6 ms·

Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]

74 points by sandslash 1y ago

anoojb 1y ago
Honest question — why is the CEO of a Enterprise cloud storage company so out in the public touting the benefits of AI? Conversely, why aren't the senior leaders of Google Drive, SharePoint, etc. so consistently speaking about the benefits of AI? A couple top of mind thoughts on the range of outcomes: -Perhaps it's more of a requisite function of a company that went through a long phase of mild-growth (even anemic relative to the Nasdaq composite) and is seeking to maintain relevance with PR/Marketing spend -They are investing in a step function product roadmap that could accelerate revenue growth and are positioning the brand for a future product launch. -A slightly more cynical view, the CEO is searching for a new home for the company? It's been over 20 years, which fees like long time for a public technology company to have a single CEO. -The CEO is positioning himself personally for a new VC fund. He's had some success with previous investments and is looking to preemptively market his new fund. -A slightly more realistic view, the CEO (who seems really enthusiastic) is honestly just like the rest of us and got nerd-swiped by this AI thing and feels genuinely excited about it :-) Either way he seems very well networked and able to appear nearly everywhere and re-cap information and insights from other source material. I'm curious what the underlying incentives/outcomes are for this kind of PR blitz.
- mettamage 1y ago
  > Conversely, why aren't the senior leaders of Google Drive Google execs are constantly talking about the benefits of AI. People lower on the totem pole just don't have the same platform as the top execs at Google do. And by Google, I mean Alphabet, not just search.
- nextworddev 1y ago
  He’s trying to stay relevant
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  When was the last time Box was relevant? Dropbox is struggling, can only imagine what Box is going through. Their stock isn't great and the outlook is "limited growth".
  - mosura 1y ago
    “Feature not a product” looks like it was right in the long run.
  - strus 1y ago
    Box is relevant in enterprise space. It's a very different business than Dropbox.
- quantumsequoia 1y ago
  He's being a salesman, he wants to convince enterprises they need Box AI
mandeepj 1y ago
From the video: a lot of new companies are going to start Well, there is this as well - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-board-chair-doubles-down-153914695.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-board-chair-doubles-do... Altman was touring globally to raise $7T (yes, trillion), just a few months ago. So, not sure if they are purposefully trying to scare off people.
- WaltPurvis 1y ago
  >Altman was touring globally to raise $7T (yes, trillion), just a few months ago. A few points about that: It wasn't just a few months ago, it was more than a year ago; he wasn't raising funds for OpenAI, it was for a separate chip-building venture; the $7T number was universally regarded as laughable, and the whole thing has predictably gone nowhere; and, FWIW, both OpenAI and Altman have publicly denied that he was ever trying to raise such a comical amount.
game_the0ry 1y ago
I see some comments here that are critical of Aaron, but I enjoyed the talk. Pretty good insider info on trends in the "enterprise" vis-a-vis ai and saas in general. Especially liked the framing of structured vs unstructured data, and the opportunity to make unstructured data more useful with llmns. I do not have much criticize or add except to emphasize that ai as it is now is probabilistic, not deterministic -- ask the same question twice and you could get vastly different answers.
- bwestergard 1y ago
  I remarked on this back in March, prompted by Théophile Cantelobre's visualization of the connections between people in the culinary world and the restaurants they've been involved in. https://bjornwestergard.com/llm-extractors/ https://bjornwestergard.com/llm-extractors/
plasticsoprano 1y ago
Man you guys are pessimistic and stuck in your bubbles. Asking if box is relevant when they’ve had growth the last two quarters while Dropbox is on the verge of seeing a drop in numbers. Yes ms and Google are seeing more but the product box is putting out is light years ahead of Dropbox, egnyte, and, honesty, most of FAANG, in terms of supporting the average office worker. They aren’t building sexy AI coders but they are making it so Sue Ellen, the EA to the VP of fuckall, can automate things and make life easier for everyone. I worked at box, albeit for only a year, and saw Aaron’s passion up close. He could step into an executive briefing center meeting and pull out projects the customer was working on a year prior that didn’t directly involve box and ask honest, empathetic questions about it. He’s a nerd and loves talking about this stuff. Those saying he’s trying to remain relevant or find a new hole for box miss the fact he’s on cnbc and other business channels a few times a year just talking tech. Unless Houston who only shows up when Dropbox has a sad launch to tout. Aaron is passionate about Box and has been fighting an uphill battle since day one but I’ve held on to my thousands of shares since I left and the value has doubled. I fully expect AI to accelerate their future and lead to a bigger balance sheet.
- gyanchawdhary 1y ago
  Sue Ellen, the EA to the VP of fuckall .. I died
- khamidou 1y ago
  Part of the reason you're seeing pessimism about box is because the stock has barely kept up with inflation. Their IPO price was 23.23 USD, now it's at 32.30. That's 39% of growth while inflation over 10 years is 36%. So sure their CEO is passionate and on CNBC but the business is clearly not doing that great
  - jdlshore 1y ago
    Stock price isn’t necessarily equivalent to how well the company is doing, though. I’d be more interested in hearing revenue and profit. (Not asking you to go dig that up, just making the point that the market can be irrational.)
HEmanZ 1y ago
My biggest gripe with this is the reasoning for “no, AI is not going to take everyone’s jobs.” Obviously the state of “workers and AI together” comes first. So there’s not going to be some strawman cliff where suddenly all jobs are replaced in a month. But people like him lay out this future and then act like AI just stops there. Of course there will be an intermediate state. And then that state will be passed over as AI move further up the chain and humans are eliminated from office labor entirely.
- d3ckard 1y ago
  My biggest gripe with your reasoning is a hidden assumption that everything humans do is easily encodable in what we call AI today. I don’t think this is the case.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    It will be encodable in what we call AI tomorrow
    - jaccola 1y ago
      Except not literally tomorrow, of course. So you might as well say 1 million years from now...
  - tjs8rj 1y ago
    AI and technology is already replacing jobs. The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people. Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k. This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases. Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created. And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.
nitwit005 1y ago
The claim that companies won't just build everything in-house because of wanting to be able to sue over damages seems extremely weak. If AI tools could genuinely build a replacement for Box with trivial effort, everyone would drop them immediately. There's some strangeness around AI where people will claim it will do amazing things, but somehow not so amazing that no one will need them.
- lubujackson 1y ago
  You miss the bigger point about context. Companies pick their focus and what to spend their time on. Post startup-scale, the cost of internal failures becomes exponential. AI might be able to whip up the exact same legal document or CRM or whatever, but when one thing goes wrong, that might lose $1 million in revenue. It is about paying for accountability over outcomes.
  - nitwit005 1y ago
    Do some math to see if it makes sense. If you have 10,000 employees, any software subscription that's $100 a person for all employees will be a million dollars a year. Many licenses are more than that. Even if you experience the million dollar outage, you'll have easily saved money.

