BOX COMPANY CULTURE 2

Box Company Culture

Culture is an important component of a business. It is the foundation upon which a
business is built on and grows. As businesses grow bigger, some aspects of their culture change
to better meet the needs of the business. Some companies, however, try to retain their start-up
culture even as they grow big. An example of such companies is Box Inc., a file sharing and
cloud storage company. This paper will show that even as the company has grown big, it has
managed to retain large components of its start-up culture mainly through hiring employees
whose values are similar to the company’s start-up values.

Will Aaron be the next Bill Gates or flame out before Box can become profitable and really
large?

Aaron Levie has many things in common with Bill Gates. Chief among them is that they
both founded technology companies while still young. While Bill Gates went on to become
hugely successful with Microsoft, Aaron’s Box is yet to replicate Microsoft’s success. Since its
founding in 2005, the company is yet to make a profit even though it has experienced massive
growth over the years (Barrett, 2013). The lack of profits is largely because of massive
investment in sales and marketing to drive growth (Barret, 2013). The relatively fast growth of
the company has led some experts to believe that Aaron Levin could become the next Bill Gates
by growing Box to become as large as Microsoft. That is, however, unlikely to be the case.
Microsoft was helped by the fact that throughout the late eighties and nineties when it
experienced its greatest success, the company operated almost as a monopoly. Box does not have
such advantage. Its cloud storage and file sharing business is relatively crowded. To make
matters worse, it is competing with some of the biggest companies in the tech world such as

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Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google. These companies have a lot of resources. It is, therefore,
hard to see how they may just sit by and let Box become a market leader in such a lucrative area.
Thus, it is unlikely that the company will grow to the size of Microsoft.

What is the culture of the company?

Culture is to a company what foundation is to a building. A company’s culture shapes the
behavior, actions, and decision-making of employees of a business (Ries, 2017). Even though
Box is a relatively large company and has been in existence for over a decade, it still retains a
largely start-up culture. For instance, it is anti-hierarchical and encourages risk-taking (Barret,
2013). Employees are encouraged to act, make mistakes, and learn from them quickly. They also
believe that success cannot be achieved when working alone. So they encourage collaboration
and teamwork. Most importantly, they create an environment where employees can have fun
while working (Barret, 2013).

What accounts for it being so open and freewheeling?

Box Inc. is a generally freewheeling and open company. This may come as a surprise
given its relatively large size. It has more than a thousand employees, is valued at more than $1.5
billion and has operations in places such as Paris, London, and San Francisco. Human resource
experts argue that the bigger a company grows, the more formal and hierarchical it becomes
(Ries, 2017). Box Inc. has defied these predictions by retaining its start-up freewheeling and
open culture even as it has grown bigger. There are two main reasons why this is the case. One
of them is that the company’s top management is still largely made up of young people who
founded the company (Barret, 2013). Secondly, and most importantly, is their hiring process.
Granted, the company takes into consideration the skills and knowledge of a person before hiring

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them. However, they also consider whether their values fit with the culture of the company
(Barret, 2013). Thus, by hiring employees whose values are similar to values of start-up
companies, the company has managed to retain its open and freewheeling culture even as it has
grown bigger.

How does the culture reflect the four founders, their history together, their ages, the
culture of Silicon Valley, etc.?

The company’s culture has been shaped by its four founders. The founders, Aaron Levie,
Dylan Smith, Jeff Quessier, and Sam Ghods are all millenials below thirty. In addition, they had
been friends long before they started working together to create and grow Box (Mazarakis &
Shontell, 2017). All of them knew each other as early as high school. Their long history together
has had a major impact on the way they run the company. For instance, they have learnt to trust
each other from their many years of friendship. With this quality shared amongst themselves,
they have tried to make it part of the culture of the company as well with employees encouraged
to trust each other and work together. In addition, their youth and long friendship have made
them to distaste hierarchical approach to running a business that is favored by older leaders.
Apart from their personal experiences, the company’s culture has also been greatly influenced by
the culture of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, the hub of America’s tech industry, encourages risk-
taking, making mistakes and learning from them fast, and having fun while at work (Levina &
Hasinoff, 2017). Some of the well-known companies with Silicon Valley roots such as Facebook
and Google, have this culture as well.

As this article shows, Box Inc. has managed to succeed where most companies of similar
size have failed. By having its founders retain senior management positions in the company and

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actively seeking out employees who are not just qualified for specific positions but also share the
company’s values.

References

Barret, V. (March 4, 2013). How The Kids At Box Are Disrupting Software’s Most Lucrative
Game. Forbes. Retrieved on 4 th March on
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2013/02/13/box-
aaron-levie-mobile-enterprise-software/amp/
Levina, M., & Hasinoff, A. A. (2017). The Silicon Valley ethos: Tech Industry products,
discourses, and practices. Television & New Media, 18(6), 489-495.
Mazarakis, A. & Shontell, A. (July 14, 2017). How Aaron Levie quit college to found Box, now
valued at $2.5 billion. Business Insider. Retrieved on March 4 th from
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/aaron-levie-quit-college-to-
found-box-now-25-billion-company-2017-7
Ries, E. (2017). The startup way: how modern companies use entrepreneurial management to
transform culture and drive long-term growth. Currency.