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Listen to your customers, but don’t always build exactly what they’re telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

Aaron Levie

I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.
AARON LEVIE

Achieve Cliche People Sight Thinking
You can keep ‘consumer’ DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
AARON LEVIE

Adoption Consumer DNA Easier Mean
Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.
AARON LEVIE

Building Business Disruption Model Oriented Technology
Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.
AARON LEVIE

Cheerleader Coach Entrepreneur Player Waterboy
It’s unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
AARON LEVIE

Biological Sleep Unfortunate
Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that’s an opportunity to go build new technology.
AARON LEVIE

Delta Opportunity Possible Technology Today Wide
In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology… and you can build software then, around the user.
AARON LEVIE

Bringing Building Lead Model Software Technology
We’re going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.
AARON LEVIE

Building Custom Platform Standard World
Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
AARON LEVIE

Done Enable Look Technology
The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what’s best for the customer, without ever having to ask.
AARON LEVIE

Answer Ask Centric Customer Decide Organization
My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.
AARON LEVIE

Dad Education Mom Pretty Serious Teacher
In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.
AARON LEVIE

Incumbent IT Organisation Organization Relationship Winning World
Companies have never won. You’re always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.
AARON LEVIE

Entrepreneur Fighting Relevance Survival
You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
AARON LEVIE

Crazy Customer Ecosystem Reasonable
All we’re really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago… it’s just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn’t have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
AARON LEVIE

Ago Done Enabling Repeat Technology Year
The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.
AARON LEVIE

Always Chance Failure Guarantee Know Knowing

Listen to your customers, but don’t always build exactly what they’re telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

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Listen to your customers, but don’t always build exactly what they’re telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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