Threshold | Venture Capital

Josh Stein on Box Founders

I first met Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith in 2006. Their office was in Aaron's uncle's garage behind a house in Berkeley, and I was stepping over laundry. While they were young (21 and 20, respectively) and the business was early, it was apparent that these were exceptionally talented founders with a big vision for what we thought could be a very broad, “horizontal” market.

While we knew there would be plenty of risks along the way, I did think it could be a billion-dollar company, based on the market potential. I supplied the first institutional investment in Box and have continued to support the company in every subsequent financing round.

Watching the Box team so successfully realize that vision has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my professional career.

Partnership with Threshold

Josh Stein helped define a set vision for the company in its early days. At its start, Box focused on consumers and businesses, offering a simple way to store files. But Josh, who was an active part of Box’s business (and served on the board), saw the writing on the wall that enterprise customers were “stickier,” in his words, and pushed the company to “sharpen its focus.”

Aaron Levie on partnering with Josh Stein: Early on, Josh gave me important advice, Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Josh explained that by trying to serve both customer segments, he’d be diluting the experience for both. Instead, he suggested focusing on the enterprise segment because it was the far larger revenue opportunity. I had had a “come to Jesus moment,” realizing it was the right move to sell to enterprises with hundreds or thousands of users versus focusing on selling individual subscriptions to consumers. Josh started to connect the dots on doing an SaaS enterprise model. We credit him to being able to shine light for us on something we couldn’t see.