74 points by sandslash 1y ago

Honest question — why is the CEO of a Enterprise cloud storage company so out in the public touting the benefits of AI? Conversely, why aren't the senior leaders of Google Drive, SharePoint, etc. so consistently speaking about the benefits of AI? A couple top of mind thoughts on the range of outcomes: -Perhaps it's more of a requisite function of a company that went through a long phase of mild-growth (even anemic relative to the Nasdaq composite) and is seeking to maintain relevance with PR/Marketing spend -They are investing in a step function product roadmap that could accelerate revenue growth and are positioning the brand for a future product launch. -A slightly more cynical view, the CEO is searching for a new home for the company? It's been over 20 years, which fees like long time for a public technology company to have a single CEO. -The CEO is positioning himself personally for a new VC fund. He's had some success with previous investments and is looking to preemptively market his new fund. -A slightly more realistic view, the CEO (who seems really enthusiastic) is honestly just like the rest of us and got nerd-swiped by this AI thing and feels genuinely excited about it :-) Either way he seems very well networked and able to appear nearly everywhere and re-cap information and insights from other source material. I'm curious what the underlying incentives/outcomes are for this kind of PR blitz.

mettamage 1y ago
> Conversely, why aren't the senior leaders of Google Drive Google execs are constantly talking about the benefits of AI. People lower on the totem pole just don't have the same platform as the top execs at Google do. And by Google, I mean Alphabet, not just search.
nextworddev 1y ago
He’s trying to stay relevant
candiddevmike 1y ago
When was the last time Box was relevant? Dropbox is struggling, can only imagine what Box is going through. Their stock isn't great and the outlook is "limited growth".
- mosura 1y ago
  “Feature not a product” looks like it was right in the long run.
- strus 1y ago
  Box is relevant in enterprise space. It's a very different business than Dropbox.
quantumsequoia 1y ago
He's being a salesman, he wants to convince enterprises they need Box AI

mandeepj 1y ago

From the video: a lot of new companies are going to start Well, there is this as well - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-board-chair-doubles-down-153914695.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-board-chair-doubles-do... Altman was touring globally to raise $7T (yes, trillion), just a few months ago. So, not sure if they are purposefully trying to scare off people.

