of customer support platforms. Svane and two of his friends founded Zendesk in Copenhagen and eventually moved the company to California, took it public, and turned it into a nearly 2 billion dollar business. Over the course of almost a decade, Svane has experienced his fair share of ups and downs -- from figuring out how to raise capital from American investors to taking on a massively consolidated industry -- but has emerged as a prime example of what it takes to disrupt the enterprise. Levie calls up Svane to discuss all the events that take place between raising capital and an IPO: how you create value through better design and being faster to market, what it takes to build an effective enterprise sales model, and how to keep the startup culture alive as a public company. Tune in for a glimpse of Svane's latest thoughts around the future of customer support and how new channels like FB Messenger will change the way businesses communicate with their customers. He even shares his favorite companies at the forefront of customers support (and some that could use a little help!).

In this episode of Founder Calls, Aaron Levie interviews Jeff Lawson, CEO and Co-Founder of Twilio. Jeff is responsible for building one of the leading developer platforms that has completely owned the communications category. Jeff is a serial inventor with over 15 years of entrepreneurial and product experience. Prior to co-founding Twilio, Jeff was Founder & CTO of NineStar, Founding CTO of Stubhub.com and Founder, CEO & CTO of Versity. He was also one of the original product managers for Amazon Web Services. At every business, Jeff identified the fundamental need for a platform for developers and companies to easily build communications-based business solutions. Tune in to hear about how Jeff originally got the idea for Twilio, what it has taken for him to scale the Twilio platform to over 600,000 developers, and how he sees APIs completely transforming enterprise software.

In the inaugural episode of Founder Calls, Aaron Levie (Box CEO & Co-founder) dials up renowned operator and partner at Khosla Ventures Keith Rabois, whose career has spanned Paypal, LinkedIn, and Square. Keith shares his thoughts on a wide range of topics from the ability of robots to replace doctors and lawyers to the dynamics that enable the spread of virally adopted enterprise software (see: Yammer, LinkedIn, Slack) to the best areas for founding a startup today.