WaltPurvis 1y ago
>Altman was touring globally to raise $7T (yes, trillion), just a few months ago. A few points about that: It wasn't just a few months ago, it was more than a year ago; he wasn't raising funds for OpenAI, it was for a separate chip-building venture; the $7T number was universally regarded as laughable, and the whole thing has predictably gone nowhere; and, FWIW, both OpenAI and Altman have publicly denied that he was ever trying to raise such a comical amount.

game_the0ry 1y ago

I see some comments here that are critical of Aaron, but I enjoyed the talk. Pretty good insider info on trends in the "enterprise" vis-a-vis ai and saas in general. Especially liked the framing of structured vs unstructured data, and the opportunity to make unstructured data more useful with llmns. I do not have much criticize or add except to emphasize that ai as it is now is probabilistic, not deterministic -- ask the same question twice and you could get vastly different answers.

bwestergard 1y ago
I remarked on this back in March, prompted by Théophile Cantelobre's visualization of the connections between people in the culinary world and the restaurants they've been involved in. https://bjornwestergard.com/llm-extractors/ https://bjornwestergard.com/llm-extractors/

plasticsoprano 1y ago

Man you guys are pessimistic and stuck in your bubbles. Asking if box is relevant when they’ve had growth the last two quarters while Dropbox is on the verge of seeing a drop in numbers. Yes ms and Google are seeing more but the product box is putting out is light years ahead of Dropbox, egnyte, and, honesty, most of FAANG, in terms of supporting the average office worker. They aren’t building sexy AI coders but they are making it so Sue Ellen, the EA to the VP of fuckall, can automate things and make life easier for everyone. I worked at box, albeit for only a year, and saw Aaron’s passion up close. He could step into an executive briefing center meeting and pull out projects the customer was working on a year prior that didn’t directly involve box and ask honest, empathetic questions about it. He’s a nerd and loves talking about this stuff. Those saying he’s trying to remain relevant or find a new hole for box miss the fact he’s on cnbc and other business channels a few times a year just talking tech. Unless Houston who only shows up when Dropbox has a sad launch to tout. Aaron is passionate about Box and has been fighting an uphill battle since day one but I’ve held on to my thousands of shares since I left and the value has doubled. I fully expect AI to accelerate their future and lead to a bigger balance sheet.

gyanchawdhary 1y ago
Sue Ellen, the EA to the VP of fuckall .. I died
khamidou 1y ago
Part of the reason you're seeing pessimism about box is because the stock has barely kept up with inflation. Their IPO price was 23.23 USD, now it's at 32.30. That's 39% of growth while inflation over 10 years is 36%. So sure their CEO is passionate and on CNBC but the business is clearly not doing that great
- jdlshore 1y ago
  Stock price isn’t necessarily equivalent to how well the company is doing, though. I’d be more interested in hearing revenue and profit. (Not asking you to go dig that up, just making the point that the market can be irrational.)

HEmanZ 1y ago

My biggest gripe with this is the reasoning for “no, AI is not going to take everyone’s jobs.” Obviously the state of “workers and AI together” comes first. So there’s not going to be some strawman cliff where suddenly all jobs are replaced in a month. But people like him lay out this future and then act like AI just stops there. Of course there will be an intermediate state. And then that state will be passed over as AI move further up the chain and humans are eliminated from office labor entirely.

d3ckard 1y ago
My biggest gripe with your reasoning is a hidden assumption that everything humans do is easily encodable in what we call AI today. I don’t think this is the case.
- beeflet 1y ago
  It will be encodable in what we call AI tomorrow
  - jaccola 1y ago
    Except not literally tomorrow, of course. So you might as well say 1 million years from now...
- tjs8rj 1y ago
  AI and technology is already replacing jobs. The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people. Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k. This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases. Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created. And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.

nitwit005 1y ago

The claim that companies won't just build everything in-house because of wanting to be able to sue over damages seems extremely weak. If AI tools could genuinely build a replacement for Box with trivial effort, everyone would drop them immediately. There's some strangeness around AI where people will claim it will do amazing things, but somehow not so amazing that no one will need them.

lubujackson 1y ago
You miss the bigger point about context. Companies pick their focus and what to spend their time on. Post startup-scale, the cost of internal failures becomes exponential. AI might be able to whip up the exact same legal document or CRM or whatever, but when one thing goes wrong, that might lose $1 million in revenue. It is about paying for accountability over outcomes.
- nitwit005 1y ago
  Do some math to see if it makes sense. If you have 10,000 employees, any software subscription that's $100 a person for all employees will be a million dollars a year. Many licenses are more than that. Even if you experience the million dollar outage, you'll have easily saved money.